In this extraordinary, elemental House Piranesi lives. The Lower Halls are the Domain of the Tides their Windows - when seen from across a Courtyard - are grey-green with the restless Waters and white with the spatter of Foam….The Upper Halls are, as I have said, the Domain of the Clouds their Windows are grey-white and misty.” Piranesi Piranesi lives in the Middle Halls, which he describes as “the Domain of birds and of men.” It is certainly not the ‘easy read’ the 240 pages might suggest, but it is worth the effort.Piranesi tells the story of the title character, who lives in a vast House (he has never been able to walk to the end of it, and he alternately refers to it as “the World”) full of marble arches and endless enormous statues.

Piranesi is magical, mysterious and melancholy. As I said, for the first 60 pages it wasn’t even for me, though the rest of it more than makes up for it. Which I appreciate is a very personal thing, and automatically means that this book is not for everyone. Extrapolating minute details to build the bigger picture, construct what has happened before to lead us to the now. It reads like a Chinese puzzle box and the Legal nerd that lives rent-free inside my brain could not get enough of it. I found it incredibly hard to put this book down once it got going. Statues the silent audience who have seen and judged it all. Even the entire genre changes! Alternative history gets swept away with the tides and is exchanged for a masterful mystery that was hidden right under our noses this whole time. The book itself becomes a glorious metaphor for the metamorphosis of our main character. As we follow Piranesi, who is undergoing significant mental change, both positively and negatively, the language changes, the way we view the world through his eyes changes. What the author managed to pull together from page 60 onwards is truly genius. It just made it harder to connect with our main character. Don’t get me wrong, it was beautiful to read, like a book of poetry. Which wasn’t helped by the lyrical language used to describe our setting.

So much so that I couldn’t even begin to imagine Piranesi up until that point. It’s distracting and requires some significant mental gymnastics on my part to immerse myself in the story and envision the environment. Maybe it’s down to the fact that I have issues with timelines if we are working with ‘the year the Albatros came to visit’. So telling me something is taking place in the 89th north-eastern vestibule means exactly nothing to me.

Perhaps it’s down to the fact that I am terrible with directions. This book was heading down that, much-trodden path for the first 60 pages. What Clarke achieved with Piranesi is quite unique, I’ll be the first to come out and say as much.ĩ9% of the time, when a book starts the way Piranesi does, it loses me.

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