A 16-Year Wait :: 'Piranesi'

Awaited Susanna Clarke’s ‘Piranesi’ (2020) with bated breath and happily read it in a morning. It has been a long 16 years since her 2004 ‘Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell’, of which I really enjoyed. This story is just as fantastical and totally out there. (Reviews here, here, here and here.)

Set in a fantastical House that seems like an island, the only inhabitant is Piranesi, and an older man known as the Other. Piranesi doesn't leave the House, ever. As far as he knows, there're only 15 other people in the world, of which 13 are dead, and he tends to their bones. The One known as The Other visits him in the House. His world is blown apart when the Other warns him about a 16th person who is alive, who is an enemy, and must be avoided at all costs because a close encounter would drive him mad. 

The Other gives him clothes, shoes, blankets, heat packs, and also multivitamins. Piranesi didn't have access to all these, and catches fish to eat. His tasks include maintaining a Calendar and a Table of Tides, and the turn of the Seasons and Extraordinary Occurrences. He keeps time in the format of journals this way — 'Second Entry for the Twenty-First Day of the Ninth Month in the Year The Albatross Came to the South-Western Halls'. I was thoroughly stumped. It took me a while to fall into the language and rhythm of the names in the book, and a longer while to be absorbed into its world. 

As for the Other's claim that I lose time and muddle days, I do not see how this can possibly be true. I invented the calendar I use, so how could it get 'out of sync' as he put it? There is nothing for it to get out of sync with.

I wonder now if this is why he asked me that strange question three and a half weeks ago? I mean the question with a strange word in it. Turning back the pages of my Journal I see that the strange word was 'Batter-Sea'.

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It is not the fact 16 is a woman that fascinates and excites me — or at least, not entirely; it is the fact that she is another human being. I want to learn everything I can about her — or as much as I can learn without going mad. (That is the tricky part.)

I have not told the Other about the message that 16 wrote. Nor have I told him that after I erased it there were little half phrases and sentences remaining and that I left these untouched. 

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

MANY SPOILERS.

DO NOT READ BEYOND THIS IF YOU HAVEN'T READ THE BOOK AND YOU INTEND TO DO SO.

After a while, I was like, where is this World that Piranesi inhabits and the Other only visits, along with 16, the woman. This story seems to allude to an actual 17th century Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) who drew labyrinths and prisons. The themes of isolation, curiosity, tiredness and uhh lockdown run through. 

The 16th person, known as '16', is a woman. Piranesi was shocked to discover that when he spotted her in the 'Sixth North-Western Hall' and heard her voice. For months, the Other never told him or corrected him that 16 is a woman. Through 16, Piranesi also learnt that the Other's name is Valentine Ketterley. Dr Ketterley. He was confused by 16's messages to him, of which one asked 'Are You Matthew Rose Sorensen?' He was like, "I am the Beloved Child of the House. I am Piranesi." He didn't know how to answer 16's question. He has no idea who Matthew Rose Sorensen is. 

16 is Sarah Raphael, a detective working on the case of the disappearances of the missing researchers. She took him out of the House, of this World of labyrinths, and return to the real world where his parents and sisters and friends were waiting. They assumed he had a mental breakdown and disappeared into a world o his own inside his head. But we readers know better. The real-world personality of Matthew Rose Sorensen has disappeared and the House personality of Piranesi has taken over. 

We know that the World of the labyrinths is real, and those who learn the secret of entering the world and wish to stay, need to know how to feed themselves in there and know the Tides; or they will eventually die, and it'll be a real death. We don't know if Piranesi will eventually return to the House and if Sarah Raphael will go with him too, and stay in the quiet of the corridors and Halls. 

What a splendid story indeed. I love it.

But I, who am not Piranesi — or at least not only him — realise that this probably wouldn't go down too well. 

I have decided to write a book about Laurence Arne-Sayles. It is something that Matthew Rose Sorensen wanted to do and something that I want to do. After all, who knows Arne-Sayles's work better than me?

Raphael has shown me what Laurence Arne-Sayles taught her: how to find the path to the labyrinth and how to find the path out again. I can come and go as I please.