Piranesi seems to be a prisoner in his house of infinite rooms, through which he wanders.īorges specialised in short stories that fold in on themselves, that spiral, misidentify, mislead, magnify, falsify.
To pass through a portal to this mystical realm is to risk getting trapped and never finding one’s way back – or finding one doesn’t want to go back.
Piranesi’s (the Clarke character’s) favourite statue is a faun reminiscent of Mr Tumnus from the Narnia books. Then we have Narnia: an immense magical multiverse reached through portals such as a wardrobe and peopled with fauns, dwarves, winged horses, talking animals, witches, etc. Above all, Tolkien took fantasy seriously. When she was in her 20s, she did a night class on Borges.įrom Tolkien she may have imbibed the density and complexity of his use of fantasy tropes (a project so vast that it included the construction of more than 15 languages), as well as his gothic, grown-up sorceries. (A quotation from The Magician’s Nephew is one of the epigraphs of Piranesi.) Later in life she read and was impressed by Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. As a child she adored CS Lewis’s Narnia books, and especially The Magician’s Nephew. In both the Jordan and Miller interviews, and elsewhere, she has talked about her influences. It turns into a warm book about losing and finding oneself about what humanity could have lost in the process of becoming rational.īoth of Clarke’s novels have an element of the labyrinthine, of impossible geometries or hidden infinities that one has to find one’s way through. The book might start out like an intellectual exercise, but if you’re patient with it you find that it isn’t.
Piranesi house full#
It is a story about an amnesiac man who is lost in an immense ruined Classical ‘house’ with countless rooms, some partly underwater, others full of birds or gusts of wind and cloud. Piranesi (the book) is difficult to describe without making a mess of its intricate puzzling plot, but here there are also fantastical spaces that underlie the real and reflect it (or which the real reflects) in distorted and beautiful ways. Clarke’s title is merely a witty allusion, but it is incredibly suggestive. Now we have Piranesi, a book that isn’t actually about the 18th-Century Italian artist known for his densely intriguing representations of weird (very weird) prison spaces where architecture ties itself in knots. It is a book about the magical things and impossible places that could lurk behind the dull everyday, notably a cold, surreal, sinister faerieland which the careless or unfortunate or power hungry might lose their way in.
Piranesi house series#
It was made into a TV series that preserved its wonderful strangeness. Neil Gaiman, a god among fantasy writers, called it “unquestionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last 70 years”. In 2004, Clarke’s debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was published, a charming, dark, eccentric pastiche of Regency literature that defied expectations by going stellar and selling more than four million copies. Going to her looking for direction may be a waste of time, because even she might not understand them. Yet there is a sense that Clarke’s labyrinths aren’t meant to be solved, but rather dis-solve. “You start with an image or the fragment of a story, something that feels like it has very deep roots into the unconscious, like it is going to connect up with a lot of things,” she told The Guardian. In interviews, Clarke has attempted to engage in the contradictory act of explaining the delicate obscurities and puzzles that are at the heart of her writing. Why the funniest books are also the most serious For another, their influences converge in Susanna Clarke and her recent novel Piranesi. What could the conservative Irish-born writer CS Lewis (1898-1963), famous for the Narnia books, and the postmodernist Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), famous for short stories that play in ‘labyrinths’ of meaning, possibly have in common? Well, for one, they share a fascination with impossible spaces and magical worlds.
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