Piranesi; A Deadly Education
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020)
I’ll be honest, I nearly bailed on this one. (What a way to begin my book review newsletter! But it’s true.) For just a second, when I turned to the first page and saw this . . .
When the Moon rose in the Third Northern Hall I went to the Ninth Vestibule
ENTRY FOR THE FIRST DAY OF THE FIFTH MONTH IN THE YEAR THE ALBATROSS CAME TO THE SOUTH-WESTERN HALLS
. . . I nearly returned the book to the library right then and there. I had read Susanna Clarke’s 2004 smash hit Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and while it was unquestionably a masterpiece, it was also a slog. A long, difficult slog. While her new book is much shorter, baroque language like that right off the bat hinted at another possible slog, and I wasn’t sure I had the patience this time around. I’m not as young as I used to be.
But everyone I know who’d read Piranesi had raved about it, so I decided to push through. It was a good decision.
Piranesi is, quite simply, dazzling. It’s almost impossible to describe the extent and depth of Clarke’s achievement with what at first seems a simple story of a man, the title character, who lives in a massive statue-filled house. How massive? As Piranesi tells us early on, “I have travelled as far as the Nine-Hundred-and-Sixtieth Hall to the West, the Eight-Hundred-and-Ninetieth Hall to the North and the Seven-Hundred-and-Sixty-Eighth Hall to the South.”
A man with a mania for counting and organizing and keeping track of things generally, Piranesi meticulously journals about the tides, the birds, the statues, and the human skeletons with which he shares the house (or, as he terms it, the House). He is sometimes visited by a man he calls the Other, who is conducting some sort of experiment—scientific? magical? both?—and needs all the data that Piranesi can collect, so their interests are dovetailing nicely.
And then one day another man appears . . .
I said it was almost impossible to describe this book, and part of the reason is that you can’t do it without giving away spoilers. So carefully and tightly is the plot woven together that practically the whole book is a spoiler. And trust me, this is not a book you want spoiled. You want to follow Clarke into the labyrinth she has so deftly constructed, each twist and turn of which reveals more delight and horror and wonder. (I can safely say, though, to pay attention to the epigraph from C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew at the beginning.)
A reader comes away from Piranesi with a heart aching and strangely comforted at the same time—partly in shock at an unflinching exploration of human brutality, partly overcome by a portrayal of how much human dignity and moral agency are still present even in a person who has lost everything. And I do mean everything.
We may pay lip service to this idea, but Clarke shows it to us in undreamed-of ways, in a brilliant new light. I really do wish I could say more, but I’m already bumping up against the permissible limits, so all I can say is, go read Piranesi. Please go read it.
A Deadly Education (Lesson One of the Scholomance) by Naomi Novik (Del Rey, 2020)
I picked this up from the library because I’m a great fan of Novik’s earlier novels Uprooted and Spinning Silver. I liked this one too, but I’m of two minds whether to recommend it, at least for the target YA audience.
I’ve reviewed many YA books over the years, but the truth is, I’m still sometimes unsure what’s appropriate for the age group. I was one of those super-sensitive readers as a teenager, so I tend to lean conservative with my recommendations, but then I hear about all those teenagers out there who gobble up every gory detail an author can throw at them and beg for more. It really all comes down to what a given teenager can handle and what his or her parents deem advisable.
In this case, Novik isn’t exaggerating with her title. The Scholomance, the magical school attended by El, our protagonist, is basically out to kill everyone in it. (In case you’re wondering why the students go there in the first place, it seems the outside world is eager to kill them even faster.) El is a tough girl with tremendous potential for evil who nonetheless finds in herself a determination to be good. Much against her will, she’s forced to team up with school golden boy Orion Lake, a monster slayer par excellence. The book is full of familiar fantasy and YA tropes, but Novik backs into them, as it were, her writing so nuanced and her approach so unusual that they don’t feel stale. And she ends on a cliffhanger that leaves one panting for the sequel.
Like many fantasy writers, Novik is really into the worldbuilding. And building and building and building. There’s almost more worldbuilding than plot, but again, she handles it so well that I only rarely started to feel lost. (Compare this with, say, Robin McKinley’s Dragonhaven, where I feared I might never find my way out and just stay stuck in the book forever. I adore McKinley’s early books—Beauty is one of my all-time favorite novels—but her later ones too often leave me hopelessly floundering.)
Novik doesn’t pull her punches; her monster battles are high-stakes and messy and violent. Most of the monsters aren’t unbearably creepy in and of themselves, but there’s one creature called a maw-mouth that I confidently expect to show up in my nightmares someday. It was all a bit much for me sometimes, even though I liked it on the whole, and it would have been WAY too much for me as a teenager, so again, parents should know what their kids can handle. But adult fantasy fans with tough hides and a taste for richly detailed worlds and reluctantly heroic kids are likely to enjoy it.
Book Links
I know some readers prefer to buy from Amazon and some prefer not to, so for each book I review in this newsletter, I’ll offer two links: one for Amazon and one for Bookshop or an alternative source.
Piranesi at Amazon
Piranesi at Bookshop
A Deadly Education at Amazon
A Deadly Education at Bookshop
Other Links
Christ and Pop Culture, where I frequently write, has been doing its year-end “best of” roundups. I contributed some thoughts on Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell and A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians by H.G. Parry for the list of Book & Game Favorites, and on Armando Iannucci’s adaptation of David Copperfield for Film Favorites.