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Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
My initial thoughts...
Piranesi is told in first person through the journal entries of our narrator, who is called Piranesi but who tells us early on that it's not actually his name. He lives in the House, an immense series of halls and staircases full of statues and containing the sea, where he is the only person except for another man, whom he calls the Other, and thirteen skeletons. He spends his time subsistence fishing in the sea and conducting scientific research on various aspects of the House. As the journal entries go on, it becomes clear to the reader—and, after a while, to the narrator—that all is very much not what it seems, and things develop from there.
It's a fairly simple book, structurally. The actual plot could be summarised in a couple of sentences. Most of the substance of the book consists of the narrator, and the reader, steadily discovering the truth about the state of things we're introduced to at the start, and as more is revealed, most of it is pretty much what it seems to be on first being revealed—there aren't really any big dramatic twists. This is not a criticism—some books are more ambitious than others, that's fine!—but it gave the book a quiet, sort of contemplative feeling, and it felt kind of small. There's a lot that's never explained, which was intriguing and slightly frustrating at the same time.
The cast of characters is also relatively limited. We spend the most time with the narrator, who I liked a lot from the start—he's a sweetheart, with a very earnest and determined approach to his unusual life and his scientific work, but with more than one sort of hidden depths. Further revelations only made me like him more, although that's hardly a simple thing... The rest of the characters are not drawn in so much detail, although what details there are are frequently intriguing, and Raphael in particular is great. And—it feels appropriate to put this in the 'characters' paragraph—there are a lot of birds in this book, and I loved them all, and they felt very familiarly Clarkeian.
I don't really know what I was expecting from this book, to be honest! One thing I certainly wasn't expecting, after the historical setting of JSMN and the historical reference in the title, was that it would be set in the modern world—or rather in an adjacent fantasy world. I was a little bit dubious at first—I don't usually enjoy books set in or about the modern world—but I needn't have worried. Clarke's style deals as beautifully with modern life as she does with everything else—car headlights and crowded city streets are given just the same tilted, otherworldly cast as rain over the moors and bare branches against the sky, and it fits in really surprisingly well. There were, however, one or two instances of a kind of sordidness which is something I associate with modern books, and which I didn't like any better here.
This book has a couple of textually queer characters, which was interesting. I thought the portrayal of Laurence Arne-Sayles—a villain, and a predator in a kind of stereotypical way—was slightly doubtful from this perspective, but on thinking about it—this is, I think, one of those times when a character being a good or bad person isn't really the point—and Arne-Sayles's sexuality is linked to his status as the sort of 'outsider' (a significant word which occurs repeatedly throughout the book—once in reference to fanfiction, haha...) who could understand magic and find the other world in the first place, which I thought was very interesting.
It's surprising how much this book has in common with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell for a book that's so entirely unlike Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. On the one hand, the setting, structure and narrative style, and much of the mood, are completely different—and it is, as I've said, a far less ambitious book than JSMN—there's much less there there. On the other hand, you could easily make a bingo card out of the incidental details they share—academia and academic drama; significant statues; significant birds; magic as something that vanished in the past; the House as a take on the King's Roads; etc. etc. And, more significantly, the basic sense of what the world is like is the same: in those evocative little bits of description, in the book's metaphysics and what it implies (unlike JSMN, it doesn't say so at much length) about the nature of magic, there is a definite sense that this is the same kind of magical world as JSMN, the same 'other side of the rain' sort of thing. Which in one sense was a little frustrating—you said it so much better the first time!—but, really, reading those significant passages, I just felt that Susanna Clarke was doing what she does best, and it's just as brilliant as it's always been.
From this angle, by far my favourite part of the book was the ending. Once I'd worked out what was going on with Matthew Rose Sorensen and the narrator's past identity I was very curious about how the whole thing would be resolved. And the way it's resolved is one of those endings that, without being a dramatic twist, seems at once something completely different from the obvious 'easy way out' and just as obviously the only way things could have gone. And I thought that both the prose and the ideas in the last section were some of the most beautiful and meaningful bits of the whole thing—although the prose is absolutely beautiful throughout, of course.
So, in conclusion: I think this book is beautiful and I enjoyed it a lot, and I think Susanna Clarke is still brilliant at basically the same things she was brilliant at sixteen years ago. It is, of course, not nearly as good a book or as impressive an achievement as JSMN, but it was never going to be and it didn't need to be, so I'm not holding that against it. It's also not so much my kind of thing as JMSN is, and I think because of that and because of the relative lack of substance it's not going to live in my heart the way that book does. But, overall, a very worthwhile thing to have read.
Anyway—this book has made me remember how much I love Susanna Clarke's writing, and now I really want to get back into Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell fandom (where is it happening these days—Tumblr, Discord? I feel out of touch). I was writing a bit of historical RPF about John Uskglass the other day, perhaps I'll pick that up again...
