a gallimaufry

Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke

ENTRY FOR THE NINETEENTH DAY OF THE SIXTH MONTH IN THE YEAR THE ALBATROSS CAME TO THE SOUTH-WESTERN HALLS
[...] On the way, the House showed me many wonders.
In the Forty-Fifth Vestibule I saw a Staircase that had become one vast bed of mussels. One of the Statues that lined the Wall of the Staircase was all but engulfed in a blue-black carapace of mussels with only half a staring Face and one white, out-flung Arm left free. I made a sketch of it in my Journal.
In the Fifty-Second Western Hall I came upon a Wall ablaze with so much golden Light that the Statues appeared to be dissolving into it. From there I passed into a cool little Antechamber with few Windows, where it was cool and shadowy. I saw the Statue of a Woman holding out a wide, flat Dish so that a Bear Cub could drink from it.

I have now read Piranesi and I am ready to tell you that it’s just as good as everyone says, albeit very different to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

It is impossible to write very much about it without spoiling it, and one of the pleasures is that you really don’t know at first where it’s going. So I’ll just explain that it takes the form of a series of journal entries by Piranesi (not his real name) who inhabits a vast labyrinth of abandoned stone halls. Seas wash the lower ones and clouds float through the higher ones. Many of the halls contain statues, but apart from the birds and the fish Piranesi lives alone. He has explored many of the halls and noted down his observations of them, but he has not found their limits. On his travels, he has found the bones of thirteen different people, and he cares for them, bringing food, drink and lilies as offerings. Piranesi loves the House and appreciates its beauty. His observations are a tribute to it; they are also essential to his survival since he records the tides which sporadically sweep through and would drown him if they caught him.

(Piranesi, ‘Via Appia and Via Ardeatina’, etching from Le Antichita Romane, 1756; from here)

However, there is something unsettling about the world from the beginning. Piranesi does not seem to belong there. Among the marble and the fishes, he sniffs the smell of petrol, which is out of place in this car-less place. How does he know the smell of petrol? He finds crisp packets. He is visited twice a week by the Other, who gives him a pair of brightly coloured trainers. He has a sleeping bag, a torch, plastic bowls to catch rainwater. Despite his meticulous record-keeping, there are holes in his memory. His innocence is both charming and odd; is it the result of some trauma?

Do you trust the House? I ask Myself.
Yes, I answer Myself.
And if the House has made you forget, it has done so for good reason.
But I do not understand the reason.
It does not matter that you do not understand the reason. You are the Beloved Child of the House. Be comforted.

The Other is the one who has named Piranesi. He does not seem to feel the beauty or the kindness of the House. He believes that that it is the repository of some secret and powerful knowledge which he intends to find and exploit. He knows that to stay too long in this world is to pay a price. He perceives the House as a prison, which presumably is why he has chosen the name Piranesi.

(Piranesi, ‘The Pier with the Chains’, etching from Carceri d'Inventione, 1750/1761; from here)

The question that the reader has is not, What will happen to Piranesi? but, What is this place and what does it mean? This places Piranesi in a tradition of Absurdist and Surreal literature in which characters are trapped in places that do not seem to be our world and are forced to reflect on themselves. I am thinking of Silvina Ocampo’s The Topless Tower, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, that sort of literature, though there are probably better-known examples which I just can’t remember. Unusually, Piranesi experiences the labyrinthine House as a benign, living entity. He feels a religious awe for it and his existence, his record-keeping, is a sort of worship. And without, I hope, giving too much away, it is a place that others long for even before they have seen it (this is explored in the interviews at the end of the novel). It is both a place of escape and a prison.

The novel abounds in literary allusions which give us further ways to understand the House. There is an epigraph from The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis, and at the heart of that novel is the Wood Between the Worlds which contains the entrances to many different universes. Something similar occurs in this novel. There is also an abandoned city (although Charn is dead, and the House is living) and a magician who likes to experiment upon people, both of which may be relevant to Piranesi.

Near the beginning of the novel, Piranesi encounters an albatross.

