books

Piranesi is a book that asks something unusual of its reader: a willingness to be disoriented, and to accept that disorientation as part of the pleasure. Its narrator, who answers to the name Piranesi although he suspects it is not his own, lives alone in a building of infinite halls lined with thousands of statues, an imprisoned ocean surging through the lower storeys and clouds gathering in the upper ones. He keeps a journal. He reveres the House. Every object he encounters is given a capitalised title, from the Statue of the Woman Carrying a Beehive to the Tides themselves, and the first eighty pages or so require the reader to learn his grammar of wonder before the plot begins to take shape.

That adjustment is the book's first gamble, and I think it pays off almost entirely. Once the rhythm of the journal entries settles, the House becomes one of the most vividly realised settings in recent fiction - part neoclassical ruin, part Borgesian labyrinth, part storehouse of lost meaning. There is a clear lineage here to the historical Giovanni Battista Piranesi and his etchings of imaginary prisons, and an even clearer debt to C.S. Lewis, particularly the abandoned city of Charn and the Wood Between the Worlds from The Magician's Nephew. Clarke wears those influences lightly, folding them into something that feels entirely her own.

What raises the book above its atmosphere, though, is the narrator himself. Piranesi is guileless, curious and thoroughly kind, and his voice carries a moral weight the mystery plot alone could not sustain. We understand things long before he does - the significance of the skeletons he tends, the sinister edge to his only companion, known as the Other - and the slow closing of that gap gives the novel its emotional charge. There is a genuine tenderness in watching a man who believes himself at home begin to suspect otherwise.

The book is not flawless. The second half tilts from meditation into something closer to a conventional thriller, with academic conspirators, a flood and even a handgun, and some of the metaphysical strangeness of the opening is traded for narrative tidiness. A few threads wrap up too neatly for a story that has spent so long resisting explanation. There are moments where I wished Clarke had trusted the ambiguity a little longer, and anyone coming to it expecting the dense, ornate Regency of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell should be warned that this is a very different animal: shorter, sparer, more interior.

Even so, Piranesi lingers. It is a novel about memory, captivity and the quiet dignity of paying close attention to the world in front of you, and its final pages are among the most moving I have read in any recent fantasy. It rewards patience, rereading, and a willingness to be gently unmoored. I was, and I would return to the House tomorrow.