Piranesi introduces this strange, perilous, and often lovely world in the soft, awed tones of a willing acolyte he’s learned to track the tides, and he trusts the house’s benevolence. Birds arrive and leave, sometimes seeming to deliver messages in the patterns of their flight, and in where they choose to alight the fish of the submerged lower floors provide Piranesi sustenance, as do the rains that fall from the upper floors. The Other shows up now and then, but he’s too concentrated on his search for lost truth to be perfect company. Crumbling statues-of fauns, and kings, and women crowned with coral-rest everywhere, hinting at befores. He’s been close to alone for as long as he can remember: the bones of a few who came before him rest in a hall nearby, and he visits them to pay his respects.
Piranesi lives in a house whose halls seem endless. In Susanna Clarke’s wondrous and moving novel Piranesi, a gentle man finds the tranquility of his vast but bounded world challenged by visitors from the outside.
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