History knows Giovanni Batista Piranesi as an 18th-century Italian artist. Piranesi made many fine etchings of monuments, often magnificent old buildings with grand statues in huge halls beneath soaring ceilings.
His fame also rests largely on his depiction of a series of fictitious but impressive prisons, thick stone walls and crumbling carving included.
At no stage in Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi is this historical Piranesi even mentioned, but it does not take much effort to see where Clarke draws her inspiration for the House, the setting of this novel. The House stretches across many, many halls.
The highest, atop massive staircases, reach up to the clouds, while the lowest are swept by the seas. The farthest are so distant that the lone full-time inhabitant of the House has never even got close to them, though he’s been as far as 20 km out from the First Vestibule.
Besides this man (who is the narrator), there are lots of birds in the House. And, kept carefully in niches and alcoves among the thousands of grand statues that fill every hall of the house, there are 13 skeletons.
All of this is documented by ‘the Beloved Child of the House’, as he styles himself: the narrator who meticulously maintains a journal, documenting everything he sees and observes in the House, which is the world for him.
A world he shares sometimes with a regular visitor, the man he calls the Other, and who in turn refers to him, the journal-keeper, as ‘Piranesi’. It is not his name, the Other admits, but Piranesi is willing to submit to being called by a strange name, since he knows nothing of himself anyway. Not his real name, not where he’s come from or who the Other is.
What is this world, this House that Piranesi reveres and adores? Is it fantasy? Or a bit of science fiction, a parallel world? Is it, perhaps, just an elaborate figment of Piranesi’s own imagination?
Piranesi is a brilliant example of storytelling at its finest. Susanna Clarke, using primarily the thoughts and words of one character—‘Piranesi’ is our only insight into what happens in the House and even outside of it—conjures up a world that’s eerily magnificent. And in that world she sets a story of great suspense: how, after all, did Piranesi and the Other arrive in this world? Whose are the skeletons Piranesi so carefully looks after? What lies beneath?
The truth, when it begins to emerge, draws the reader in, completely and inexorably. Clarke builds up the suspense superbly, leaving one tantalising clue at a time, increasing the pace of the revelations, and taking us into the mind of a man who is only now beginning to unearth the secret of his presence in the House.
Along with the suspenseful story and the vivid descriptions, Piranesi is marked by a fine attention to detail.
Note, for instance, the subtle way in which the way Piranesi writes changes as time passes, or how something as minor as Piranesi’s grooming of his hair changes with his changing situation and his growing awareness.
A fantastic book, well worth the wait of more than 15 years since Clarke’s last book, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.