Still it continued, straight towards me, and the strangest thought came to me: perhaps the albatross and I were destined to merge and become another order of being entirely: an Angel! This thought both excited and frightened me, but still I remained, arms outstretched, mirroring the albatross’s  flight. [...] The moment that he reached me – the moment that I thought we would collide like Planets and become one! – I gave out a sort of gasping cry – Aahhhh! In the same instant, I felt some sort of pent-up tension go out of me, a tension I did not know I had until that moment. Vast, white wings passed over me.

Far from shooting it with a crossbow, as did the Ancient Mariner, he feels kinship with the bird, concern for its chick. And the arrival of the albatross heralds significant changes for Piranesi.

(Piranesi, detail from ‘The Triumphal Arch’, etching from Grotteschi, 1748; from here)

A final literary allusion is to ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ by Jorge Luis Borges. In this story, two characters discuss the ancestor of one of them, who declared he would write a novel and create a garden labyrinth. When he died, his relatives found a jumble of papers which made no sense. Stephen Albert, the man who has translated these papers, explains that novel is the labyrinth. In most fiction, characters are presented with questions, they make a choice and the consequences of that choice follow. But in this novel, every possible choice is explored, every forking path, and the book just carries on expanding. This seems to me to bear a relationship to the nature of the House, which is endless and apparently living. Perhaps it is created by the collective imagination, constantly expanding, prison and freedom. It is, after all, an artifice constructed between the sea and the sky.

reading notes, 5th March 2021

(Dogwalking chez gallimaufry; French school, early nineteenth century, A Young Woman Standing Reading a Book in the Woods, her Dog beside her, oil on canvas; found here)

Writing about books takes me an insanely long time, and sometimes I don’t have an insanely long time to devote to it. Sometimes I read a book and I enjoy it but I don’t have anything to say about it. So I thought what I might do, fairly regularly, is write a short post about what I’ve been reading and what I’m looking forward to reading, no real analysis, no spoilers. And then I hope that in the comments, you’ll tell us what you’ve been reading and are looking forward to reading.

I have just finished...

Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield. I found it in the library and for some reason I borrowed it. ‘For some reason’ because I read her first novel, The Thirteenth Tale, and began by enjoying it but found the ending unsatisfying – annoying, even. And then I read her second novel, Bellman & Black, and did not like it at all. Still, there was something about the way she writes... So I’m very glad that I persevered because I really did enjoy Once Upon a River and it was exactly the right book at the right time.

One midwinter night a man bursts into The Swan at Radcot, on the Thames, carrying a dead child in his arms, and collapses. Miraculously, the child returns to life. But who is she? Is she Amelia Vaughan, who was abducted two years ago and never seen again? Her parents believe so. Is she Alice Armstrong, whose desperate mother has drowned herself? Her father claims her. Could she be Ann, Lily White’s little sister, even though Lily is now a woman in her forties? And how can a dead child revive? It’s a novel about the stories people tell themselves, as entertainment or exploitation or as a means of surviving, where they come from and how they can change. It brings a nineteenth-century community to life, it’s funny and sad but ultimately a cheering book, and it features a sapient pig.

I am looking forward to...

Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke. For reasons too boring to list here, I had ordered a copy of this before it was published but was only able to get my hands on it (thanks to my kind mother) yesterday. Entirely by coincidence, I had been having a tiny Susanna Clarke fest. My daughter had received the DVD of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell for her birthday (yes it was from me, pretending to be the hens; I knew she’d enjoy it and I am of course softening her up for when she’s old enough to read the novel). We watched that, and I’d been rereading stories from The Ladies of Grace Adieu. Piranesi lives in a wonderful house quite alone, except for Tuesdays and Fridays when he’s visited by his only friend, the Other. But then messages start appearing, chalked onto the pavements: there is someone else in the house. A friend or, as the Other tells Piranesi, a foe?

What have you just finished? And what are you looking forward to reading next?

new books in 2020: what are you excited about?

It is only comparatively recently that I have noticed a trend: looking forward to books that are to be published in the near future. Pre-Internet, young Helen would be pleasantly surprised to walk into a bookshop and see a new book by a favourite author. Now the publicity machine never stops grinding on, and every new season brings articles on ‘forthcoming releases’ (which inevitably makes me think of the poor books as prisoners).

Never one to leave a bandwagon in peace, I thought I’d ask you, dear readers, if you pay attention to this advance title information and what books are being published in 2020 you’re feeling excited about.

