I found Piranesi by Susanna Clarke at a time when I was looking for something to transport me to an otherworldly place. My go-to reads are usually in the literary fiction genre. I like the form — weaving important observations and insights into a story — and it’s what I’m most interested in writing. There are always interesting perspectives and/or language to express obscure feelings or phenomena in literary fiction, but it can also be a bit self-serious. Sometimes I just want to read for the joy of reading, to simply to dive into another person’s mind and be guided through a new and exciting world.
This is exactly the kind of setting that Susanna Clarke presents in Piranesi. The book and its main character are named for (or perhaps are an allusion to) Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi who earned famed in the 1700s for his drawings of ‘atmospheric prisons’, (which sound and look a lot like pocket dimensions or alternative realms). The narrative unfolds in a house, but it is no ordinary house. It’s a bit like the infinite hallway in Dark Matter (the TV Adaptation of Blake Crouch’s book Dark Matter), except that it’s full of marble statues and has it’s own weather system complete with clouds in the ceiling and the tidal waves of an ocean on the floor.
The protagonist, Piranesi inhabits this space with another, known to him only as ‘The Other’. The Other is an academic who is convinced that there is a hidden knowledge that people once possessed and used in miraculous ways that is now lost.
Piranesi says of the knowledge: ‘Once, men and women were able to turn themselves into eagles and fly immense distances. They communed with rivers and mountains and received wisdom from them. They felt the turning of the stars inside their own minds. My contemporaries did not understand this. They were all enamoured with the idea of progress and believed that whatever was new must be superior to what was old. As if merit was a function of chronology! … They should have held on to it. They should have respected it. But they didn’t. They abandoned it for the sake of something they called progress.’
The Other is desperate to find this lost knowledge but he is not as adept at living in the House as Piranesi is. Therefore, he employs various tricks and falsehoods to get Piranesi to help him, though it is frustrating because Piranesi has amnesia. He’s been in the house too long and has started to lose his sense of time and identity. His forgetfulness sets back and frustrates the Other’s research, which kicks off the narrative. What is this infinite house? Who was Piranesi before? What has he forgotten and what does the Other really want with the ancient lost knowledge?
I chose to read this book because it teased an allegory of invasion and colonization — alien vs. native/indigenous.
The Other is a stranger to the house. He does not understand its magic but he wishes to possess and exploit it for his own gain. Piranesi, on the other hand, is the innocent native of the house who, in seeking to share its magic, unwittingly helps his enemy and even becomes complicit in his own exploitation. Sound familiar?
I especially liked the idea challenging what progress actually is. It is an onward movement, sure, but to what end? It’s become a word that’s associated solely with betterment, but it’s actually quite an ambiguous and subjective word. So much so that it can be used invertedly. What passes for progress depends heavily upon the goal held by the person speaking. Certainly, the goals of the alien invader cannot at any time align with those of the native, so progress for him will more likely spell doom for the native (and his habitat).
The trick to get around this is to use double meaning words like ‘progress’ to confuse the native into thinking that you’re all on the same side, working towards the same thing. The Other is quite adept at this, even using trinkets that are unfamiliar to Piranesi to manipulate him and project false superiority.
It started promisingly but I have to say that the ending underwhelmed me. However, it was well worth the read. It’s a short book — I completed it in about six and a half hours — and an easy read too. It’s intriguing, suspenseful and unfolds at a good pace. It doesn’t exactly read like a storybook as I initially hoped when I saw that it was a fantasy and magical realism book, but I did end up finding a book just like that — ‘The Ten Thousand Doors of January’ by Alix E. Harrow. You can read all about it in my next review.
What are you reading?
