Fiction
Prisons of the imagination Susanna Clarke’s surreal second novel Kirsten Tranter
Piranesi
by Susanna Clarke
I
Bloomsbury $27.99 pb, 272 pp
t is day one hundred and seventeen of the official ‘Shelter in Place’ order in Berkeley, California, when I finish Susanna Clarke’s surreal, heartbreaking novel Piranesi, having rationed the final pages over several days. There is something about lockdown and its strange effects on the mind that makes every text seem like a code for the situation of quarantine, every story an allegory of constriction, captivity, or exile. But Piranesi speaks to these themes with unique sharpness: it is literally a story about a man trapped in a house of endless rooms, who no longer remembers that another world exists. The narrator has forgotten his real name and is called Piranesi. The name references the eighteenth-century Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi and the House described in the novel seems to embody his monumental, uncanny architectural images, especially his collection of etchings titled Carceri d’Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons, 1750). In these haunting engravings, as in the novel’s House, massive stairs and walkways connect gothic archways and innumerable vast halls filled with statuary. The House encloses a dreamlike world. Rain falls from clouds in the upper levels, while the lower levels of the house – the ‘Drowned Halls’ – are filled with water that resembles an ocean with its own tides. Windows look onto enclosed courtyards and show the sky. The novel is told in the form of Piranesi’s obsessive journal entries describing the House, its many statues, rooms, windows, fish and bird life, and collection of anonymous human skeletons. The voice is innocent, archaic, with important nouns capitalised and liberal use of exclamation marks. I found myself wondering if Piranesi were one of the nineteenth-century magicians in Clarke’s début novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell (2004), venturing into a strange world beyond our own. But traces of the modern world begin to show and become more obvious, more insistent and malign. Initially, Piranesi’s only companion is a man he calls ‘the Other’, a cantankerous, arrogant person who holds a ‘shining device’ and somehow has access to things necessary for survival in the House such as a sleeping bag, fishing nets, and matches, which he gives to Piranesi. How are we to understand this place that resists conscious understanding? It is suggested that the House was discovered by someone searching for ‘a passage, a door between us and wherever magic has gone’. One character believes that ‘it was created by ideas flowing out of another world’, which seem to have taken concrete shape in the form of innumerable statues. We meet a
stone elephant carrying a castle, two kings playing chess, a woman holding a beehive, a hall of giant minotaurs, and countless more. These stone figures – human, animal, whimsical, monstrous, divine – convey every state of being from joy to struggle and despair in a vast repository of arcane symbolism. The novel revels in its intertextual conversation with literary and popular culture. Piranesi’s favourite statue is a faun, in a nod to Mr Tumnus in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia. ‘He smiles slightly and presses his forefinger to his lips’, as if in warning, Piranesi tells us; ‘I dreamt of him once; he was standing in a snowy forest and speaking to a female child.’ Doctor Who also gets a reference. The House not only offers a tribute to Narnia and the Doctor’s timetravelling TARDIS, but to every fantasy world ever reached through a fictional portal or tear in space, on a page or on a screen or in the imagination.
There is something about lockdown that makes every text seem like a code for the situation of quarantine The extraordinary Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell was a massive brick of a book, a story that reached with epic ambition across time and space in a completely realised magical universe. With Piranesi, Clarke has condensed the power of that sprawling narrative into a little jewel box, an intricately crafted puzzle of a novel that, like the Italian Piranesi’s etchings, constantly asks the reader to shift perspectives, to guess and see anew more freshly impossible geometries. Despite the signature beauty of Clarke’s prose, Piranesi’s point of view seems at first so weird, so stubbornly naïve, and the whole thing somehow too clever and artificial. This changes as the story draws us further into the mystery of the narrator’s existence and the relationship of the House to our own world. The novel’s parable of creativity, the story of a mind lost in an imaginary world of beauty, danger, loss, and wonder, loses its sense of contrivance and as though by magic comes emotionally true. Piranesi’s story is not only a testament to the power of the imagination and a discourse on the mutability of the self, but also a story about the best and worst of human impulses, where cruelty and egotism contend with kindness, compassion, and courage. Clarke’s careful turns of the narrative screw have a stealthy power, and the moment Piranesi comes to contemplate the possibility of leaving the House feels both inevitable and unexpectedly tragic; it seemed as though I had somehow forgotten and was now being forcibly reminded of the awful loss that attends disenchantment, the wrenching pain of disconnect between art and life, matter and spirit, imagination and reality, self and other, that is the foundation of all creativity. Clarke writes brilliantly about magic and also understands the magic of language, its power to reveal the mysteries that shadow what we take for reality, to conjure empathy and provoke insight. Like Clarke’s magician Jonathan Strange, Piranesi laments the passing of magic from the modern world, and yet makes its own case that fiction is one place it might be rediscovered. g Kirsten Tranter’s novels include Hold (2016). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020
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