Susanna Clarke’s House of Mirrors

Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

The House spreads infinitely, a baroque agglomeration of marble colonnades and timeless statues. Happy, childlike Piranesi survives by fishing among the tides that flood the lower floors, and makes maps of the halls; The House is Piranesi’s entire world. Twice a week, he meets with The Other, a scientist, and shares his various discoveries. They are the only humans in existence, which they accept. Until a third human appears.

Susanna Clarke’s second novel drops a scant fourteen years after her first, and it’s tough to imagine a more abrupt zigzag. Where her first novel was massive, heroic, and dense with allusions to classic British literature, this slim volume brims with psychological dread, and oblique references to authors like C.S. Lewis, Jorge Luis Borges, and Sigmund Freud. Though both novels share overlapping audiences, Clarke isn’t content repeating her successes.

Piranesi considers himself and The Other both scientists. He maps The House’s measureless halls with great precision, runs subtle calculations to predict the sometimes violent tides, and speculates upon the identities of the nameless Dead, whom he reveres as mysterious ancestors. The Other, meanwhile, dragoons Piranesi into attempts to unlock supernatural wisdom, which he believes permeates the halls. Piranesi is happy to help his only friend.

It’s difficult to synopsize this novel without spoiling its narrative arc. Unlike her first book, Clarke’s second has a singular through-line, told entirely through one character’s viewpoint (more or less). Therefore everything builds consecutively, even Piranesi’s traumatic flashbacks. Clarke’s unsophisticated first-person narrator tells his story with the guileless charm of a Greek slapstick actor. But he drops persistent clues that more is happening than he realizes.

For instance, Piranesi recognizes real-world referents he couldn’t possibly share inside The House. He knows what wool suits are, and plastic, and guns. His journals include dates and places he’s never seen, and which he admits, when he considers them rationally, have no corresponding meaning in his world. Rationality, though, is an impediment in understanding The House. Only two purposes exist in The House: to survive, and to make maps.

Worse, we understand truths about The Other that Piranesi misses. Piranesi’s journals reveal The Other’s behavior as petulant, domineering, and sometimes menacing. Piranesi, however, has never met another human, so he receives The Other’s behavior as simply ordinary, and doesn’t question The Other’s motivations, or where he goes when he isn’t around The House. We know, as Piranesi doesn’t, to make a list of clues.

Susanna Clarke

Clarke expands upon themes present in her earlier work, particularly the double-edged charm of anti-modernism. Her characters embrace a pre-Christian ethos of reality as purely experiential. Modernity, Clarke implies, may be safer and more luxurious, but we march through modern life without living it. Her characters are really living, but not well. They engage in a Nietzschean battle of wills, which inevitably divides humanity into winners and losers.

That Nietzsche reference isn’t incidental. Her characters believe truth exists; Piranesi openly worships The House, and believes it provisions and protects him. However, that doesn’t mean anything particularly practical. Actions, not motivations, define Clarke’s characters, and Piranesi begins reclaiming a modicum of freedom only after he learns to lie. This is both melancholy and ennobling for our characters. After all, “doing the right thing” means little to the dead.

Throughout, Piranesi meticulously keeps his journals, detailing his discoveries, no matter how bleak and disillusioning. He states clearly that he does this because he knows humans occupied The House before him, so others must surely follow; he wants to ensure Truth for posterity. Here as elsewhere, though, we readers realize something he misses: huge blocks of knowledge have vanished from his brain. We await him rediscovering them with existential dread.

Perhaps this novel runs shorter than Clarke’s last (barely a quarter the page count) because she understood we’d sustain such dread only briefly. Humans have difficulty reconciling our finite being with the feeling that eternity exists, potentially just inches beyond our grasp. Clarke’s characters are seekers after capital-T Truth because they believe their knowledge organizes a meaningful world. But to Clarke, uncovering that Truth doesn’t necessarily set one free.

Audiences bowled over by Susanna Clarke’s first novel may find her second jolting. Though thematically consistent, it’s a very different book, written by an author in a very different stage of life. But then, we’re all older now too. The intervening fourteen years haven’t been kind to anybody—except, perhaps, those like The Other, who profit off others’ suffering. This is a much darker novel for a darker age.