Piranesi (2021)
Who wrote it?
Susanna Mary Clarke (1959- ; active 1996- ), born Nottingham, England. She was the eldest daughter of a Methodist minister, and owing to his postings spent her childhood moving around different parts of Northern England and Scotland. She studied PPE at St Hilda's College, Oxford, graduating in 1981 before beginning a career in publishing, including stints at Quarto and Gordon Fraser. After two years teaching English in Italy and Spain, she returning to England in the early Nineties and began writing stories and what would ultimately became her debut novel, while at the same time working for Simon & Schuster as a cookbook editor.
Her first short story set in the universe of what became Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell was 1993's "The Ladies of Grace Adieu", written for a five-day fantasy and science fiction course she attended. One of the course tutors was author Colin Greenland, who sent her story to Neil Gaiman who advocated for her, leading to its inclusion in the fantasy anthology Starlight 1 (1996) which won a World Fantasy Award the following year. Over the course of the decade, she published seven further short stories while working on her novel, and fell in love with and married the aforementioned Colin Greenland.
The novel was sold in unfinished form, after a series of rejections, to Bloomsury in 2003, who were so confident in its success that they offered Clarke a £1million advance and commissioned seventeen translations before its 2004 publication. It was a critical and commercial success, won numerous awards in the fantasy category, was longlisted for the Booker, and was adapted for TV by the BBC in 2015. Clarke followed its initial success with the publication of a collection of her short stories, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories (2006) which was well-received but compared unfavourably in some quarters to the more substantial Jonathan Strange.
She also began working on a sequel to her debut, set a few years later and featuring a similarly large cast of characters. In this period she suffered a collapse from exhaustion which was later diagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome. She later said that progress on this sequel was slowed massively by her condition, and she decided to switch focus to an earlier project with fewer characters and less dependent on historical research. That novel became Piranesi, published in 2020 some 16 years after her debut.
What's it about?
Piranesi is a fantasy novel set largely in an imaginary ‘House’, composed of seemingly infinite halls filled with unique statues. Its basement level contains an ocean, teeming with sealife, and its upper level clouds, giving it its own weather system as well as an array of birds. Other than this, its only inhabitants seem to be the titular character ‘Piranesi’ (though he knows this not to be his real name) and a mysterious ‘Other’ who Piranesi meets a few times a week. Piranesi believes himself to have always lived in the House, has no awareness of a world outside of its existence, and believes the only humans ever to have existed to have been himself, The Other, and fifteen sets of skeletal remains he has cataloged in his extensive travels through the halls.
Piranesi is ostensibly satisfied with his lot, knowing nothing else. He sees the House as a benevolent provider, giving him what he needs for survival in the form of seafood and marine plantlife, and finds the endless variety of the statues more than sufficient to keep him engaged. Despite his satisfaction, he keeps a regular journal which demonstrates a scientific mind and an interest in understanding as much as he can about the world in which he exists. He walks miles through halls, memorizes their contents in great detail and develops a detailed understanding of the perilous tides of the House’s oceans. For Piranesi, understanding is an end in itself, which is contrasted with The Other, who utilises Piranesi’s scientific temperament in the service of attempts to uncover undetermined ‘powers’ that he believes must be associated with the existence of the House. He provides Piranesi with various items that enable him to live tolerably, from the notebooks for his journal to occasional food items not found in the House and even some very modern seeming trainers. He also regularly interacts with a ‘shining device’ - obviously a smartphone or tablet. Despite the lack of explanation for the existence of any of these items in the context of the House, Piranesi seems not to question their source.
Piranesi’s content hunter-gatherer / explorer lifestyle is disturbed when the Other alerts him to the possibility of the arrival of another human in the House, who both refer to as ‘16’, who the Other warns Piranesi to beware of. Around the same time he meets another outsider, who he names ‘The Prophet’, who warns him not to trust the Other, who he refers to as Ketterley. The references made in these interchanges cause Piranesi to begin to question some elements of his existence, including returning to his older journals, which contain references to people, places and concepts that make no sense in his present context, and most notably talk of a man called Laurence Arne-Sayles, an occultist professor in the ‘real’ world who claimed that other worlds / realities existed and could be accessed. Ketterley was one of his students and followers, and Arne-Sayles has been imprisoned for the kidnapping of a man named James Ritter, who had described being imprisoned in a place resembling the House.