For me, it’s Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi (currently scheduled for the middle of September which is deeply frustrating as it’s at my annual Peak Busy but I expect I’ll bravely find a way to neglect my paid work and devote myself to it). At last! I have loved everything she has written and I cannot wait to see what she’s done next. Fellow Clarke fans: you can read about it here on the Bloomsbury website. I defy you not to be intrigued.

(Me being excited about Piranesi, not really, a photograph from Dancers Among Us by Jordan Matter, found here and slightly cropped)

What about you? What are you looking forward to this year? Or do you ignore all the advance publicity and prefer to be pleasantly and serendipitously surprised?

The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, by Theodora Goss

(Detail from Fernand Khnopff, I Lock the Door Upon Myself (1891), inspired by a poem by Christina Rossetti; found here)

I’m very fond of Theodora Goss’s short stories, so when I saw that she was publishing a novel I was excited and ordered a copy straight away. Goss’s stories are often formally quite experimental and fantastical; if you like Lud-in-the-Mist or Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, her work will appeal to you. This novel in fact grew out of a short story called ‘The Mad Scientist’s Daughter’, which you can read here. While I feel that ‘daughter’ and ‘wife’ have become overused in titles, here that use is appropriate, since it is their fathers and their fathers’ work which form the common bond between the main characters. It also alludes to Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which as you will see is also appropriate.

Mary Jekyll has just buried her mother; her father predeceased her some years before and in mysterious circumstances. A provision in her mother’s will leads her to the Society of Mary Magdalen and a young girl named Diana Hyde who claims to be her sister. The fate of their father(s) is intertwined with an investigation into a series of brutal murders of prostitutes in London’s East End, conducted by Sherlock Holmes. For yes, this London of the 1890s is a London in which monsters abound, there’s a nefarious secret society and Mary and Diana are not the only young women with monstrous fathers.

It isn’t actually necessary to have read Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Frankenstein, Rappaccini’s Daughter, The Island of Dr Moreau and Dracula, but I must say that part of the fun of this novel is seeing what Goss has done with the original texts. All of the female monsters have their first appearances, however fleeting, in these Gothic classics. During the course of Goss’s novel they recount their own versions of the stories, which differ significantly from the originals. The differences imply a feminist commentary on the originals, while destabilising them and insisting they are not ‘true’. Questioning the factual ‘truth’ of fiction and claiming it is poor biography is a nice inversion of the accusation sometimes levelled at autobiographies that they are not ‘true’ but ‘made up’ like fiction. There are some good in-jokes too, such as Justine having ‘Miltonic’ English prose.

Goss’s playing with the idea of text and fiction continues in a lovely innovation. One character is the ‘author’ of the novel; she writes the main action and she ‘rewrites’ the other characters’ stories, presumably to their satisfaction because they all chip in with their comments. Here Diana has been telling/writing the story of her origins – Mrs Poole is the housekeeper.

‘To think that you were born in such a place!’ said Mrs. Poole. Suddenly, her heart swelled with pity for the poor orphan child, and she regretted her earlier harshness.

MARY: It’s a good thing Mrs. Poole is sorting laundry, or whatever she’s doing. I don’t want to hear what she would say to that!

DIANA: How do you know her heart didn’t swell with pity? Mrs. Poole can say what she likes, but she always gives me the largest chop and the most pudding.

CATHERINE: That’s because you’re so scrawny.

DIANA: How do you know? Wouldn’t it be rich if our precious Mary wasn’t her favorite after all?

MARY: For goodness’ sake, can you just finish your section?

DIANA: You were the one who interrupted in the first place.

‘Yes,’ said Mary, also feeling a surge of pity for her long-lost sister.

MARY: Oh please!

This questions the ‘truthfulness’ of this account too; after all, Catherine admits that she is using her imagination when writing it all down. It also enacts, on a textual level, the mutual co-operation of the characters who must work together to defeat their common enemy, and the reclamation of their own voices.

