Piranesi by Susana Clarke

What a strange, compelling, strange novel

What a strange novel

What a [jonathan] strange [& mr norrel] compelling novel

What a strange trip of a novel.

A neat, tidy, ride that starts off feeling like it’s fucking impenetrable, but quickly and artfully ties together its many fucking threads and weaves together a sharp, moving and heavy-feeling story that has a total and clear cohesion to it, even incorporating unknowable infinite mystery within this cohesion, because unknowable infinite mystery is fine when the unknowable infinite mystery is – like it is here – so fucking clearly intentional, and not a fucking papels in the air giving up on the thing kinda giving up kinda thing. Y’know what I mean?

I know what I mean.

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Piranesi is the follow up to Susana Clarke’s only other novel, the fucking massive Jonathan Strange [ampersand] Mr Norrel, which I don’t remember much about but I do remember enjoying.

(Many things I read but once in the increasingly tiny percentage of my too-long, miserable, life that precedes this record of my reading habits (TriumphOfTheNow.com) fade fade fade like a stain on a frying pan subjected to flame.)

There was a long time between the publication of those novels (Clarke did put out a collection of short stories in the interim but let’s pretend – this is an England-based “literary lifestyle blog” after all (alas, for now) – that doesn’t count), but don’t worry, Piranesi isn’t huge, it’s probably a quarter – likely less (?) – of the length of that other novel, though it might feeeeeeeel shorter than it is because it’s just so fucking readable.

E.g. I sat down with a mug of peppermint tea (pretend I typed “triple negroni” if you want to imagine I’m still doing fun things) and the plan to read ten pages or so before going to bed last night, and by the time I was able to convince myself I had to stick my bookmark back in the book, I’d burned through a hundred pages (and had no idea how much time had passed – I’m currently testing out a theory I have that if you genuinely don’t know how much sleep you’ve had, you don’t worry about how much sleep you’re getting and thus don’t feel tired. Honestly, it seems to be a workable theory. Try it. No clocks in the house, and stop looking at your phone as early as possible into the evening. Clocks are a capitalist construct for exploiting daytime hours. Let the alarm sing you into daylight’s miserable hours of toil but remove time from your fucking mind as much as you can. 🙏🙏🙏 innit)

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Piranesi opens in a bizarre, other, world, an infinite collection of giant rooms, peopled with statues and skeletons, containing staircases that lead to a cloud-filled upper level (again, infinite rooms), or to eternal basements filled with rolling ocean waters that regularly flood out, populated by fish, seaweed and other ocean creatures, with birds and all kinds flapping and floating throughout. This world seems to only have two inhabitants: one is our narrator, a youngish man known as Piranesi who lives on (and wearing) fish and seaweed and spends his time moving between the tides, writing in his diary and completing bizarre rituals he’s created to honour the dead skeletons; while the second is known only as The Other, an older guy who is always dressed sharply and regularly sets Piranesi tasks to do in the hope he will be able to unlock some kind of ancient knowledge hidden, somewhere in the world.

Where it could have gone from this premise is fucking anywhere; who the characters could have turned out to be, what their connection is to each other and to the skeletons of the world, why they are where they are, where where they are is, all of this is unexpected but coherent and cohesive and smooth and artful.

If you were being a dick, you could basically say it’s Narnia meets The Secret History, but saying that makes the ultimate thing about this novel seem less true than it is: this feels original, imaginative, complex, unique, strange strange strange, and not at all derivative.

This is fresh, enveloping, engaging, emotive and powerful imaginative fiction. I had no idea where it was going, what was going to happen. And it was all happening in a fantastical bizarre fantasy world and that was absolutely fine, because it all cohered internally.

An excellent novel. An excellent story.

A really fucking cracking bit of prose. Nice.