Via the actions of ‘16’, who turns out to be a police officer called Sarah Raphael - investigating Arne-Sayles and his followers, Piranesi discovers that he had a previous life and identity in the real world, as an investigative journalist called Matthew Rose Sorenson, writing a book about Arne-Sayles. In the course of his research, he had visited Ketterley to interview him, and been convinced to perform a ritual which led to his transportation to the world of the House, and - like all who remain at length in that world - lost his memory of what came before.
Raphael convinces Piranesi/Sorenson to leave the House, despite his great reservations. He forms a bond with Raphael, takes James Ritter on a return visit to the House, struggles with some aspects of the outside world, and reflects on his identity - affirming that he is no longer either Sorenson or Piranesi, but must construct a new identity from their remnants.
What I liked
Oh, where to begin? This is such an incredible book which grabbed me from the start and kept me absolutely hooked, to the point of having to ration it to avoid it being over too quickly.
First and foremost, its appeal is in its incredibly vividly constructed fantasy world. It’s rich and seemingly infinite, and yet in some senses strikingly simple and easy to picture.
It works on many levels, but in some senses is a straightforward mystery, to the extent that its real-world rationalist police officers and other normal folks are able to explain away any of Sorenson, Ritter and Raphael’s observations as the delusions of the victims of imprisonment. Unlike your everyday mystery, though, it unfold almost in reverse, with the ‘crime’ not really revealed until late in the novel.
It reveals its mysteries in small pieces, often quite literally in fragments like the pieces of a puzzle. It’s very satisfyingly done.
There’s so much to chew on in terms of ideas and thoughts, that I’ll only really be cherrypicking a few to focus on, but it really is pretty head-spinning, in the very best of ways. I particularly enjoyed the contrasting of Piranesi’s unquestioning love for ‘the House’ with his uncertainty at the real world. There’s no judgement presented by Clarke, but it holds up that the ‘other world’, of relative solitude, with rich cultural sustenance but little in the way of social or other kinds of stimulation, certainly has its appeal when contrasted with the overstimulation, overpopulation and capitalist systems of the ‘real’ world. Piranesi is loathe to leave his unusual sort-of paradise, and while we can also read that as a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, it’s a useful thought-starter for examining ideas about our own world. Despite this, his burgeoning relationships with Raphael and Ritter highlight the advantages provided by a world filled with more than sixteen inhabitants (!)
All of the above was of course to some extent informed by Clarke’s own relative isolation and confinement enforced by her illness. On top of that, its release in 2020 must have felt particularly apposite at a time when much of the world’s population was living out a modern-day form of isolation due to the Covid pandemic, a time in which many reported adopting kinds of new identities and had to seek sustenance in the rich (indeed, seemingly infinite, due to digital technology) but somehow limited world of culture.
I’m sure it’s a book that rewards repeated re-reads, not because it’s overly complex - in fact on a superficial level it’s remarkably coherent given its themes - but because there are obviously so many layers to explore, references to process, and jumping off points for further thoughts and ideas.
I love that something like this won a major prize. I’ve not really read any ‘fantasy’ fiction as such, at least since I was a teenager, and it’s great that following major literary prizes can open up new avenues and worlds rather than relentlessly focusing on straightforwardly ‘real’ stories. It’s a reminder that the dividing line between some ‘genre’ fiction and what’s considered ‘literary’ can be remarkably hazy - after all in here Clarke is knowingly referencing everyone from Plato to C.S. Lewis to Borges - using fantastic narratives and tales of ‘other worlds’ as a vehicle for reflecting on our own world is hardly a niche or ‘lesser’ form of fiction.
What I didn’t like
It wasn’t long enough!
In a related but deeper sense (maybe) - like Piranesi, I (and I’m sure many other readers) didn’t want to leave ‘the House’ - so there was a kind of sadness that accompanied the final pages. Not only because a rich and beautiful novel was ending, but because it was ending by dragging back into our own much drearier reality, in which mundane explanations can be constructed for the most endearingly magical experiences. Sad times indeed.
Food & drink pairings
Largely fish-based
Fun facts
The 2021 judging panel was chaired by Bernardine Evaristo, 2019 Booker Prize winner.
The audiobook is narrated by Chiwetel Ejiofor, and there’s also a BBC Radio 4 adaption with Samuel Anderson narrating.
Piranesi’s name alludes very deliberately to 18th-century Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who produce a series of elaborate prints depicting enormous subterranean halls with staircases and machinery. It is given to Sorenson mockingly by Ketterley due to his obsessive interest in the elaborate labyrinthine nature of the House.
