While I once enjoyed travel, musical performances, picture shows and communal drinking, I now merely pace the halls of my manor chewing mail-order snacks and raving madly about the widespread inability to discover and interpret facts. When seeking an escape from the labyrinth of despair to which I’d been banished, I’d pick up a novel and read the same passage repeatedly until I’d managed to sufficiently obscure reality and retain what I was reading, and then I could proceed to subsequent passages and enjoy the experience of reading rather than fixating on disaster or listening to my butler’s tales of being berated for kindly asking people to wear a mask nearly a year into a pandemic that has killed over 400,000 people and will kill hundreds of thousands more (and cause long-term damage to countless others) and which could still be curtailed if people would simply wear a mask and not congregate as if there weren’t a pandemic.
So, eager for an escape into a more magical and less confining space, one that didn’t reek of black market hand sanitizer and exhaustion, imagine my pleasure on discovering Susanna Clarke, the author of one of my favorite and most transporting novels (“Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell”), had a new novel, and my book-fetcher had acquired it from the local book depository. Naturally, the book, “Piranesi,” was about someone stuck in a house. (Or at least our narrator refers to it as “the House.” It might more accurately be called a labyrinth.) The differences between my home and Piranesi’s, though, are substantial. In the novel the “house” consists of an apparently endless series of halls in the style of classical architecture and filled with countless fascinating statues, water that rises from “the Drowned Halls” and which might sweep you away if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, fish, seaweed, birds, thirteen human skeletons, one monkey skeleton and one other living person. My house, for the record, has nearly none of those things. Also, while I long for a world in which I might doff my hat or twirl my cane for the benefit of the outside world, Piranesi is quite content in his home. Indeed, in a line that reveals his mindset and therefore shows up in a lot of reviews of this book, the narrator says, “The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.” He considers himself the “Beloved Child” of the house, and is content to eat fish and seaweed, pay tribute to the skeletons, write in his journal and meet the other person when the other person wants to meet.
It quickly becomes clear that there is more to this situation than Piranesi understands. For example, Piranesi knows that is not his real name, but just what “the Other” calls him, but he can’t remember his real name. He discovers his older journals used to refer to years as mysterious numbers (2012?!) rather than useful descriptions (“the year I discovered the Coral Halls” or “the Year the Albatross came to the South-Western Halls,” etc.). While Piranesi’s innocence makes him slow to become suspicious, the reader will quickly recognize “the Other” isn’t a very nice person. When another person appears in the halls, the stakes are heightened. When our narrator is able to find and piece together the portions of his journals that had been torn up, the reader is apt to get chills from what he finds. To learn more about this delightful mystery before experiencing it would rob the reader of some of the fun.
Unlike her previous astonishing novel, it isn’t about magicians, but this book is magic. The pleasures of reading it and ruminating on it are such that one is sad to leave its pages. As Piranesi says:
“The Search for Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unraveled, a text to be interpreted, and that if we ever discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery. The sight of the One-Hundred-and-Ninety-Second Western Hall in the Moonlight made me see how ridiculous that is. This House is valuable because it is the House. It is enough in and of Itself. It is not the means to an end.”
Due to the pandemic, we are trapped in our homes all the time (unless we’re working, acquiring provisions, visiting nature, visiting medical professionals or just out and about propagating the virus), and while our homes may not be as beautiful or mysterious as Piranesi’s, valuing what is available might ease the mind and the temptation to taste that black market hand sanitizer.
