Piranesi

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I normally don't read "popular" books when they first come out, but the Weird Studies podcast had forced my hand. They're doing an episode on it next week and there will be spoilers, so I needed to read this before I listened. Not that this is a bad thing, mind you. Oh, and to answer your next question, no, I've never read Susanna Clarke's other most famous book. Just haven't gotten around to it yet (nor have I watched the television dramatization) I have to admit. This, though, is much shorter than that behemoth of a book. it is a very quick read, both because of the flowing, nay, lilting prose, and because the mystery that unfolds draws the reader in, once the reader lets it.

There are shades of Borges here. And nods, of a sort, to Peck's A Short Stay in Hell, with a voice not dissimilar to Walter Moers' The City of Dreaming Books, which means to say that I love the style and I love the content. Like the three books of which it carries echoes, Piranesi is going to be a bookshop-shelver's nightmare; the kind of thing that will make book marketers sit up in bed in the middle of the night, bathed in a cold sweat. Just the kind of book I like best; and the kind of book many people will hate!

Plenty of other review cover the basics of the plot. Some claim that the plot is extremely thin, though I would argue that the thinnest part is the part that is in plain sight. Its anchors are carefully obfuscated, but deep and strong. Nothing about the plot is obvious from the beginning (again, a trope that I love, but that drives some readers absolutely batty), and this helps the reader feel more fully vested in the naivete of Piranesi himself. We are forced to see only through his eyes, and this plunges the reader into an unfamiliar, very strange place, watching revelations unfold in real time. That same estrangement is at the very heart of the plot of the story and at the very heart of who Piranesi is as a person(s). I will leave it at that.

At first, as I started to discover the edges of Piranesi's labyrinths, both mental and physical, I thought that the very sly opening of the 4th wall (as early as page 12!) portended a hyperstition about hyperstition. On further reflection, I've come to the (tentative?) conclusion that it's not a hyperstition about hyperstition. It is an attempt to engage the real world reader (the person who is actually reading the book) to believe in a hyperstition, that of Arne-Sayles, a sort of call to willingly suspend disbelief that such a reality could be created, ex nihilo, from the mind of The Professor.

This engagement, I would argue, is largely successful because part of the immersion into Arne-Syles' created (or was it simply discovered?) reality results from the utter naivete of Piranesi himself. At it's heart, this is a story of innocence - a past innocence that had been utterly lost, a new innocence gained by a complete denial of a harsh past reality, and a further repeat of a loss of innocence, but not a complete loss: A synthesis of losses and realities, not a complete exposure to the terrors of past and present reality, but the reconciliation of two perceptions and two realities, the old Hegelian dialectic applied to trauma and psychological defense, a newness in which both pain and comfort come together to form a new person out of two previous emotional-intellectual entities. It is a beautiful thing to behold - tentative and tense, but beautiful in both its hesitation and its reconciliation.

One of the ways this dialectic unfolds, and the satisfaction to me (again other readers will hate this aspect) is that most of the mystery is preserved, rather than resolved. If you expect to know everything, to see a reality shattered and the "truth" fully uncovered, or to have the "solution" spoon-fed to you, you will not. If you are not comfortable with untidy endings and loose strings, this is most definitely not the book for you.

But if you are, like I am, comfortable with stories that do not comfortably end, this is a rich excursion into mystery. I think that Piranesi himself sums it up in a corollary thought that may be at the heart of the book, the great key to "understanding" (what is to be understood, which is, again, not everything):

AS I walked, I was thinking about the Great and Secret Knowledge, which the Other says will grant us strange new powers. And I realised something. I realised that I no longer believed in it. Or perhaps that is not quite accurate. I thought it was possible that the Knowledge existed. Equally I thought that it was possible it did not. Either way it no longer mattered to me. I did not intend to waste my time looking for it any more.

This realisation - the realisation of the Insignificance of the Knowledge - came to me in the form of a Revelation. What I mean by this is that I knew it to be true before I understood why or what steps had led me there. When I tried to retrace those steps my mind kept returning to the image of the One-Hundred-and-Ninety-Second Western Hall in the Moonlight, to its Beauty, to its deep sense of Calm, to the reverent looks on the Faces of the Statues as they turned (or seemed to turn) towards the Moon. 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.

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IMPORTANT UPDATE!!! Piranesi is now going to be a stop-motion movie!!! Incredible!

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