reacting to Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell was published in 2004, and everyone seemed to be enraptured by it, and ... well, the name Packbat didn't exist until 2005, but someone who would take that name in a year read it and thought it was kind of adequate but not great. The worldbuilding was interesting, and this was a time where they didn't tend to give up on books, so they did read it through? But the whole thing felt to that reader like a plot summary - maybe somewhere else there was a version of this story that was enrapturing, but we were reading the TV Tropes recap page of that story, and it was just dry.

Except when it wasn't. Because sometimes Jonathan Strange would try something, or someone else would try something, and it was like being dropped into a story that was happening now, not in a summary. There was dialogue, conversation, perspective. It was suddenly and unquestionably alive, and whoever we remember being "I" then loved it.

Anyway, this year a friend of ours mentioned another book, Piranesi, said it was really good, and we'd been looking for an excuse to go to the library so we checked our library catalogue. And there was a book called "Piranesi" in the catalog, by the same Susanna Clarke, and it was the book our friend was talking about, so we thought, "Maybe Clarke's learned something. Bits of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell were great, even if the book as a whole was a bit of a slog, so maybe this'll be better than that was."

If you liked Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, I apologize? We mean no offense, I know that two people reading the same book will have different opinions.

But Piranesi was terrific. It was alive, not in patches but from front to back. The fantastical was there - we were dropped into an endless house of statues, like Borges's Library of Babel for statues, with waves sweeping through its lower rooms and clouds through its upper - but the fantastical was seen through a perspective. We were dropped into the world of a person, a world he introduced us to and spoke eloquently about and cared about, and cared about in the specific way that he cared about it.

We picked up this book at about one in the afternoon from the library. By seven we were gushing about it in the DMs of our friend who recommended it. By nine-thirty we were through, and reeling.

We can talk about what happens if you like? There's some heavy stuff in there, so if you do want to read it, you might want to check first, see if it hits something that affects you strongly. We had to ask our friend for some content warnings, which it gave, and that was helpful, and assuming we get along we'll do the same for you if you ask ... but our friend also said the story benefits from reading with very little idea of what will happen, and the story does. It would perhaps be helpful if you came into it having heard of Battersea...? but even if you haven't, you'll likely figure things out quickly. The protagonist and narrator is not deceptive towards you or me.

It's currently four thirty in the morning, typing this. We'll go back to bed in a moment. But we couldn't lie just in bed waiting for all these thoughts to slip through our fingers into sleep.

And you don't have to read Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. It is just a book, two hundred and forty-five pages among uncountable billions, and you have other calls upon your time. But we have to gush about it for a minute, because we were hoping it would be alive and it was.

(We were also hoping it would last us longer than a day, but somehow I think we'll live.)