One of the myriad memorable elements in Susanna Clarke’s astonishing and bestselling first novel was her evocation of a parallel reality, a “fairyland”, that was both a place of almost unimaginable possibilities and a climate in which human beings can’t safely live. Her second novel is as different as could be in its style and setting to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell – published 16 years ago – but it continues, brilliantly, to explore the same territory where exhilaration and mortal danger flow into each other.
Clarke gives the initially unnamed narrator of this story a remarkable voice, of washed simplicity, blending compassion, obsessive observation and childlike directness. He leads us into “the House”, the labyrinthine complex of Halls, Stairs, Vestibules that constitutes the World (the capital letters are one of the ways in which the narrator’s intensified perception is conveyed). Throughout this landscape there are Statues, some depicting what we would recognise as mythical beings (fauns, centaurs, giants), some simply showing humans and animals in various significant poses or configurations – “the Woman carrying a Beehive… the Young Boy playing the Cymbals, the Elephant carrying a Castle, the Two Kings playing Chess”. Occasionally, the Tides sweep dangerously through some of the Halls and Courtyards and drown them for a time. The only other inhabitants of the World are birds and fish – and “the Other”, the human presence who meets the narrator twice a week, and who has christened him Piranesi, after the Italian artist whose bleak engravings depict desolate expanses of ruined classical buildings and huge underground vaults and prisons.
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