This year’s Women’s prize produced a notably strong shortlist, led by Brit Bennett’s landmark saga of racism and family in the US, The Vanishing Half; along with Patricia Lockwood’s hilariously barbed satire of internet domination, No One is Talking About This, and Yaa Gyasi’s thoughtful exploration of science, faith and generational trauma, Transcendent Kingdom. It also spotlit Claire Fuller’s quietly brilliant portrayal of English outsiders, Unsettled Ground, and a searing Barbadian debut, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones.
But it’s a delight to see the award go to Susanna Clarke’s triumphantly unusual second novel Piranesi, which begins as the diary of a man trapped in a vast mysterious mansion, in which an ocean rises and falls. He is dreamily content there, with birds, statues and his own scribblings for company, believing himself alone in the world except for visits from a well-dressed Other, who brings vitamin pills and appears to be studying him.
It’s difficult to describe Piranesi to a new reader, as you don’t want to deprive them of the sheer storytelling pleasure of being taken into another world – something Clarke shares with her fantasy influences CS Lewis, Diana Wynne Jones and Neil Gaiman. It’s what made readers fall in love with her 2004 debut, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an epic slice of rambunctious alternate history set in a Regency England tinged with magic.
Piranesi is a very different book: restrained, austere, written out of the long illness that plagued Clarke after the success of her debut. Its roots are in a labyrinthine short story by Borges and the fantastical prison etchings of the 18th-century artist who gives the book its name, but also in the collective subconscious of dreams. Perhaps that’s why a book so singular and surreal – perhaps, Clarke thought at first, just too peculiar – has connected so deeply with readers.
Published into the pandemic, this story of isolation took on an uncanny wider relevance – we were all confined to our own small worlds, and driven deeper into inner spaces. And this novel about another world has a clear and current message for our own: it dramatises the question of whether humanity’s role is to conquer or to belong. The Other wants to exploit this strange realm’s resources, to colonise dangerous new territory for his own glory; Piranesi is alert to the life force rippling through it, and content to live in community with non-human beings.
“You are the Beloved Child of the House,” Piranesi tells himself – but his isolation is both haven and prison. Exploring profound questions of freedom and individuality, Clarke’s novel is not a straightforward allegory; every reading will be as unique as the book itself, and conclude with more questions.