Ketterley’s own name is a reference to a character in C. S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew, part of the Chronicles of Narnia, to which there are several other allusions in Piranesi.
Vanquished Foes
Brit Bennett (The Vanishing Half)
Claire Fuller (Unsettled Ground)
Yaa Gyasi (Transcendent Kingdom)
Cherie Jones (How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House)
Patricia Lockwood (No One Is Talking About This)
2021’s Booker Prize went to Damon Galgut’s The Promise, from a shortlist that also included No One is Talking About This. Clarke’s Women’s Prize winner was nowhere to be seen, which maybe says something about the relatively more expansive scope of the Women’s Prize versus the Booker, at least in recent years?
Context
In 2021:
Ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and related global disruption
January 6th US Capitol riots by supporters of outgoing President Trump
Inauguration of Joe Biden as 46th President of USA
Coup d'etat in Myanmar removes Aung San Suu Kyi from power and restores military rule
US rejoins Paris Climate Agreement, 107 days after leaving
Disruption of global trade by the blocked Ever Given container ship in the Suez Canal
Russian military build-up around Ukraine borders first reported in April
Breakaway European Super League football competition announced and then retracted in days after widespread condemnation
Discovery buys WarnerMedia from AT&T
Eurovision contest held in Rotterdam after 2020 cancellation, won by Italians Måneskin
Ryanair Flight 4978 is forced to land by Belarusian authorities to detain dissident journalist Roman Protasevich
UEFA Euro 2020 is held, a year late and hosted by 11 different countries, with England losing in the final to Italy
Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest-serving prime minister of Israel, is voted out of office
2020 Tokyo Olympics held a year late, and without spectators for most events
The first direct observation of light from behind a black hole is reported, confirming Einstein's theory of general relativity
Taliban capture Kabul, leading to the surrender of the Afghan government in August
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun
Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You
Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle
Spider-Man: No Way Home
No Time to Die
Dune
The Power of the Dog
Little Simz, Sometimes I Might Be Introvert
Billie Eilish, Happier Than Ever
Lil Nas X, Montero
Adele, 30
Life Lessons
Why live in the world when you can live a simple life in a parallel universe mainly inhabited by statues?
Trust no one, especially not occulist professors.
Score
10
I don’t often give 10s - indeed this is the first in my Women’s Prize run-through and only the similarly mind-expanding Lincoln in the Bardo got the same rating in my Booker journey. Maybe I should be reading more fantasy! Any tips?
I gave 2021 Booker winner The Promise 8.5/10.
Ranking to date:
Piranesi (2021) - Susanna Clarke - 10
How to be both (2015) - Ali Smith - 9.5
Demon Copperhead (2023) - Barbara Kingsolver - 9.5
Property (2003) - Valerie Martin - 9.5
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2014) - Eimear McBride - 9.5
Hamnet (2020) - Maggie O’Farrell - 9.5
The Idea of Perfection (2001) - Kate Grenville - 9
Half of a Yellow Sun (2007) - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - 9
Home Fire (2018) - Kamila Shamsie - 9
The Lacuna (2010) - Barbara Kingsolver - 9
When I Lived in Modern Times (2000) - Linda Grant - 9
An American Marriage (2019) - Tayari Jones - 8.5
Larry’s Party (1998) - Carol Shields - 8.5
Bel Canto (2002) - Ann Patchett - 8.5
Small Island (2004) - Andrea Levy - 8.5
A Crime in the Neighbourhood (1999) - Suzanne Berne - 8.5
May We Be Forgiven (2013) - A. M. Homes - 8
The Tiger’s Wife (2011) - Téa Obreht - 8
On Beauty (2006) - Zadie Smith - 8
A Spell of Winter (1996) - Helen Dunmore - 8
The Road Home (2008) - Rose Tremain - 7.5
The Glorious Heresies (2016) - Lisa McInerney - 7.5
We Need to Talk About Kevin (2005) - Lionel Shriver - 7.5
The Song of Achilles (2012) - Madeline Miller - 7
Home (2009) - Marilynne Robinson - 7
Fugitive Pieces (1997) - Anne Michaels - 6.5
The Power (2017) - Naomi Alderman - 5
Next up
Taking a quick break before tackling the final Women’s Prize winner (for me, since I’ve already covered 2023’s Demon Copperhead): Ruth Ozeki’s 2022 winner, The Book of Form and Emptiness.
