Susanna Clarke on Piranesi and its lessons for life in lockdown

Susanna Clarke is known for her debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which was first published in more than 34 countries and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award. It won British Book Awards Newcomer of the Year, the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award in 2005. Her latest novel is Piranesi, a strange and mysterious tale about a young man living in a labyrinthine house filled with statues, roaring tides and many secrets.

Today, Susanna Clarke is on the blog to share some thoughts on her eponymous protagonist, Piranesi, and the lessons he can share with modern readers. Read on …

Susanna Clarke

Piranesi is content in his confinement. He fishes, he has his journals, is happy to help the Other with his scientific project. Piranesi was thought about and written long before lockdown. What lessons do you think we can learn from Piranesi?

Fictions rise up from God-knows-where. They’re like dreams; they mean different things to different readers (or dreamers). And that, I think, is as it should be. Because of this, I’d be hesitant to talk in terms of lessons; that’s for the reader to work out (or not).

When I became ill my life became severely curtailed. I could go out sometimes, but much of the time I was confined to my house. Lockdown has been pretty easy for me; this is far from the most isolated I’ve been in my life.

As I got towards the end of writing Piranesi I realised that I (a person living a very confined life) was writing a story about a man who couldn’t leave his house; I (a person who of necessity was quite isolated) was writing a story about a man who is alone most of the time, who has only one friend and who makes friends of the Dead and the birds. It might seem a bit preposterous that I didn’t realise until quite late on that this was what I’d done, but the number of things I don’t notice when I’m writing are legion. You’re not really in a noticing frame of mind when you’re writing. You’re attuned to different things.

For some readers Piranesi is confined; for others not. (I’m more on the not side, myself.) I suppose one of the things I was trying to do was to undercut the idea of Piranesi as someone confined, as a victim.

I spent a long time angry at the unfairness of my illness, angry about all that was taken away from me. And a lot was. But how I try to look at it now is that I still have a lot left. As well as a comfortable home and plenty to eat, I still have all of history, all of literature, all of spirituality, all of mathematics, all of art, all of science. And that’s quite a lot really. (To be clear I don’t necessarily do all of those things. Some, such as science or mathematics, are largely a closed book but the point is they’re perfectly available to me.) That’s more how Piranesi thinks. He thinks his life is full of marvellous things.

My aunt was ill for a decade before her death. Her room was small, but there was a tree outside it, just a small, unremarkable tree. When we went to see her she sometimes talked about the tree. After her death I found a diary — just a little thing in which you write appointments. The last thing she wrote was a few days before she died. She was worried about the tree because a wind had come and blown off many of its leaves. The tree, I think, represented the whole of nature to her. And she was still connected to it and to all the seasons through it.

Having said all that, I loved making Piranesi very active. He climbs up walls of statues, fishes in strong tides, goes for long walks in beautiful halls, all things I can’t do or would struggle to do.

One of the bizarre things about lockdown for me has been the way it’s opened my life up at the same time as it closed down other people’s. Gatherings now take place on Zoom. (It’s currently July 2020.) I can take part from my sofa. I’m in regular contact with groups of people I couldn’t have dreamt of before lockdown. When people start to meet again in the real world I shall be happy for them and for all of us, but I expect my world to get a little smaller.

–Susanna Clarke

Piranesi (Bloomsbury Publishing Australia) is out now.

Piranesi

by Susanna Clarke

Piranesi lives in the House. Perhaps he always has.

In his notebooks, day after day, he makes a clear and careful record of its wonders: the labyrinth of halls, the thousands upon thousands of statues, the tides that thunder up staircases, the clouds that move in slow procession through the upper halls. On Tuesdays and Fridays Piranesi sees his friend, the Other. At other times he brings tributes of food and waterlilies to the Dead. But mostly, he is alone. Messages begin to appear, scratched out in chalk on the pavements. There is someone new in the House. But who are they...

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