Piranesi Book Review

The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.

Piranesi is a speculative literary fiction novel written by Susanna Clarke in 2020.

The novel is written as a journal belonging to “Piranesi”, who lives inside a seemingly endless labyrinth called “The House”. The novel throws the reader right into the middle of one of his journal entries without explaining why Piranesi is in the House, or how he reached there in the first place.

Piranesi is a genre-melding book spanning fantasy, mystery, literary fiction, and philosophy.

I would recommend going into the book blind, without having read anything about it - including this book review. The rest of this review contains spoilers.

Overview

• Pace: Medium to fast-paced. It’s not an action novel. It’s a work of art.
• Plot or Character Driven?: Mix.
• Major Themes: Memory, Identity, Platonic Forms, Philosophy, Innocence.
• Prose: Immersive fever dream.
• Links to other reviews: StoryGraph, Goodreads

Plot Summary

The novel starts out right in the middle of one of Piranesi’s journal entries:

When the Moon rose in the Third Northern Hall I went to the Ninth Vestibule

ENTRY FOR THE FIRST DAY OF THE FIFTH MONTH IN THE YEAR THE ALBATROSS CAME TO THE SOUTH-WESTERN HALLS

The rest of the novel follows Piranesi’s experience of living inside an infinite labyrinth of massive halls. The halls contain statues of varying sizes, depicting scenes ranging from everyday life to war. The halls are flooded by sea water in their lower levels and permeated by clouds in their upper levels.

Piranesi lives alone in the House, except for one other person that Piranesi simply calls “Other” in his journal. Piranesi counts thirteen skeletons, including that of a dead monkey, as co-inhabitants of the House. He cares for these skeletons. He brings them food and water, and talks to them.

While Piranesi is content with living in the house as it is, the Other is here to gain a “Great and Secret Knowledge”. Piranesi tries to convince the Other to abandon his quest:

The House is valuable because it is the House. It is enough in and of Itself. It is not the means to an end.

but learns that they have had this conversation before. The House erases its inhabitants’ memories and personalities.

We gradually learn that the Other is using Piranesi as basically his slave in his search for this “Great and Secret Knowledge”. The Other brings Piranesi shoes, clothes, fishing nets, vitamins, and other essential supplies but doesn’t do any of the manual labour for his research. Piranesi doesn’t mind this though.

Piranesi’s utopia gets disturbed when the Other tells him about another living person in the House - someone Piranesi starts referring to as “16”. The Other advises Piranesi to avoid 16, otherwise 16 will manipulate Piranesi into essentially becoming insane. And at that point, the Other will have no choice but to kill Piranesi, out of the goodness of his heart, to help Piranesi end his miserable insane existence.

We come to know what’s actually happening when a man named Laurence Arne-Sayles visits Piranesi in the House and explains that his world (The House) is a “Distributary World”, formed by ideas flowing out of another world (our world, or the “real” world). Laurence explains that the Other is a man named Valentine Ketterly who used to be Laurence’s student. Laurence encourages Piranesi to kill Ketterly, but does not offer anything in terms of a way out.

The novel ends with 16, who is a police officer named Raphael, rescuing Piranesi and showing him a way back to the real world.

Piranesi, whose real name is Matthew Rose Sorensen, is back in the real world, but doesn’t change into his old self - Matthew. He also doesn’t continue as Piranesi. Instead, he is a completely new, third person now who has integrated both “Matthew” and “Piranesi” within him.

Analysis

An Uncorrupted Mind and Childlike Wonder

Piranesi teaches us the importance of having a childlike wonder and reverence towards seemingly mundane objects in our life. Even while describing things like the “Evening Light”, he uses capitalization for these nouns to elevate them to a God-like position of reverence.

This, however, does not make Piranesi incapable or inferior in any way. In fact, we later learn from Laurence that other people who have been trapped in the labyrinth before, completely lost their minds.

While Ritter (one of Laurence’s victim) was losing his mind:

I will die here … There is nothing to eat. I rely on him to bring me food and water …

Piranesi, on the other hand:

This was the writing of a very angry and unhappy person … I wished … to show him the fish that abounds in every Vestibule, the beds of shellfish just waiting to be gathered, how with only a little foresight he need never go hungry, how the House provides for and protects its Children.

Even when Piranesi is wondering about the Other’s access to resources that Piranesi himself doesn’t have, he does not get bitter:

… it occurs to me to wonder why it is that the House gives a greater variety of objects to the Other than to me, providing him with sleeping bags, shoes, plastic bowls, cheese sandwiches, notebooks, slices of Christmas cake etc., etc., whereas me it mostly gives fish. I think perhaps it is because the Other is not as skilled in taking care of himself as I am. He does not know how to fish. He never (as far as I know) gathers seaweed, dries it and stores it to make fires or a tasty snack; he does not cure fish skins and make leather out of them (which is useful for many things). If the House did not provide all these things for him, it is quite possible that he would die. Or else (which is more likely) I would have to devote a great deal of my time to caring for him.

I found this extremely refreshing. Usually popular media equates innocence and sincerity to naivety and helplessness. In this case, it is Piranesi’s unencumbered attitude, combined with his childlike reverence for the House that is the very thing that helps him survive.

Expectations and Enjoying Things For What They Are

I realised that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted, and that if ever we discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery.

The House is valuable because it is the House. It is enough in and of Itself. It is not the means to an end.

There is no bigger difference between Ketterly (the Other) and Piranesi than their regard for the House.

While for Ketterly the House is just a means to get to his “Great and Secret Knowledge”, for Piranesi, the House is sacrosanct.

I could not help but think of Kant’s Kingdom of Ends (“Reich der Zwecke”), part of his Categorical Imperative that humans being should be treated as ends by themselves, rather than a means to an end for other people.

Platonic Forms

The statues in the Halls are Platonic Forms of people and events in the “real” world.

At the end of the novel, Piranesi comes across an old man walking on the street who exists as a statue of a King in Piranesi’s world of forms.

When Raphael explains to Piranesi that his world contains “only” the representation of objects, while her world contains the “real” objects, Piranesi objects to this classification.

‘Yes,’ said Raphael. ‘Here you can only see a representation of a river or a mountain, but in our world – the other world – you can see the actual river and the actual mountain.’ This annoyed me. ‘I do not see why you say I can only see a representation in this World,’ I said with some sharpness. ‘The word “only” suggests a relationship of inferiority. You make it sound as if the Statue was somehow inferior to the thing itself. I do not see that that is the case at all. I would argue that the Statue is superior to the thing itself, the Statue being perfect, eternal and not subject to decay.’

It reminded me of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem - another mind-bending work of philosophical fiction.

Subversion of the “Damsel in Distress” Trope

In another time, from another author, Piranesi would be a woman, and her rescuer, Raphael, would be a man. Not here. This blends in beautifully with another theme in the book - “transgressive thinking” - the topic that Matthew (Piranesi) was researching before being kidnapped by Ketterly.

Conclusion

Piranesi is probably the first work of modern literary fiction that I have read (I usually read genre fiction). I was a bit apprehensive about the pace of the book before I started reading it but that wasn’t an issue here. The prose is simple, though dreamlike, and easy to follow.

5/5 stars.