Early in the novel, a family of albatrosses roosts in a nearby room but struggles to find materials to build a nest. His enchantment at the wonders of the House, at the world he lives in, is alluring. He may not be able to see how life in the House has warped him, the way we can-but our understanding of the majesty of the House is nothing like his. Instead, it illuminates the unbridgeable gap between us, the readers, and Piranesi, and puts forth an argument that the differences between us may be just as damaging to us as they are to him. What’s unsettling about the book, and what I loved most about it, is that this dramatic irony is not played for comedy or for pity. Piranesi is after a quieter kind of magic, exploring the ways human beings can adapt and find meaning in even the direst of conditions. “Are You a traveler who has cheated Tides and crossed Broken Floors and Derelict Stairs to reach these Halls? Or are You perhaps someone who inhabits my own Halls long after I am dead?” And he speculates about “the Sixteenth Person,” the person he is writing his journals for.

He knows the times he is supposed to meet the Other, the one living person who also inhabits the House, a well-dressed man who quizzes him on his knowledge of the House but treats him with mild disdain. He has located “all the people who have ever lived,” 15 in total, the bones of 13 of whom are located in various halls that he cares for tenderly. He has begun the long work of cataloging the statues who inhabit each room, classical-style representations of fauns, men fighting beasts, or children at play. He knows how to collect fresh rainwater from the upper halls, where lightning flashes in the clouds. He knows how to fish and collect seaweed from the lower halls of sea and foam.

Piranesi has been in the House as long as he can remember, long enough that he’s charted the tides that occasionally sweep through the halls on the main level, where he lives, and can predict when a room will be suddenly flooded. Unlike the House, Piranesi, the new novel by Susanna Clarke, abides by limits, and within those limits-thanks to those limits, in fact-it is a wonder. It’s curious, then, that a novel set in the House feels so small.

Susanna clarke new book