Did you ever play those old adventure games, like Zork, where you wander through a maze, mapping it out while discovering strange and wonderful things? Piranesi feels like being in that kind of game. At first it’s just the strangeness and magnitude of the place that grabs your interest. Then there’s another character in the maze, and slowly you discover there’s a story and a mystery to solve.

Susanna Clarke’s first novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, was a huge hit. In 2005 it got a Hugo Award, a World Fantasy Award, and a Locus Award. It was an inspiration for my The Magic Battery. Unfortunately, health issues put a dent in a promising career, and her second novel, Piranesi, didn’t come out until 2020. The earlier book was realistic historical fantasy. This one is completely different.

It’s hard to say anything about Piranesi without saying too much. As in an adventure game, the world-building comes to the foreground. The narrator lives in a huge house which is his entire world. It has hundreds of halls and thousands of statues. The staircases seem scaled for giants. The House is so large that it has tides, seasonal snowfall, and a wildlife ecosystem. Yet as far as the narrator knows, it has only two inhabitants. The narrator is as much of a mystery as the house is, even to himself.

He calls the other inhabitant “the Other.” The Other calls him Piranesi. The narrator doesn’t think that’s his real name, but I’ll call him that so I don’t have to keep saying “the narrator.” The name must come from the architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who created a series of drawings of imaginary prisons. The House is certainly a prison, even if it’s a pleasant one.

The Other uses words, place names, that have no referent for Piranesi, who dismisses them as fiction. Yet it’s clear from various hints that the House isn’t all that exists.

Piranesi is a meticulous record-keeper. Like a good adventure gamer, he has mapped many halls. He has identified a dozen or so past inhabitants and tends to their remains. However, he remembers very little about himself. His carefully maintained journals are often a puzzle to him; he has written about events and people that he no longer remembers. He is naive and often has trouble putting two and two together, which is understandable for someone with so large a gap in his memory. The reader will figure many things out before he does.

The story is the unfolding of the secrets behind the House and Piranesi. The House may not be all that there is, but it is a rich world by itself, a place it would be wonderful to visit and explore for a month or a year. His life in it has a dreamlike quality; when you’re dreaming, you don’t notice the things that don’t make sense or ask how you got there. Eventually, though, you have to wake up. Or to return to the gaming metaphor, you have to walk away from the game and get back to real life. I can’t say much more than that, but the process of discovery kept me going through the book at a fast pace. It’s a much shorter book than Clarke’s earlier one.

For next time, I’m looking at Michael Ende’s Die unendliche Geschichte, known in English as The Neverending Story. Come to think of it, it has much the same theme: entering a fantasy world and finding your way back.