This book is a Masterclass of space and sound. Here’s why.
The world of Piranesi deserves more attention. Piranesi is a masterful book by Susanna Clarke published in 2020, but I didn’t discover it until this year. Let’s explore and review Piranesi’s world.
The story drops you into the narrative deep end:
“I heard the Tides roaring in the Lower Halls and felt the Walls vibrating with the force of what was about to happen…. the Tide from the Northern Halls. It hurled itself up the middle Staircase, filling the Vestibule with an explosion of glittering, ice-white Foam…The Waters covered me and for a moment I was surrounded by the strange silence that comes when the Sea sweeps over you and drowns its own sounds (1-2).”
Notice the Capitalized words and how significant they become. Not any waters or any vestibule. But the Waters and the Vestibule.
A Magical Space and Time
Space in the book Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is a mysterious thing. The beginning of the book reads like an exploration of a magical realm. Different, specific Tides flood the world: the waters “rush and thrumb“ with “churning depths.” They are “restless Waters.” Piranesi describes them as “full of movement and power so that, while they may not exactly be alive, neither are they not-alive (47).”
Water is a main source of life in this world (food comes from the fish, warmth from burning seaweed, and drinkable water from the rain and Clouds in the Upper Halls.) Likewise, sound plays a key role. You hear how the tides echo throughout the story from calm to raging. Birds chirp as they make their home and nests in hallways.
In sacred spaces we listen to the sounds, not always of birds and oceans. What are we listening for? Why?
Usually to discover and the book Piranesi is all about discovery.
The space is described reverently too.
“No Hall, no Vestibule, no Staircase, no Passage is without its Statues. In most Halls they cover all the available space, though here and there you will find an Empty Plinth, Niche, or Aspe, or even a blank space on a Wall, otherwise encrusted with Statues. These Absences are as mysterious in their way as the Statues themselves (5).”
Early on when I began reading Piranesi, I decide to give up understanding the space. I generally form a mental map of places when I read, but I was suddenly confronted with so many important capitalized words: Northern, Western and Eastern and Unknown Halls and Staircases. I realized it was too much. Too painful to try and keep it all mapped in my mind. The mental strain wasn’t worth the effort. I decide to trust Piranesi. He must know where everything is located. We are reading his journal and he states everything with such authority. Together we would not get lost.
Navigating Other (Virtual) spaces
I have always had a blindness for left and right (I meant the other left), but once oriented in a place, city, island or outside a subway, then I have a good sense of direction. I don’t get lost often (GPS has made me lazy and lose confidence.) Once when driving around San Francisco looking for my cousin’s house, I felt lost among the freeways and concrete. Another time on a road trip with friends in a foggy coastal town near the Canadian boarder, we took a wrong turn trying to find the interstate. In Valencia, Spain late one night I was walking from the museum to my hostel and I realized I wasn’t on my map. (No phone to navigate either.) Luckily, I found a street map and realized if I kept going on the same street I’d reach the neighborhood with my hostel.
Often, I feel like I lose people, or can’t find places, but I myself am not lost.
Lost in a Video Game Map
Getting lost in a can happen video game until I figure out the landmarks. I marvel about the worlds of Zelda. Was this tiny world ever confusing to navigate? Sometimes yes (Wind Waker and Twilight Princess) and sometimes I never figure them out.
I remember playing the Assassin’s Creed 2, which is set in Firenze Italy, and the game imitated reality so closely that I recognized where to go because I’d visited the real Firenze. (Or was it the other way around.)
No Man’s Sky is a sci-fi adventure survival game that generates planets every time you jump into a new galaxy. I’m always getting lost in outer space. It is infinitely harder to process where the space station and planets are because my ship might be upside down compared to the last time. And because the game generates the world, there are always new ones every time I play!
On that note, let’s get back to the review of Piranesi.
Spoilers for the story begin now. If you want to read it unspoiled, stop here, please!
Navigating the Sacred Space
We learn from Piranesi that his world is navigable, but the magnitude of the space makes it difficult. “Outside the House there are only the Celestial Objects: Sun, Moon and Stars (6).” Inside there is only the House and Statues and they exist in a seemingly infinite space, extending in all directions. From each window there is visible another, similar Hall. It feels dreamlike with these architecturally-impossible Halls and seas coming from each compass direction. So, naturally the climax of the story features a great flood of four tides. A convergence of people, and dangerous waters in the same place.
This world is a Labyrinth. Piranesi might understand it, but the average reader shouldn’t have to. In fact, it becomes obvious that trying to understand it can make you go insane. (Reader beware!)
A Hidden Secret Power
Piranesi has a enigmatic relationship with the House and Statues, and an almost supernatural ability to commune with the world around him. This becomes a key theme. Only no one seems to realize his special ability is very similar to the power, “the Great and Secret Knowledge” that the Other (the antagonist) is seeking.
Piranesi can hear the thoughts of birds:
“Birds are not difficult to understand,” he explains. “Their behavior tells me what they are thinking… Is this food? Is this? What about this? This might be food?… yet it occurred to me that there may be more wisdom in birds than appears… a wisdom that reveals itself only obliquely and intermittently (39).”
And Statues:
“Suddenly I saw in front of me the Statue of the Faun, the Statue that I love above all others. There was his calm, faintly smiling face; there was his forefinger gently pressed to his lips. In the past I have always thought he meant to warn me of something with that gesture: Be careful! But today it seemed to mean something quite different: Hush! Be comforted… Safe in his embrace, I wept for my lost Sanity. Great, heaving sobs rose up, almost painfully, from my chest. Hush! He told me. Be comforted! (108-109)”
Unfortunately, this power is not be exactly what the antagonist, Ketterman, wants. And he will never get his hands on it, because he fears the world, and is constantly escaping from it rather than living within it like Piranesi.
The Great Conflict
The great conflict of the story revolves around the arrive on another person to the world who is looking for Piranesi, a threat to his sanity and way of life. This new Sixteenth person forces both Prianesi and Ketterman to change and take actions. The mysteries of the world begin to unravel, first to the reader and then to Piranesi himself. Throughout the book, we uncover investigations into this world and others, disappearances, identities are revealed, strange rituals occur and everything is connected to the past.
The story enfolds as an investigation, first of the world and then its inhabitants. The vast space and sounds are used to make you feel as if you are there and part of a grand discovery.
Even if we are only readers, venturing into the world through words and phrases, the House exists. Written down it exists. Reading the book makes it exist in our minds and like Piranesi we can seek it out and return to it whenever we want.
A familiar soundscape of ocean waves is transformed into something masterful and magical in Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.
Let me know if you go searching for Piranesi’s world. Would you live in a Labyrinth like Piranesi? Or just visit?