Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is one of my favorite books, and I’ve been longing for another novel from Clarke ever since I first read that masterpiece. (I haven’t read her story collection, fearing that short stories won’t have the same immersive quality.) Piranesi is very different from her earlier novel, but it has that same quality of pulling readers into a whole other world, where the rules are different and strange. In this case, the world is a watery castle, occupied by a man called Piranesi (although that is not his name) and another man he calls The Other. Piranesi spends his days cataloging what’s in each room of the vast sprawling world and meeting periodically with The Other.
The experience of reading Piranesi was so rich for me. Clarke creates a whole word, and our guide is an appealingly deliberate and careful sort of person that I both related to and cared about. He seems contented in his odd life, moving from room to room, keeping numbered journals, and always attentive to the tides that flood various rooms. But, as a reader watching from the outside, I could see reasons to be wary (and not just because it’s a strange world).
This rest of this post is potentially spoilery, but I will avoid specifics as best I can.
The book got me thinking about the worlds we create for ourselves, through the media we choose to consume, the people we choose to believe, and the ideas we choose to pursue. This is, of course, pertinent to our current moment, with so many people diving head-first into conspiracy theories in which Democrats and media elites are harvesting children’s blood to consume their life force.
Once on the inside of that world, it’s next to impossible for people to see a different reality. Things that seem bizarre to anyone else (such as that the entire media apparatus is covering up child trafficking with nary a leak) seem perfectly plausible. For Piranesi, it makes sense that the whole world is just two people and that one of those people somehow is able to access food and supplies that Piranesi cannot. Like Piranesi, believers in conspiracy theories obsessively catalog every clue about the world as they understand it and they don’t really take a step back to see that the story doesn’t make sense.
In Piranesi, a third person eventually arrives, someone The Other perceives as a threat. What is that third person going to reveal? Who will Piranesi listen to? And all of this is wrapped up in the fact that Piranesi is happy in his little world. He has no desire to see anything different. And, as readers, we can’t help but wonder what he would find if his world gets bigger. Is he safer in his strange house, moving along with the tides, just as we’re safer at home in a pandemic?
I don’t necessarily think Clarke was intentionally writing a parable for these times, but maybe! It certainly functioned that way for me. Plus, it’s just a really good story. It feels at times like a horror story built on unease, which is my favorite kind of horror story — where something isn’t quite right but you can’t put your finger on it. And the world is different enough from our own that we cannot be sure what’s going on until the book reveals its secrets.
I loved it. It was worth the wait.
Shelf Love 
I loved it tooooo! Piranesi was such a sweetheart and I just wanted the best for him. I’m so delighted you enjoyed this, friend! I thought you would but these things are so unpredictable. :P
I was rooting for him so much the whole time!
I’m currently reading this and loving it! Glad you enjoyed it.
Yay! So happy you’re loving it, too!
Boy, there’s quite enough unease in the world for my taste right now. I wonder if I should save reading this one for a while.
I do sometimes like dark stories in dark times, but this ends up being a hopeful story in the end. All the unease is in the first half or so.
I completely agree about the sense of unease and yet also that sense of innocence, cheerfulness and hopefulness that Piranesi preserves. There’s a complicated, subtle statement being made here, I think, about how tethered our minds really are to reality–and about how, although what’s been done to Piranesi is monstrous and cruel, it’s not entirely without its positive aspects. (I also found the novel so immersive that, after reading it, I had a dream set in the House! It wasn’t a nightmare or a bad dream, just an odd one. Again, I think your characterization of this as a version of un-scary, but unsettling, horror is spot-on.)
I found it so interesting that, although we on the outside could see the problems, Piranesi himself was pretty content, and that made me almost not want to disrupt his lovely reality.
And that’s so cool that you had a dream set in the house!
I adored this book, and think it’ll be my book of the year. It made me think about so many things, and I was lucky enough to see the launch zoom in which Clarke expounded on a few of them and a few weeks after reading it is still foremost in my mind. Piranesi was the most wonderful character, and the Halls such an amazing construct, the growing sense of unease was superbly done too.
That’s so great that you got to hear her speak about the book!
Definitely worth the wait. And it also somehow made the isolation go by easier. Loved the book
I finally read Piranesi and came back to reread your post for clues. I really like your point about how difficult it is to get outside the world we are inside of, how we explain and complete it endlessly. I think I agree that the novel isn’t really a parable, but it kept making me wonder if it was. It is so *specific* about everything: I enjoyed the descriptions and the atmosphere of the labyrinth so much.