Meg Fancher

What Do You Remember?

A “deeply, deeply buried game is afoot” in Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi

Susanna Clarke changed everything for me with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Her debut novel was a sly, epic nineteenth-century pastiche set in an alternate universe-England during the Napoleonic Wars, where once-ubiquitous practical magic had been long-lost, though gentlemen still studied it abstractly—until “One day,” etc. JS&MN ballooned out and contracted inwards in that way only gigantic plots can, so you can imagine that exhausted toastiness I swam around in for days after its perfect ending. Now, Clarke’s second novel, sixteen years coming and some 500 pages lighter, gives me the same massive phantom-hug feeling of having plumbed the depths and ascended the cliffs of an entire parallel existence. It’s one of those books—she’s done it twice now! She has a 100% rate!—you never want to stop passing on. And it’s about being in quarantine, sort of. 

Piranesi lives inside the House, and the House is the entire World. Its ascetic marble Halls go on forever, containing within them an entire ocean that sustains a water cycle and a populace of fish and birds. Piranesi spends his days tromping around to collect rainwater to drink, catch fish in seaweed traps, and calculate the movement of the tides, all of which he writes lovingly about in his volumes and volumes of meticulous journals. Twice a week he meets up with the Other, the only other person in the House, to confab about what Piranesi has learned during the latest fact-finding task that the Other has given him; the Other (a guy in a nice suit), Piranesi writes, is searching for a “Great and Secret Knowledge” intrinsically bound up in the House that will grant them power over “lesser intellects.” A bit odd, Piranesi thinks, as the only other intellects inside the House are, like, albatrosses, but he wants to be helpful.

The House is filled with niches and alcoves, like a medieval cathedral, all of which hold statues of bizarre specificity: a woman holding a beehive, two men playing chess, an elephant with a castle on its back. As part of his daily rounds, Piranesi visits his favorite statues and chats with them, which is sweet. He also visits the crumbling remains of thirteen human skeletons, the origins of which he doesn’t know and doesn’t worry about, which is troubling. 

Piranesi operates within a strange memory paradox: his knowledge of the House is encyclopedic, which serves him well because he loves learning about it and cataloguing its innards and doing really any exploratory task put to him by the Other in their quest for the Knowledge—but Piranesi could not give less of a damn about who he is, himself. He is a “Blessed Child of the House,” and that’s the beginning and end of it. He’s is optimistic, dogged, methodical, conscientious, and kind, exactly the sort of Victorian gentleman-scientist the House truly may have conjured up just so a living human soul could explore and come to love it; for all intents and purposes, Piranesi is a Child of the House. Except that he’s only called Piranesi because the Other has dubbed him so: “Which is strange,” Piranesi muses in his journal, “because as far as I remember it is not my name.” Thus elucidated, his interest in that detail disappears. 

This is how the novel operates for the first fifty or so pages: a tour of the lovely starkness and eerie wildness of the House as described by the happiest guide in the World. Teensy clues drift by, unnoticed by the protagonist, that a deeply, deeply buried game is afoot. There’s a scene early on, before the gears even seem to be turning, demonstrating the dainty perniciousness creeping around the House’s edges like mold. One day, the Other asks Piranesi a question about himself, a flattering break in form: “What do you remember?” Piranesi says gamely that he remembers everything, every Hall of the House, every Statue in its Walls, their cardinal positions, etc., but the Other interrupts him: “What about Batter-Sea?” Piranesi does not remember this place: “It is not a word,” Piranesi says. “There is nothing in the World corresponding to that combination of sounds.” Then it dawns on him—it’s just an ethical test:

“Very cunningly you have chosen a word that sounds like a place. A place that is battered by the Sea. Now if I were to say that I remembered Batter-Sea and then described the way there, you would know I was lying. You would know I was simply boasting. You have put this in as a control question.”

“That’s it exactly,” [the Other] said. “That’s exactly what I am doing.”

We both laughed.

This is a deeply unsettling fissure in the foundation of the novel’s world, released blithely into the prose of the House like a little bird. It’s as if in an 1803 JS&MN scene Mr. Norrell is reading a book and Jonathan walks into his room, vaping. Perhaps you remember Batter-Sea (or the elephant carrying a castle), in which case you may see the cracks in the House’s marble where Piranesi does not.

As her second book, Piranesi offers more material with which to identify consistent Clarkeian motifs: ambitious, backbiting academics pushing themselves too far; a lost paganesque knowledge imbedded in the natural world, possibly an invocation of the Sublime; the collective psychic wisdom of a flock of birds; magical enslavement; weird, sweet young men who just want to learn. As her second alternate world, Piranesi explores a sort of apogee of the same supposed purity of studious isolation that JS&MN characters fought over: its protagonist is blessed to live in a perfect world, his only job discovery, his only desire harmony with the House until his death. Is his existence stunted, or is it flourishing? Is he oblivious or is he enlightened, and by whose standards? Can there ever be such a thing as a true partnership of equals? Can you ever truly comprehend the mechanics of your place in the world, and does comprehension matter, and what are its costs? Do you remember how you got here?