Piranesi
by Susanna Clarke
Summary
A man lives in a House of infinite marble halls, peopled by thousands of statues, no two alike. The lower halls belong to an ocean whose tides climb the staircases on schedules he has learned by heart; the upper halls hold clouds and birds. He fishes, mends his nets, keeps meticulous journals, and tends the bones of the thirteen dead who share the world with him. He calls himself the Beloved Child of the House and knows of only one other living person: the Other, a well dressed man who appears twice a week with requests, calls him Piranesi, and is searching the halls for a Great and Secret Knowledge.
The novel is Piranesi's journal, and the reader begins decoding it long before he does: the supplies the Other brings come from somewhere; the journal indexes refer to earlier volumes in another hand about people and places no world of statues contains; and a new presence, whom the Other warns will drive Piranesi mad, is chalking messages in the halls. The excavation of what is actually happening, an occultist academic underworld, a missing London journalist named Matthew Rose Sorensen, a crime measured in years, is managed with a thriller's timing, but the book's genius is that the revelation does not disenchant: the House remains what Piranesi knows it to be, kind, and his refusal to renounce it gives the ending its strange, double grace.
Around two hundred and seventy pages, told in the gentlest first person voice in modern fantasy.
Best for readers who want a locked world mystery that is also, quietly, a book about solitude, madness and gratitude, and who do not need it explained that the two books are the same book.
Historical Context & Significance
Piranesi won the Women's Prize in 2021, a fantasy novel taking a prize that rarely rewards one, and the win sat on top of a comeback story: sixteen years had passed since Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke's eight hundred page debut phenomenon, and most of them were lost to a chronic illness eventually diagnosed as CFS, which confined her, fittingly and cruelly, to a house. She has described writing through the illness as slow and difficult and the book, about a man imprisoned in a world he refuses to experience as a prison, is impossible to read outside that fact once known.
The title points at Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the eighteenth century engraver of the Imaginary Prisons, vast impossible vaults whose staircases go nowhere, and the novel's other declared ancestors, Borges's labyrinths and the magician's house in Narnia, are worn openly.
It sold enormously through pandemic lockdowns, when its subject was suddenly everyone's, and its readership keeps growing by the word of mouth of people pressing it on friends with no spoilers, please.