Since the World began it is certain that there have existed fifteen people. Possibly there have been more; but I am a scientist and must proceed according to the evidence.
Ever since our ancestors lifted walls to gird their houses we have been surrounded by our labyrinths. Crete had its minotaur, the O’odham had their Man in the Maze, and we in the here-and-now have our vast networks of roads and bridges and livid and bleeding wired connections between the phones and computers of every human being on the planet. Susanna Clark’s Piranesi is only the most recent literary manifestation of our obsession with the hidden and complex.
The titular character, Piranesi, lives in a lonely hydrocephalic world, bathed in tides. He calls this labyrinth the House, for it is the only place he has ever lived, although the word House is clearly more than a title. At the very least, the House is human-adjacent. When Piranesi walks down the halls, the ceilings are vaulted; when he descends as far into the upper and the lower extents of the House as he dares, the floors are tiled; when he lies asleep in his own lonely vestibule, one of only two living people in the full breadth House, he is watched over by statues. And oh, what statues! Stone minotaurs, marble bees, chalcedony doves, and the calcified back of a man hunched over, locked in place, broken face grimacing, a lonely Atlas without his sky. As the book progresses it becomes obvious that this House is very much alive. The lower halls are swaddled in tides, tides which, like in our world, rise and fall, and like in our world, bring nutrients, and seaweed. Studying these rhythms is Piranesi’s only pastime. They help keep him sane in a world only inhabited by him and other statues.
Obviously, no normally dimensioned house can have its own tides. Rhythms like these hint at a different truth: that, frequently, the extents of the House encroach upon the impossible; the proclaimed holiest place in the House, the one hundred and ninety second vestibule, lies twenty kilometers away from where Piranesi has made his home camp. It is strongly implied that the House simply does not end, only frays at the edges. Piranesi walks in the bowels of an impossible architecture, where infinite pathways cross infinite vestibules which lay lateral to an unending sky.
Piranesi, the book, is a psychological one. Piranesi’s mind is bicameral, split in twain, for Piranesi himself once lived in our world. His name was Matthew Rose Sorensen, and he was a British journalist, researching the work of the eccentric Arne-Sayles before being taken captive by one of Sayle’s students – Ketterley – and being locked in the House via sacred ritual.
Unfortunately, walking the House’s halls has its consequences. In the words of Arne-Sayles, discoverer of the house, staying for too long will result in “amnesia, and eventual total mental collapse”. By the time of the book’s starting, Piranesi has been imprisoned for months, and as a result has completely forgotten his previous earthly existence as Mathew Rose Sorenson. Slowly, but quite surely, he’s lost his memory and his mind, dribbles of sanity being swallowed by the House’s hollow lungs.
Taken in context, this makes sense. Piranesi, the character, took his name from the real-life artist and architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi, a man most famous for his drawings of prisons. His penciled prisons also stretch to impossible heights: his vaulted ceilings traverse the whole of the sky, his marbled walls stretch from horizon to horizon, and it is very, very clear that nothing on the scale that he draws could ever exist in the real world. Furthermore, real life prisons are as much about their psychological punishments as their physical privations. Just like the House.
Even the House itself was generated by pure psychology. The House is eventually revealed to be a mere tributary world of the real one, lying downstream of our noosphere. Castoff thoughts and conceptions decorate every hall of this world – they are the statues. Arne-Sayles himself, discoverer of the House, posited that this is the world where the gods went when they left our world, the House being their less respite, acting as a vast and lonely storm drain, its jailbarred vents take in our refuse after we’ve cast it off in the pursuit of a glittering future.
Eventually, Sorenson – Piranesi – does return home, but it’s not him that steps through that final doorway. What steps once again from House to Earth is an amalgam of two identities, the person he was before he entered the house and the man he was after he left its stomach, as well as something entirely different. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Remarkably, he seems untroubled by this, continuing the life he’d once lived from where he’d left it off, same family, same friends, same everything – albeit with more interview requests. The only change we really see is in Piranesi’s shattered identity. In fact, identity is, at its most fundamental level, what this book is about: how it behaves in the normal conditions of our world, how it behaves in the extreme and hostile environment of the House, and, ultimately, how it fixes itself after a tragedy evinces its destruction.
