In particular I’m interested in what it says about the state of contemporary Fantasy. Rather I’m struck by the extent to which Clarke’s novel is Platonic. That’s not the main thing that interests me about this novel. The story of the novel is really the story of him recuperating that lost knowledge. The amnesiac quality of the place has meant he has forgotten this, and all his prior life as well. He had devised a ritual to open a portal from our world to Piranesi’s House.Īrne-Sayles stranded Piranesi (we learn his ‘real’, our-world name about halfway through) in the House. The twist is that where Crowley was a fraud, Arne-Sayles actually could do what he claimed. In parallel with Piranesi’s burgeoning awareness we, as readers, piece together an our-world-set story about an Aleister Crowley-type magus, called Laurence Arne-Sayles, who gathered a group of acolytes around him with promises that he could access miraculous dimensions, and who used his power over these people to indulge his various sadistic caprices. This includes him encountering other texts and manuscripts, including ones he had himself earlier written but which he now has forgotten. So, yes: the story brings in new characters from our world, and takes Piranesi on a path towards an understanding of his actual condition. The Other relies upon this amnesia (he ‘tests’ Piranesi by dropping words like ‘Battersea’ into conversation, to check that they strike him as meaningless). cannot remember the other world is a function of the strange, memory-effacing effect the House has upon those who live within it for any length of time. And so it transpires: not just him but various others including, we soon discover, Piranesi himself. My point is that before I’d even cracked the covers of the novel, and just going on the reviews I’d read, I asssumed that Clarke was going to set her drafty, universe of oceanwashed inward marble halls against our world (after all, the novel’s epigraph is from the Magician’s stuffing Nephew) and that when I started reading it seemed obvious that the Other would prove to have come from the latter. I mean, perhaps you never started reading this blogpost, in which case you obviously have no problem. But perhaps you would prefer to stop reading now, if you haven’t yet picked up Clarke’s novel, lest I taint your enjoyment. Piranesi wandering his strange megadomus would hardly fill two hundred and fifty pages, so of course there are complications. Things go broadly how any reader who thought about the matter for five minutes would anticipate them to go. Aspects of the way Clarke unfolds her story seem to me readily guessable, even from the basic summary of the premise I give here. On the topic of spoilers, I’m a little puzzled by the reviewerish pussy-footing. It’s an upholstered short-story rather than a novel, but that’s OK. But I enjoyed it very much, and its core idea has lingered with me since I finished it. Certainly it would be hard to claim it as on a par with Strange and Norrell, undeniably a major piece of 21st-century fiction. I’m not sure it has the unexpectedness or baffling eloquence of particular image that defines the best surrealism (your mileage may, of course vary). In all it is a good though not, I think, a great novel. I suppose those images refract: (a) Clarke herself stuck largely inside her house since 2012 with her debilitating, chronic illness, (b) a Lewisian Narnia-style allegory by which the world is God’s strange mansion - Magician’s Nephew supplies the novel’s epigraph - and (c) some manner of anxiety about climate change (the lower levels are dangerously flooded!) The worst you could say is that it’s more cool conceit than rigorous narrative, more a arrangement of striking images than a framework able to furnish all the satisfactions the novel as a form. This is all well-evoked, the universe of the House neither mistily sketched nor over-rigorously delineated. Piranesi is an unusually ingenuous, almost a child-like narrator, and we soon realise that the only other person in the House - a twice weekly visitor called ‘The Other’, whom Piranesi considers a friend - is probably not all he pretends, no matter how much Piranesi trusts him. The House consists of an endless succession of rooms and corridors, adorned everywhere with marble statuary past which Piranesi wanders, feeding on seaweed and fruits de mer from the ground floor, and tending the skeletons of thirteen previous inhabitants of the place. But perhaps you want to exercise caution.Ĭlarke’s title character, narrating in first-person via his journal entries, is the only living inhabitant of a vast mansion - so vast that he can never find a way out of it, so huge an ocean washes tidally through the lower levels, and clouds float through the upper ones. Reviews of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi have been cagey about revealing too much of the plot, as if to say even rudimentary things about the novel would be to spoil it.
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