Well, I bloomin’ loved it. The synopsis is above so I won’t go into that.. but this book is so clever in taking a setting we must all be familiar with in museums and the like, ( marble halls lined with statues) and making a whole, much expanded world from that. So in that way we almost ‘know’ the halls Piranesi walks. I looked up the art by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (the Piranesi of this book’s namesake) and Clarke’s world here very easily became whole and real for me.
The book is not difficult to read and get immersed in but it is strange and dream like to start with. I think it is a matter of just going with the flow and taking huge pleasure in all the little treats along the way. There are wonderful hidden meanings in so much here, but not in a way that diminishes from the story if you don’t recognise all of them. They are just there to relish like reclaimed gifts
All in all this slim book had so much to occupy my mind. The nature of memory, trust, self, self reliance, the past selves we carry in us, being alone, being home, reality and false realities.. life, the universe and everything.
A lot is left to the imagination about the labyrinth world, but that isn’t a bad thing. It gave the book scope to do other things than endlessly world build.
So I was engrossed and thoroughly enjoyed this masterful story and marvelled at the cleverness of it.
Ps an example of the little treat things... there is a statue of Kings playing chess. This is a mnemonic for the classification of all living things. It fits the idea that the halls in this book are of themselves a whole world
‘Kings play chess on fine grained sand’ (Kingdom, Phyllum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, species)