Piranesi (novel)

Piranesi

Cover of first edition
Author	Susanna Clarke
Audio read by	Chiwetel Ejiofor
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre	Fantasy
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date	15 September 2020
Media type	Print (hardback), e-book, audio
Pages	272
ISBN	9781526622426 (hardback)
OCLC	1157346980
Dewey Decimal	823/.92
LC Class	PR6103.L375 P57 2020

Piranesi is a fantasy novel by English author Susanna Clarke, published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2020. It is Clarke's second novel, following her debut Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), published sixteen years earlier. Piranesi won the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction.

Synopsis[]

Piranesi lives in a place called the House, a world composed of infinite halls and vestibules lined with statues, no two of which are alike. The upper level of the House is filled with clouds, and the lower level with an ocean, which occasionally surges into the middle level following tidal patterns that Piranesi meticulously tracks. He believes he has always lived in the House, and that there are only fifteen people in the world, most of whom are long-dead skeletons. Piranesi records every day in his journals, the text of which comprises the novel.

Twice a week, Piranesi meets with the Other, a well-dressed man who enlists his help to search for a "Great and Secret Knowledge" hidden somewhere in the House. The Other occasionally brings Piranesi supplies that seem to originate from outside the House, such as shoes, electric torches, and multivitamins. When Piranesi suggests that they abandon the quest for the Great and Secret Knowledge, the Other says they have had this conversation before, and warns Piranesi that the House slowly erodes one's memories and personality.

The Other warns Piranesi that a sixteenth person, whom both call "16," may enter the House to do him harm, and that he must not approach 16 under any circumstances or he will lose his sanity. Piranesi meets an elderly stranger he calls the Prophet, who identifies the Other as Ketterley, a rival who stole his ideas about the Knowledge. The Prophet claims that the House is a "distributary world," formed by ideas flowing out of another world. He declares he will lead 16 to the House in order to hurt Ketterley.

While indexing his journals, Piranesi discovers references to entries he doesn't remember writing which include terms mentioned by the Prophet. The entries tell the story of an occultist from the modern world named Laurence Arne-Sayles who posited that other worlds existed and could be accessed; Ketterley was one of his students. Arne-Sayles fostered a cult-like mentality among his followers and was eventually imprisoned for kidnapping a man named James Ritter. Ritter later described being held captive in a place resembling the House.

Piranesi discovers that 16 has entered the House, and leaves a message for them. Piranesi avoids reading 16's reply, but interactions with the Other reveal that she is a woman named Raphael. After learning that a rare confluence of tides will soon flood the middle level of the House, Piranesi leaves a warning for 16, and discovers a message from her asking "are you Matthew Rose Sorensen?" Reading the name gives Piranesi a vision of standing in a modern city.

Further research in Piranesi's journals reveals that someone has destroyed all entries relating to Ketterley. Piranesi pieces the destroyed pages back together from scraps he finds in albatross nests, and learns the true story of how he came to the House: he was Matthew Rose Sorensen, a journalist writing a book about Arne-Sayles. When Sorensen went to interview Ketterley, Ketterley used a ritual to imprison him in the House, where he slowly lost his memory and constructed a new identity which Ketterley mockingly named Piranesi.

On the day of the flood, Piranesi confronts Ketterley with his reclaimed memories just as Raphael returns to find him. Ketterley tries to kill them both, but drowns in the floodwaters. After the water recedes, Raphael explains that she is a police detective investigating disappearances related to the Arne-Sayles cult. She asks Piranesi to return to his home world. After long deliberation, he elects to leave the House.

In an epilogue, the narrator has adjusted to living in his home world, but often returns to the House. The narrator brings James Ritter back to visit the House, tends to Ketterley's body, and joins Raphael when she visits the House. He reflects that he is no longer quite Sorensen or Piranesi, but must construct a third identity from the remnants of the other two.

Publication[]

Piranesi was published in hardback, e-book and audio format on 15 September 2020 by Bloomsbury Publishing.^[1] The audiobook version was narrated by actor Chiwetel Ejiofor.^[2]

Reception[]

Piranesi received reviews of unanimous admiration.^{[3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]} Sarah Ditum of The Times gave the novel a rave review, writing, "After all that time, she has produced a second novel that is close to perfect."^[11]

Ron Charles of The Washington Post called it "infinitely clever" and praised Piranesi's acceptance of his imprisonment for unintentionally making the novel "resonate with a planet in quarantine" due to the COVID-19 pandemic.^[12]

Publishers Weekly called it an "inventive" novel, praising Clarke's subtlety in progressing the novel's storyline.^[13]

Allusions[]

The title of the novel alludes to the 18th-century Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who produced a series of sixteen prints entitled Imaginary Prisons which depict enormous subterranean vaults with stairs and mighty machines.^[4]

Piranesi contains several references or allusions to C. S. Lewis's series The Chronicles of Narnia. In the "Statues" entry of Part I, the narrator of Piranesi notes that he dreamt of a faun "standing in a snowy forest and speaking to a female child," likely a reference to Lucy Pevensie meeting the faun Mr. Tumnus in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.^[14] When describing the character Dr. Valentine Andrew Ketterley, the text notes that he is the son of a "Ranulph Andrew Ketterley" and that "the Ketterleys are an old Dorsetshire family." Both the names and the description of the family are evocative of Andrew Ketterley, a key figure in The Magician's Nephew who describes his family as "a very old family. An old Dorsetshire family." This connection is further strengthened by the quotation from The Magician's Nephew given at the front of the novel, which was also spoken in that book by Andrew Ketterley.^[15] In addition, there are several similarities between the House of Piranesi and the so-called "Wood between the Worlds" of The Magician's Nephew.^[16][6] Both are alternative worlds (distinct from our own) that must be reached through supernatural means, both contain life but of a less variegated nature than that in the characters' original worlds, and both induce a state of forgetfulness in newcomers that induces them to believe that they have always been in the new, supernatural, world.

The story of Piranesi has also been compared to the parable of the cave by Plato, who is an inspiration of Digory Kirke in Narnia.^[17] In the story of Piranesi, Piranesi is unable to leave a world filled with nothing but statues, which represent a greater reality which he is simultaneously ignorant of. In Plato's Allegory of the cave, a character, possessing no knowledge of the outside world, is imprisoned within a dark cave with nothing but shadows, reflections of the actual world, projected on the cave wall.

Awards and honours[]

References[]