As far as I can tell, one of the main reasons I haven’t been all that successful as a poet is that I’ve tried too hard to write good poems. As many unsold copies of my one published collection gather dust in an upstairs closet, the subsequent collection, which took me seven years to write, occupies a restless folder on my MacBook. Reading over those pages, I see a lot of hard work and the occasional good line. As Richard Wilbur once put it, real love “has the quality of something made.” But sometimes the effort of the making outstrips the fineness of the thing you make.
Perhaps the only reliable way to create is to stop thinking all that hard about the creation. A person who sits down “to write some poetry” will pretty much always write garbage. But a person who sits down and really loses themselves in a memory has a good chance, in their self-forgetful state, of writing a decent poem. I just can’t remember to forget.
Susanna Clarke, conversely, puts self-forgetfulness on memorable display in her new novel, Piranesi. The titular character literally suffers from amnesia. But the theme of self-forgetfulness permeates more than just the protagonist’s mental state. Clarke’s scenes haunt the reader from the first page, indicating a creator who has released her ego and given herself over to imagination.
Set in an alternate world which consists of a single, giant, labyrinthine house whose walls are lined with ornate statues, the epistolary Piranesi tells its story through the journal entries of the title character. Piranesi, who is apparently one of the two living people who inhabit this entire world, is a scientist to the bone. He lives to record the locations and details of the statues, the patterns of the rains, and the flow of the many tides that rise and fall in the house’s lower halls.
“The Beauty of the House is immeasurable;” Piranesi repeatedly writes, “its Kindness infinite.” He has a profound sense of being “a beloved child of the House,” whose provisions for him are satisfying and benevolent. He fishes and dries seaweed in the House’s lower halls, stands paralyzed by the beauty of the moon shining onto statuary, and provides nesting material for a pair of albatrosses who appear in one of the vast rooms. Initially optimistic, Piranesi becomes increasingly suspicious of “the Other,” his only companion in the house. The Other dresses impeccably while Piranesi lives in rags. He bullies and cajoles Piranesi into conducting dangerous, long-distance research trips into the House, in hopes of discovering some sort of lost and secret knowledge. The Other also uses a smartphone. And it is this last jarring detail which gives us the first real hint about where Piranesi might actually be living.
Clarke’s last novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, was a massive brick of a fantasy costume drama that somehow managed to present itself both clearly and compellingly. In Piranesi, Clarke gives us something just as elegant but far more compressed—so compressed that whole other potential novels seep through the cracks like cider through the slats of an old barrel. There are unidentified skeletons in the House, birds with the gift of prophecy, half-glimpsed underwater behemoths, anachronistic artifacts. The labyrinth, as the House is often called, behaves like a second protagonist. Piranesi believes it has a will. By the end of the novel, we could, on good evidence, be inclined to think the same. This is not simply a novel of people, but of things.
The sense of timelessness in Piranesi comes from this goosebump-producing mixture of suggestive symbolism and intense humanity. The House takes on a life of its own. It is as if Piranesi is a modern, novelistic character living on the abandoned set of a Roman myth. “When faced with a…situation I do not understand,” he writes at one point, “my first impulse is still to look for a statue that will enlighten me.”
And the statues do not steer him wrong. Through their potent symbolism—a woman carrying a lamp, a rather familiar scarf-wearing satyr playing a panpipe—they teach Piranesi how to interpret the rest of his world.
Despite their otherworldliness, the strange beauties and deepening uncertainties of Piranesi’s labyrinth seem eerily attuned to the looming sense of lostness in our own era. He wonders the same things that many of us wonder—how do we discover the truth? How do we convey it with clarity? As Piranesi begins to question every assumption about the world he lives in, and the reliability of every source of information, he must decide whether he will abandon his conviction that truth exists or trust his scientific impulse and root the truth out, no matter how unpleasant.
C.S. Lewis once wrote about George Macdonald that, while it is one thing for a writer to create characters, it is quite another for him to create myths. It takes a special quality to write moments into a book that are powerful by themselves and in themselves — to create a “nourishing pattern of events” that would be just as rich if it were written in someone else’s voice, or even only summarized. Clarke writes so well that we’d never want to hear Piranesi as told by anyone else. But, if we did, the story’s pattern of events would remain potent, a virtue that very few modern books can claim.
Clarke has not only written a profound novel in Piranesi, she has written a myth. And, like all myths, it is both timely and timeless as it describes an eternal quest: the search for our lost faith in the truth.
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