Piranesi by Susanna ClarkeMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I'd been wanting to read this for a long time, but once I bought it I put off starting it. Mainly because I wasn't sure it would live up to the hype, and I really didn't want to be disappointed.
I needn't have worried. It was amazing.
I remained concerned for a while, though. The early part of the book is the first-person protagonist writing in his journal, in a precise and capital-heavy style that suggests mild neurodivergence, about the building he inhabits and his routine in living in and exploring it. In the lower levels, it has the ocean, in the mid-levels there are statues, and in the upper levels there are clouds. It seems like it's one of those magical houses that I, for one, love, but is there going to be a story? And why is it that he seems to know about or recognize so many things from our world - Christmas cake, the smell of petrol, Prince of Wales check - that he wouldn't have encountered in his world? Why does the Other say "OK," and why does the narrator use the horrible jargon phrase "going forward," when the prose initially sounds so old-fashioned? Are these errors? This author wouldn't make that kind of error, would she?
They are not errors. There's a story. It's not the one I expected.
It was gripping, and beautifully told.
I can't say too much about it without spoiling it, but nothing is quite as it initially seems, and there are some terrific characters who are fully believable as real people (view spoiler), and a lot of things that initially seemed to be just decorative turned out to be highly functional. There's a plot, and it's a heck of a plot, too, and it's neither just the typical literary arc from helplessness to hopelessness nor the typical fantasy arc from weakness to unmixed and oversimplified triumph. There are twists and turns and revelations and surprises.
I wished it was longer, not because it needed, from a story perspective, to be longer (it was exactly the length it needed to be), but because I wanted the experience of reading it to last longer. It had beauty, it had depth, and it didn't sacrifice telling a good story in order to have those things. It was the very definition of a five-star book for me, and unless I'm very fortunate indeed it will easily get the number one spot in my Best of the Year list for this year.
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