Piranesi is sometimes visited by a mysterious person called The Other, who tends to talk to him in the way of novelistic mysterious persons but who’s at least a bit of company. He isn’t alone in the place, and thereby enters the human drama of what would otherwise amount to the longest and most gorgeously-written Architectural Digest article in history. “The Beautiful Orderliness of the House,” he reflects, “is what gives us Life.” And there’s always something new to discover, particularly among the Statues mentioned above (be prepared, after finishing the book, to capitalize its key words reflexively for about a week), statues that take on a sheer variety that seems intended to exhaust the vocabulary of symbolism.Ībove all, Piranesi seems to like his home, even its unknown or slightly menacing aspects (the description of those tides in the lower Halls is never quite free of threat, for instance). Survival, albeit of an estuarine kind, is possible in this house: there are cataracts of fresh water, and the booming tides that flood the lower Halls deposit mounds of seaweed that can be used as fuel during cold months. I have seen the Derelict Halls of the East where Ceilings, Floors - sometimes even Walls! - have collapsed and the dimness is split by shafts of grey Light. I have explored the Drowned Halls where the Dark Waters are carpeted with white water lilies. I have climbed up to the Upper Halls where Clouds move in slow procession and Statues appear suddenly out of the Mists. To this end I have travelled as far as the Nine-Hundred-and-Sixtieth Hall to the West, the Eight-Hundred-and-Ninetieth Hall to the North and the Seven-Hundred-and-Sixty-Eigth Hall to the South. I am determined to explore as much of the World as I can in my lifetime. Piranesi himself is likable right from the start, his notes in his journal doubling as both a portrait of his winsome courage and an outline of this ironically vast world Clarke has created: Clarke’s new novel, Piranesi, stands as a counterpart to these things and much more the book is scarcely 200 pages long, its title character spends most of the novel inside the confines of one (admittedly marvelous) house, and although he meticulously keeps a journal, he is largely a stranger to himself and his world, and that world has few visitors, and those visitors are mysteries themselves.īoth books are escapes and reflections, but Piranesi is a far more fitting sideways commentary on our current world, the perfect quarantine novel: confined to its home, always noticing new things, suspicious of visitors, fracturing on the edge of sanity. The characters in Susanna Clarke’s enormously popular 2004 debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell virtually all suffered in some way or other from an obnoxious surfeit of knowledge, and over the course of 800 pages they swapped notes and disputations on a canvas as broad as Europe.
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