Like the ocean in the halls, this novel is literally teeming with intertextual references. Piranesi turns back to his earlier journals for clues, only to make fateful discoveries and be confused further as to his own identity. Piranesi would like nothing more than to meet someone new, hiding as the Other would have him do will be difficult. It is when the Other warns Piranesi that a sixteenth person will soon enter the halls, and that 16’s intent is to break their friendship and destroy their life’s work, that things begin to spiral out of control. The Other, who is always garbed in a smart suit, brings him occasional supplies of things such as multivitamins, in return for information which he sends Piranesi out to get for him. Twice weekly he has a short meeting with the man he calls ‘the Other’. I dreamt of him onc e he was standing in a snowy forest and speaking to a female child. Be careful! But what danger there could possibly be I have never known. I have always felt that he means to tell me something or perhaps to warn me of something: Quiet! He seems to say. He smiles slightly and presses his forefinger to his lips. It is the Statue of a Faun, a creature half-man and half-goat, with a head of exuberant curls. The Woman carrying a Beehive is one.Īnother – perhaps the Statue that I love above all others – stands at a Door between the Fifth and Fourth North-Western Halls. There are some Statues that I love more than the rest. Piranesi writes with constant wonder about his world, telling us about the nature he encounters the tides and the birds that flock in the halls but also material things such as the statues: He also tends the bones of the dead, the thirteen skeletons he has found in his travels. He knows his way backwards around the hundreds of halls and km of passages and stairways between them and is an expert in the ocean’s tides. He enjoys his life, cataloguing the statues in the labyrinth of rooms, fishing and drying seaweed to eat. He has no recollection of how he came to be there or how he got his name. Piranesi is our narrator, telling us his story through his journal entries, which are dated in his idiosyncratic style:Įntry for the first day of the fifth month in the year the albatross came to the South-Western Halls.
Piranesi mythology full#
Enclosed within the museum is an ocean: the basement storey is flooded and teeming with fish, the upper storey is often cold and full of clouds, the middle storey, which is subject to the tides of the ocean, is where Piranesi lives among the statues and birds. What a setting though! Imagine a three-storey Italianate marble museum, perhaps infinitely larger than say the Louvre.
It’s short for a start at just 245 pages versus JS&MN’s 800 or 1000+ in paperback! Also, as you soon come to realise, despite the museum-like grandeur of its setting, Piranesi turns out to be a contemporary novel. Coming sixteen years after her debut, it would have been terrible to have been disappointed, but instead, I think I may have found my book of the year! I loved it that much.Īlthough there are parallels in some of the themes with her historical fantasy epic Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (revisited here for Shiny by Jane back when the television adaptation aired), Piranesi is a very different animal. Of all the books that were published a couple of weeks ago in this September’s post-lockdown publishing splurge, Susanna Clarke’s second novel, Piranesi, was the one I wanted to read above all others.
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