By doing this Goss diverges from a tendency of the classics on which she draws to use their monsters and their plots to externalise fear. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, for instance, is at a very basic level concerned with our relationship with our ‘dark side’ and our terror of being overwhelmed by it: the characters and plot externalise this. In Goss’s work, the female monsters are a marginalised group who turn their differences to their advantage, whether this be by appearing in a circus or running an apothecary. There is little of the psychological darkness and horror here other than the division of London into two distinct cities: the ‘nice’ London of the West End and the poorer, darker one of the East. Goss instead creates a very detailed and physical world in which the efforts of the main characters are often hampered by practical issues. Such matters as housekeeping, the supply of clean clothes, the lack of pockets in women’s clothes, food, the cost of a cab, the propriety of entering certain places: these all prey on our heroines’ minds. This focus on the mundane makes the monsters and the monstrous more acceptable. Sherlock Holmes mansplaining to Mary Jekyll the story of her own father’s death made me chuckle.

Do I have some quibbles? I do indeed, although this shouldn’t distract from the fact that this is a very enjoyable book to read and clearly written in a spirit of fun. It’s a very plot-driven novel and the pacing is good but the plot itself holds no great surprises or twists. The real strength of the book is its premise – female monsters telling their own stories! – and the literary games it plays. I wished Goss had pushed the commentaries which interrupt her narrative further; they sometimes became a bit repetitive or even redundant and that was a pity. I should also have enjoyed a little more introspection on the part of the characters, especially about their monstrousness, in between the somewhat breathless action. One of the victims of the serial killer is named Molly Keane; I couldn’t help wondering what an innocent Anglo-Irish novelist had ever done to Theodora Goss that she had to meet such a gruesome end. However, it seems there is a sequel in the works – our heroines have been invited to Vienna by one Lucinda Van Helsing, an orang-utan is on the loose and surely heading for Paris – so perhaps some of my quibbles will become superfluous. Certainly Theodora Goss is a writer to watch; if, for me, this didn’t quite match up to her stories, it’s entertaining and bodes well for future novels. (Meanwhile, you can find some of her work online here.)

reading notes

My few brain cells have been so busy with work and with writing a couple of reviews for the next edition of Shiny New Books – coming soon to a computer near you! – that they couldn’t cope with the extra effort of writing about ‘Paris’. Hence: reading notes.

• Diving Belles, by Lucy Wood – I have Faye from Literasaurus to thank for this: she wrote a wonderful review about it which compelled me to buy a copy. It’s a collection of short stories set in Cornwall, but inflected with magic and loss. There’s an old lady who enters the sea in a diving bell to reclaim her long-lost husband, victim of mermaids; a houseful of whispering spirits, observing the inhabitants; a woman who is surprised to discover that her mother has a fairy lover. The magical elements are sometimes very strong – as in the story of the couple whose house becomes haunted by a wrecker’s ghost – but sometimes very much in the background – as the wisht hounds are in a tale of a motherless girl and her father, or the story of the droll teller, and they allow Wood to write about grief, loss of memory, loss of home in resonant and beautiful ways. For instance, in ‘Countless Stones’ Rita is slowly turning into a menhir (I was reminded of Byatt’s ‘A Stone Woman’); it’s a story that’s both about a woman turning into stone and about the effects of loneliness, isolation, depression. Wood writes subtly and with an accurate eye on how people feel and speak. Lovely. I’ll definitely be reading Wood’s novel, which was published very recently.

• Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke – My use of this tome to deflect pointy cat teeth perhaps misled some of you into thinking I disliked the book. I love it! It’s even better the second time around. Please please let the sequel come soon.

• John Keats, by Robert Gittings – I started this spurred on by Stefanie asking about Keats biographies and my shameful realisation this had been sitting on my bookshelves since 1989 and never read. I am enjoying it but reading it slowly. It’s good to stop and read the poems alongside it. I hope to write about it on here in more detail when I’ve finished it.

• The Princess Bride, by William Goldman – For the first thirty pages or so, I loved this. Then it began to grate until I could barely finish it. I felt as if I were being repeatedly slapped about the head by a gnome on a stick. Sorry, Mr Goldman.

• On Beauty, by Zadie Smith – It’s ten years since this was published, and only now am I reading it. Why did I leave it so long? Smith’s characterisation is a joy, and her dialogue –  well, I can hear those people chattering in my head.

uses to which you never thought you would put Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, number 1

Fending off cat attack.

(It is a hardback edition.)

(No cats were harmed during the incident. An ankle was definitely harmed though. Beastly cat.)

Has your copy of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell ever been put to a non-reading use?