When he must move the skeleton of a small child out of the way of floodwaters, he leaves her “snuggled in a blanket” so that she will “feel safe in an unfamiliar Place.” When he needs to pilfer paper from a seagull’s nest, he waits until the baby gulls are fully grown so as not to disturb them. He gives up his hard-won seaweed so the albatross can build a nest from it. An albatross comes to the House, and like the Ancient Mariner in reverse, Piranesi embraces it. The way he tends to his birds and to the human dead he finds scattered across the halls, the way he communes with the House. The beating heart of Piranesi is Piranesi himself, the experience of watching him live his life, his profound empathy. If the House is enough in and of itself and not as mere scenery, then when we reduce it and its contents to a set of symbols, we lose what is valuable about the House - and, by extension, what is valuable about reading Piranesi. But: “The House is valuable because it is the House. “The search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted, and that if ever we discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery,” Piranesi concludes. Eventually, he is struck by an epiphany: The Knowledge, he realizes, is not the point of the House. Piranesi dutifully searches the House for the Knowledge the Other is seeking, but without all that much interest.
Once he gets it back, the Other believes, he’ll have the power of flight, immortality, and control over weaker souls. The Other believes that the House contains the key to some secret Knowledge that mankind used to possess but has now lost. Piranesi knows of only one other living human, a man he calls the Other who visits the House every so often.
A woman carrying a beehive - well, certainly that could be a reference to any number of classical myths, which tend to feature bees as a chthonic symbol for life, death, and the soul.īut early on, Clarke makes a point of aiming her readers away from such mechanical, goal-oriented reading. An elephant carrying a castle puns on the famous Elephant and Castle inn in London. The minotaurs by the entrance to the House evoke the myth of the labyrinth, which is what the wicked Laurence Arne-Sayles calls the House. The first time I read Piranesi, I scribbled notes about each statue. You’ll unlock the secret meaning at the center like a trap door. So then all you have to do is figure out what books each statue is alluding to, a dutiful reader might conclude, and then you’ll be able to sort of decode Piranesi itself.
Generally, his interpretation proves to be prophetic. A statue of a gorilla, he tells us, “represents many things, among them Peace, Tranquillity, Strength, and Endurance.” When he sees flocks of birds flying from one statue to another, he reads their movements like an augury and does what he believes the birds are advising him to do. Piranesi himself reads his statues, ascribing different symbolic meanings to each one. For instance, Piranesi makes a point of noting that his favorite statue, which depicts a faun, makes him dream of a faun meeting a girl in the snow, which anyone who has read the Narnia books will recognize as a reference to C.S. It is a place through which you may pace on your own, quite solitary and at your leisure, and take in the beauty and the brutal solitude that surrounds you.Īs this understanding emerges, temptation strikes: The statues, you might conclude, are the key! If the House is a metaphor for reading, then obviously the statues all allude to different books. It is a place populated by symbols, abstract and unspeaking, and deep dark waters that likewise keep their own council. The House, empty of all other living people and populated with statues, feels familiar to any reader: It is a world made up of books. As far as he can tell, the House is all there is of the world, so that House and World are one and the same to him. Piranesi lives on the middle floor, with the birds. The lowest floor of the House is flooded the top floor is filled with clouds. It concerns a man called Piranesi (although that is not his name) who lives in a vast House made up of endless marble halls filled with statues. Piranesi has a heavily allegorical structure. One of the dangers of thinking about Piranesi, Susanna Clarke’s uncommonly beautiful second novel and the Vox Book Club’s September pick, is that you can get trapped in the question of whether you are interpreting too much. The Vox Book Club is linking to to support local and independent booksellers.
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