I loved Piranesi. I approached it with caution but I was wholly captivated and, by the end, enthralled.
It is very hard to say much about the story without giving too much away. The narrative is in the form of entries in a journal by “Piranesi” whose world is a labyrinth of halls, populated by statues and through which the sea runs and sometimes floods. These entries are dated “The first day of the fifth month in the year the albatross came to the South-Western Halls” and so on, which gives a flavour of the style and the setting. Piranesi’s only human contact is with the Other, a mysterious person who appears sometimes and who seems strikingly 21st-Century British. The truth of the situation slowly emerges as new information comes to light, and Susanna Clarke tells it in a beautifully paced and wholly engrossing story.
This is brilliant in lots of ways. It has important things to say about identity, exploitation, the nature of reality and our experience of it and much more – and it’s all done without lecturing or hectoring. Piranesi’s voice is enchanting; it has a childlike innocence and an almost Zen-like approach to existence, combined with language which I found beautiful and almost compulsively readable. I found echoes here of Z For Zachariah and of Room, but this is it’s own book with Clarke’s wonderful ability to create a vivid, wholly real-seeming world as well as showing genuine insight and humanity in her character studies.
Piranesi is one of the best things I’ve read for quite some while. I hope it wins some major prizes, and I can recommend it very warmly indeed.
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