Piranesi is told in first person through the journal entries of our narrator, who is called Piranesi but who tells us early on that it's not actually his name. He lives in the House, an immense series of halls and staircases full of statues and containing the sea, where he is the only person except for another man, whom he calls the Other, and thirteen skeletons. He spends his time subsistence fishing in the sea and conducting scientific research on various aspects of the House. As the journal entries go on, it becomes clear to the reader—and, after a while, to the narrator—that all is very much not what it seems, and things develop from there.
It's a fairly simple book, structurally. The actual plot could be summarised in a couple of sentences. Most of the substance of the book consists of the narrator, and the reader, steadily discovering the truth about the state of things we're introduced to at the start, and as more is revealed, most of it is pretty much what it seems to be on first being revealed—there aren't really any big dramatic twists. This is not a criticism—some books are more ambitious than others, that's fine!—but it gave the book a quiet, sort of contemplative feeling, and it felt kind of small. There's a lot that's never explained, which was intriguing and slightly frustrating at the same time.
The cast of characters is also relatively limited. We spend the most time with the narrator, who I liked a lot from the start—he's a sweetheart, with a very earnest and determined approach to his unusual life and his scientific work, but with more than one sort of hidden depths. Further revelations only made me like him more, although that's hardly a simple thing... The rest of the characters are not drawn in so much detail, although what details there are are frequently intriguing, and Raphael in particular is great. And—it feels appropriate to put this in the 'characters' paragraph—there are a lot of birds in this book, and I loved them all, and they felt very familiarly Clarkeian.
I don't really know what I was expecting from this book, to be honest! One thing I certainly wasn't expecting, after the historical setting of JSMN and the historical reference in the title, was that it would be set in the modern world—or rather in an adjacent fantasy world. I was a little bit dubious at first—I don't usually enjoy books set in or about the modern world—but I needn't have worried. Clarke's style deals as beautifully with modern life as she does with everything else—car headlights and crowded city streets are given just the same tilted, otherworldly cast as rain over the moors and bare branches against the sky, and it fits in really surprisingly well. There were, however, one or two instances of a kind of sordidness which is something I associate with modern books, and which I didn't like any better here.
This book has a couple of textually queer characters, which was interesting. I thought the portrayal of Laurence Arne-Sayles—a villain, and a predator in a kind of stereotypical way—was slightly doubtful from this perspective, but on thinking about it—this is, I think, one of those times when a character being a good or bad person isn't really the point—and Arne-Sayles's sexuality is linked to his status as the sort of 'outsider' (a significant word which occurs repeatedly throughout the book—once in reference to fanfiction, haha...) who could understand magic and find the other world in the first place, which I thought was very interesting.
It's surprising how much this book has in common with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell for a book that's so entirely unlike Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. On the one hand, the setting, structure and narrative style, and much of the mood, are completely different—and it is, as I've said, a far less ambitious book than JSMN—there's much less there there. On the other hand, you could easily make a bingo card out of the incidental details they share—academia and academic drama; significant statues; significant birds; magic as something that vanished in the past; the House as a take on the King's Roads; etc. etc. And, more significantly, the basic sense of what the world is like is the same: in those evocative little bits of description, in the book's metaphysics and what it implies (unlike JSMN, it doesn't say so at much length) about the nature of magic, there is a definite sense that this is the same kind of magical world as JSMN, the same 'other side of the rain' sort of thing. Which in one sense was a little frustrating—you said it so much better the first time!—but, really, reading those significant passages, I just felt that Susanna Clarke was doing what she does best, and it's just as brilliant as it's always been.
From this angle, by far my favourite part of the book was the ending. Once I'd worked out what was going on with Matthew Rose Sorensen and the narrator's past identity I was very curious about how the whole thing would be resolved. And the way it's resolved is one of those endings that, without being a dramatic twist, seems at once something completely different from the obvious 'easy way out' and just as obviously the only way things could have gone. And I thought that both the prose and the ideas in the last section were some of the most beautiful and meaningful bits of the whole thing—although the prose is absolutely beautiful throughout, of course.
So, in conclusion: I think this book is beautiful and I enjoyed it a lot, and I think Susanna Clarke is still brilliant at basically the same things she was brilliant at sixteen years ago. It is, of course, not nearly as good a book or as impressive an achievement as JSMN, but it was never going to be and it didn't need to be, so I'm not holding that against it. It's also not so much my kind of thing as JMSN is, and I think because of that and because of the relative lack of substance it's not going to live in my heart the way that book does. But, overall, a very worthwhile thing to have read.
Anyway—this book has made me remember how much I love Susanna Clarke's writing, and now I really want to get back into Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell fandom (where is it happening these days—Tumblr, Discord? I feel out of touch). I was writing a bit of historical RPF about John Uskglass the other day, perhaps I'll pick that up again...