It will make adult readers feel that they have been granted a children’s novel all of their own. It is not a children’s novel but one need crop only a handful of sentences and it very easily could be. With its mixture of innocence and no-nonsense storytelling, Piranesi also carries a strong flavour of those old adventure novels that had once used to be turned out for intelligent children to read. In common with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Piranesi is a work of literary fantasy but beneath the fantasy trundles the sound heart of a philosophical novel. Yet this ostensible imp is, upon inspection, a little angel. It had looked for a long time as if any second novel was due to become a classic of the “difficult second novel” genre. There had been perhaps a growing suspicion that the machinery of her writing had dried up following the creation of her spectacular debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), and that she was struggling to jolt this machinery into motion again. Her ill health was frequently cited as a reason for not expecting very much from her. Clarke had seemed to be a novelist who had put herself on the back burner, in that until the appearance of Piranesi she had not produced a book for fourteen years. The consensus amongst reviewers is that it is a lovely novel and a superb surprise. Unlike Piranesi, we know that there is more to reality than just the House. There are “stars” beyond the walls of the House and we are often wondering about what else comprises its exterior. This novel might be always several steps ahead of us but the fund of dramatic irony that is its generous allowance means that we are ourselves always several steps ahead of Piranesi. He writes detailed journals about its nothingness, a sort of ongoing Wikipedia article about the House, and he pays periodic visits to thirteen sets of human remains that he has come across during his travels. He explores the interiors of this pile, aimlessly and without any determination to arrive anywhere. Piranesi does not know who built the House or how he himself came to be there or what he will do amongst its halls forevermore. Your defining characteristic becomes a terrifying absence of curiosity. You accept every absurdity that you experience without any sense of scandal occurring to you. Rather, it is more that you are stripped of your normal personality whilst you are walking in a dream and transformed into an alien version of yourself. Nonetheless, the most frightening thing about any dream is never actually its contents. There is seemingly no door to the outside world. The halls of the House proliferate inexhaustibly, like the never-ending interiors within a dream, and the face of the House only ever looks in upon these interiors. These walls “are lined with marble Statues, hundreds upon hundreds of them, Tier upon Tier, rising into the distant heights.” “Tides” wash through the House, battering the statues, and sometimes the air will be jumpy with the tumbling of seagulls or crows. The House in Susanna Clarke’s second novel Piranesi is a dream palace and dream logic is the only law that has any standing within its walls. Any dream is a sequence of baffling and disquieting events, with all of them colluding in the silent conspiracy of dream logic.
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