The Beauty of the House
on Susanna Clarke's Piranesi
Do you remember 2020? There was that bug going around. And that extra time you were forced to spend with (or away) from your family. And let’s not forget the semi-trucks in New York City full of our overflowing dead. One of those years.1 Landing softly amidst all the tragedy and doom-scrolling, though, was a slim volume titled Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke. A fantasy novel about a man trapped by himself in a magical labyrinth—trapped, that is, at home—Piranesi felt conjured by COVID. It’s a story in which isolation is not so much the setting as a spiritual condition.
The lockdowns, in fact, bathed Piranesi in a certain light from the moment it debuted. Even when reviewers found insights beyond the all-consuming news, the stay-at-home orders still framed their reading. The labyrinth of Piranesi is an endless, grand manor full of classical architecture and statues, with its own mysterious seas and tides, fish and birds. A decaying house. A house whose meaning is all secondhand, all representation and echo of the world.2 The only times Piranesi sees someone else is when he meets with a person called the Other for a quick work meeting. They’re both studying the House (as he refers to it)—otherwise, he’s alone. The symbolism is so apt, in terms of September 2020, it feels almost reverse-engineered.
I was also struck, in 2020, by Clarke’s depiction of “disenchantment.” Mainstreamed by Max Weber around 1918, “disenchantment” is an umbrella term for Western society’s turn to rationalism and materialism as defaults both preceding and bracketing supernatural belief. We don’t expect spirits to pour in or out of us except maybe as metaphors for algorithms and social conditions, or as a plot in film. The House, the labyrinth, is a literalizing of this lost magic. All the old tales of unlikely, Ovidian nature magic are true in Piranesi. They happened. We didn’t simply turn from magic as a belief; the magic went away.
But the absent power left traces. Whatever energy once allowed warlocks to see from the eyes of eagles leaked from the world as a rivulet drains into the earth. And just as a well-worn drainage track can create a cavern underground, so the magic carved out a space between worlds. This is an analogy straight from the book. Magic built a kind of in-between reality as it dissipated, a dimension of ruins. Piranesi is jailed within these ruins. He can see the magic depicted in the statues and halls as in a museum, but it has gone elsewhere.
When I finished Piranesi recently, all of these beautiful links of curiosity remained intact, but they were also less central. The core of it, like all great classics, had shifted with my own life. The House and its isolation felt larger than COVID, more permanent. If COVID lockdowns were a break with the norm, a disruption of life as we expect it, Piranesi’s entrapment felt more internal, more “Midway in the journey of life I came to myself in a dark wood.” The House goes beyond disruption, is more than a spell of isolation.
Susanna Clarke, suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, wrote the book during a time she was often restricted to her home. She could anticipate the pain of COVID, both illness and isolation, because she’d lived in its twin destructions before those destructions became dominant across the world.
But even illness writ large is insufficient to my reading. I’m healthy. I’m mobile. I’m not restricted to my home for any reason beyond nightly bedtime routine with children. What Piranesi is above and beyond all the clever connections to sickness or disenchantment, is a defense of the life of the mind as sufficient for a life of meaning, so long as it’s based on love.
Yes. Ahem. Love.
Before being trapped in the labyrinth, Piranesi was Matthew Rose Sorenson, a brilliant young scholar, urbane and ambitious. The reader learns his backstory slowly. As Sorenson, he was investigating a mad English academic and his disciples, transgressive figures of the mid-20th century who believed in magic and sought to recover its uses in the modern world. Sorenson takes one chance too many, though. He meets with one of the disciples alone, the man the reader knows as the Other, and the Other tricks him into the labyrinth, into becoming a lab rat who can report on what he discovers. A place erected by magic, mystery, power, ruin—the labyrinth takes Sorenson’s memories. It remakes him. He becomes Piranesi and forgets the world, forgets Sorenson.
When Piranesi is saved, when his life in the labyrinth is reunited with his life as Matthew Rose Sorenson, he doesn’t recover the past. The before and the after touch in his mind, but they give way to a new, unlikely self. Neither Piranesi of the labyrinth nor Matthew Rose Sorenson of the academy. In this way, the novel is partly a story about aging. The labyrinth is a result of his studies, not merely a break with his normal life but a consequence of it. He’s not where he thought he’d be. No scholarly book, no successful tenure job. Those are washed away within the house. He is worn by the mysterious seas into a new creation. He is reduced to unexpected limitations.
