Piranesi by Susanna Clarke: A Review

Book	Piranesi
Author	Susanna Clarke
Genre	Fantasy
Personal rating	5/5
Review spoiler status	Spoiler-free
For fans of...	The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Piranesi was first recommended to me by a member of my Chapter 25 Leicester Vol. 1 group after an animated conversation about The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, in which we both excitedly discussed how much we loved the book but couldn’t tell you a thing about it. I’ve been chasing the pure joy I felt after finishing TNC ever since, and also that magic of ‘I don’t remember a thing that just happened, and yet somehow I know that’s probably the best thing I’ve ever read’. So, when she suggested Piranesi by Susanna Clarke as a similar style of book, I was intrigued. While I don’t tend to pay much attention to such things, its accolades (New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, and Women’s Prize for Fiction winner for 2021) certainly set an expectation that will either leave you saying ‘yes, that was completely deserved’, or leave you disappointed. Luckily, I fall into the former category, and I’ve not been able to stop thinking about it since I finished it.

The book follows a man who can’t actually remember his name, but goes by Piranesi. He lives in a labyrinthine world called the House in which the rooms are endless; each corridor leads to more Halls, and he takes immense pride in his scientific study whereby he explores and logs as many of them as he can. The House is a microcosm of our world, with the sea encroaching on the Halls, the tides bringing with them dangerous currents that Piranesi learns to predict and watch from a safe distance. Personified through the narrator’s attitude towards it, the House takes on a role within the story that is sometimes God-like, allowing raging waters to endanger the lives of its inhabitants, and at other times parental, protecting Piranesi from said dangers. He’s quite content in this world, and with his only friend; The Other. Piranesi and The Other are the only two living people, and there are thirteen skeletons indicating that there have existed a total of fifteen people. Beyond that? Piranesi can’t even imagine a world with more people. So when a mysterious person who he calls ‘16’ shows up out of nowhere, the fear of the unknown takes hold.

And so begins a tale of identity, deceit, and greed.

My initial thoughts were far less enthusiastic than they ended up. While my preferred genres are quite broad, there are certain quirks in writing that I categorically do not enjoy, and from page 1 we had two of them. Firstly, it’s written in a journal style. As the reader, we are reading Piranesi’s notes that he keeps for educational purposes. This, especially in a fiction setting, is certainly not my idea of fun. I have no issue with first person prose, but there’s something about straying from a normal narration in favour of daily recaps that just irks me. The most likely explanation I have for this bug-bear of mine is that it takes the unreliable narrator trope that little bit further, since we’re not only getting the biased viewpoint of a singular character. With journal entries, we’re now also potentially missing information as we’re only learning what is remembered at the end of the day, rather than living alongside them as events occur. The other quirk that immediately had me dreading the book was the capitalisation of random words. Now, they certainly weren’t actually random; they served purpose in the same style as in Emma Donoghue’s Room; since the world we’re entering is different to ours, words and places take on different meanings to what we’re used to. That said, something about it makes a more difficult reading experience for me. I find myself unable to properly get into the flow of a book, because my mind gets caught on the strangeness of, for example, Walls and Staircases being proper nouns.

Despite myself, I quickly got engrossed in the story. As a voyeur into Piranesi’s world, we have a knowledge of his situation that he doesn’t possess himself. There is an innocence to him that is lost in our own world, and I found myself internally screaming at him to understand things the way you want him to. I wanted to shake him, wake him up and keep him safe. Any book that can make me feel that strongly about a character has my attention immediately; it became immediately obvious that I cared about his wellbeing. One Goodreads reviewer talks about him as ‘our friend Piranesi’ and I wholeheartedly agree; it is like you are listening to a friend tell you a story, and you are rooting for him throughout.

Every page felt important, every detail imperative to his story, every word meticulously chosen, all working together to drive the plot, unraveling the only world Piranesi has ever known. The book is relatively short, and yet the world building manages to obtain that crucial balance between being in depth and ‘show not tell’ enough to have it all sink in. I could picture every Statue he described, feel everything he was feeling, empathise so completely with his situation. Clarke masters the English language to achieve something spectacular, an escape from reality so poignant that you want to know everything there is to know about the narrator, the House, and everything in between. This novel is nothing short of a triumph.

It was announced in June 2024 that Piranesi will be getting a film adaptation using the medium of stop-motion animation. I can’t imagine a more perfect method of recreating this dreamworld, and even without a release date set, I’ll be first in line at the cinema on its opening day, without a doubt.