Piranesi (novel)

Background and publication

Piranesi is Clarke's second novel, following her debut Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), which sold 4 million copies worldwide and was adapted into a BBC miniseries in 2015. After that publication, Clarke became ill with chronic fatigue syndrome, making writing a 'torturous' process. She worked on several projects, including a sequel to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, but found herself incapable of making decisions, with everything becoming 'uncontained bushes'.

A visit to the set of the Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell miniseries reinvigorated her confidence. She decided to simplify what she asked of herself and returned to Piranesi, a longtime unfinished project that 'probably predates Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell', because she deemed it more manageable, requiring fewer characters and less research. The novel was published in hardback, e-book and audio format on 15 September 2020 by Bloomsbury Publishing. The audiobook was narrated by actor Chiwetel Ejiofor.

Plot

The novel's narrator, known only as Piranesi, inhabits a vast structure called the House, an endless labyrinth of halls and antechambers filled with unique statues. Its upper reaches are lost in clouds, while its lower levels contain an ocean that periodically floods the middle floors according to tides Piranesi carefully charts. He records his life in journals, which form the book itself. Piranesi considers himself a scientist, believes the House is a living god, and claims proof that only fifteen people exist in the world—thirteen of them long-dead skeletons.

Twice weekly, he meets a well-dressed man called the Other, who asks for help finding a "Great and Secret Knowledge" hidden within the House. The Other brings supplies from outside, like shoes, flashlights, and vitamins. When Piranesi suggests stopping the search, the Other insists they have had this conversation before and warns that the House slowly erases memory and identity. The Other also warns of a sixteenth person, referred to as "16," who may enter to harm Piranesi; approaching 16 would cost him his sanity.

Piranesi later meets an old man he calls the Prophet, who identifies the Other as Ketterley, a rival who stole his ideas. The Prophet describes the House as a "distributary world," created by ideas flowing from another realm, and says he will bring 16 there to hurt Ketterley. While organizing his journals, Piranesi finds references to entries he does not recall writing, containing terms the Prophet used. These entries describe an occultist named Laurence Arne-Sayles, who believed other worlds could be reached; Ketterley was his student.

Arne-Sayles ran a cult-like group and was imprisoned for kidnapping a man named James Ritter, who later described being held captive in a place much like the House.

Reception

Piranesi received unanimous admiration from reviewers. Sarah Ditum of The Times called it 'close to perfect'. Ron Charles of The Washington Post described it as 'infinitely clever' and noted that Piranesi's acceptance of his imprisonment made the novel resonate with a planet in quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Publishers Weekly praised it as 'inventive' and commended Clarke's subtlety in progressing the storyline. Gary K. Wolfe of Locus highlighted Clarke's continuing themes of lost knowledge and magic, and commended the novel's formal, archaic narrative voice. He characterized the structure as both elegant and 'hypnotic', and underscored risks such as putting readers one step ahead of the protagonist, but ultimately praised Piranesi as an 'astonishing narrative performance' as intriguing as Clarke's first book.

Allusions

The title alludes to the 18th-century Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who produced a series of sixteen prints entitled Imaginary Prisons depicting enormous subterranean vaults with stairs and mighty machines. The novel contains several references to C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia. The narrator dreams of a faun 'standing in a snowy forest and speaking to a female child', likely referencing Lucy Pevensie meeting Mr. Tumnus in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

The character Dr. Valentine Andrew Ketterley evokes Andrew Ketterley, the villain in The Magician's Nephew, a connection strengthened by a quotation from that book given at the front of the novel. The House of Piranesi shares similarities with the 'Wood between the Worlds' from The Magician's Nephew: both are alternative worlds reached by supernatural means, contain less varied life, and induce forgetfulness in newcomers. The story has been compared to Plato's allegory of the cave, where Piranesi is confined to a world of statues representing a greater reality of which he is ignorant, much like the cave's prisoner seeing only shadows.

The novel also alludes to the work of Jorge Luis Borges, particularly his short stories 'The Library of Babel' and 'The House of Asterion', which Clarke has discussed in an interview.

Did You Know?

• Piranesi was adapted and abridged for BBC Radio 4, read by Samuel Anderson, and broadcast as ten 15-minute episodes in February 2022.
• In June 2024, the American stop-motion studio Laika acquired the rights to adapt the novel into an animated feature film, to be directed by Travis Knight.
• David Kajganich was announced to write the script for the Laika adaptation.