And rather than disenchantment, “alienation” kept occurring to me as a better summary of Piranesi’s condition within the labyrinth. Piranesi isn’t disenchanted, in any sense. He also isn’t depressed or destroyed by his ruins, his labyrinth. And he should be! The product of a dying magic, it’s a world less dynamic than our own. He doesn’t have trees, flowers, the unfiltered warmth of sunlight in June. He doesn’t have blizzards, thunderstorms, the noise of neighbors disrupting his life. There are the House’s statues, the stars, the seaweed, the tide, and his never-ending efforts to survive in a way utterly un-modern. Fish-leather and fish nets and collecting dry seaweed for making fires in the cold months. Compared to reality outside the House, it’s a monochromatic world.
Worse, any object or idea from our own world that does drift in, usually via conversations with the Other, Piranesi doesn’t recognize unless it exists in some form within the House. Staying in the labyrinth steals the world from Piranesi. From the Other’s perspective, a man who lives in the world and only visits the labyrinth, Piranesi has gone mad. He’s a clownish amnesiac, at best. The world from which the ruins have been carved is alien to Piranesi, unless the ruins retain their imprint. It’s a pitiable state.
Clarke doesn’t skip over the pain of Piranesi’s condition. What’s been stolen from him is overwhelming, and even in his beatified myopia, his response to rediscovering his condition as a prisoner is to contemplate murder. The wrong he’s endured is not skin-deep, not reparable within a novel’s neat arc. But neither does he become ironic or cynical or flippantly jaded.3 I hate to reach for the lowest common denominator, but it’s a kind of anti-Game of Thrones sentiment. Clarke meets the grimness of reality every bit as staunchly as George R.R. Martin, but instead of punishing the reader again and again for sipping at the dregs of good in the world, she insists that there would be no world without such good. The House is Matthew Rose Sorenson’s demise. The House is Piranesi’s delight. They are the same House.
A book about tragedy, about life knocking the plans of youth askew; a book, in short, about the problem of evil,4 Piranesi might be the most hopeful novel I’ve ever encountered that isn’t either naïve or ironic. Even when he is rescued, Piranesi revisits the House. He connects with another one-time prisoner of the labyrinth, a man who fared far worse during his internment, and this man also loves the House. Nature, art, and the study of the world are worth more than fleeting, photo-focused drive-bys. Beauty and philosophy and the complexity of wondrous design can only be enjoyed fully—can only be understood—if loved.5
The Other, in fact, is the great foil to Piranesi’s love. He pursues the knowledge of the House as doggedly, in his own way, as Piranesi. He wants to understand its power, to reclaim its magic for himself. He is a scholar imitating greater scholars, and yet only Piranesi is able to unwind the labyrinth, not simply its metaphysical benevolence, but the practical ins and outs of its season, its tides, its blueprints. The depth of his concrete understanding is facilitated by, is consubstantial with, the depth of his simple love of the House. The other dies in the House, ignorant. Piranesi, too, is made ignorant, even pitiable and pathetic and scarred. But he thrives.
What is remarkable about the novel as a work of art, is that the reader believes in Piraneis’s love.6 Clarke’s methodical care at detailing Piranesi’s invented names of the months, his encounter with statues that awe him, his care for birds, his care for the Other, whittles at one’s mind. It’d be easy to dismiss the whole project as, “What if Stockholm Syndrome were good, actually?” except Piranesi doesn’t love his captor as his captor. He loves the House. His pain isn’t minimized, it’s subordinated to an improbable, persistent good that the very means of his destruction reveals.
The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.
Reading:
Middlemarch, by George Eliot
Um. Ah. Piranesi is “the most hopeful novel I’ve ever encountered that isn’t either naïve or ironic”?? Maybe I spoke too soon! I’m close to finishing Mary Ann Evans’s masterpiece and will report back!
Links:
and I did a podcast with the luminous on Francis Spufford’s Cahokia Jazz! A good book! A good podcast! A good time had by all! Mr. Spufford, please let me read your Narnia book! That might seem a little out of nowhere, but the world is full of connections: Piranesi is itself a kind of Magician’s Nephew fan fiction.7I love you all.
Is this too glib? Consider me earnest in life if I’m too flippant here.
A web, if you will, interconnected with de-centralized hubs of knowledge. A net that gathers us at home into virtual connection with the world, even…
See my intro for a possible contrast.
All good novels are about the problem of evil. Probably.
I have not written another thousand words about how this does not, somehow, contradict, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.” You. Are. Welcome.
The reader, of course, being a sensitive and intelligent person that I trust fully to agree with the correct opinion (my own).
Sensitive Narnia readers will see all these connections without Wikipedia’s aid.
I read this last year and loved it. Once again, you have enlightened me as to why I loved it. Thank you for providing insight into all these aspects of the story!
Loved this!