Is Piranesi the Dark Souls of Novels?

(It is not.)

I just finished my third readthrough of Susanna Clarke’s wonderful novel Piranesi, this time because I read it out loud¹ to my girlfriend over video chat. Piranesi has only been out for about a year and a half, but I feel confident in saying that it’s one of my all-time favorite novels. It’s an incredible work that has little-to-nothing in common with her previous book Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, except that they’re both top-notch.

Piranesi makes me want to have many Profound and Serious Thoughts, but I’ve shied away from talking about it too much because I don’t really feel equal to picking it apart; there’s a lot going on in its 245 pages, and I don’t know as I can do it justice.

I did, however, realize something on my most recent readthrough. It’s a silly connection, and not anything like the most important thing in the book, but it is an idea I am properly equipped to discuss, so: it’s weird how much Piranesi feels like a videogame.

I am not aware of any reason to believe that Susanna Clarke has ever played a videogame. She has spoken extensively about the many influences on Piranesi, including C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Jorge Luis Borges, and of course the 18th century artist for whom the book is named. She has not, to my knowledge, mentioned any videogame² at any point in her description of the project. So I’m sure all of this is parallel evolution; still, it’s odd how much Piranesi has in common with many videogames.

Let me try to explain what I mean. (Minor spoilers for Piranesi throughout.)

In Piranesi, the title character is a man living in a world comprised of vast halls filled with Neoclassical statuary. An ocean is trapped in the lowest halls, and tides occasionally rise up therefrom and flood the higher halls. Fish, birds, mussels, and sea life abound, but the only other living person in the House is the Other, a man who meets with Piranesi twice a week to talk about the things Piranesi has seen in the halls. Otherwise, he is alone, and spends his time gathering food from the sea, drying seaweed to use as fuel for his fire, studying the statuary, writing in his Journal, and wondering about the identities of the 13 dead people he has found throughout the House. He is content, and has never known any other life than this one, but as time goes on, he begins to encounter surprising details he can’t explain, and learns more about the House, his role in it, and the Other. The House itself seems to have a strange effect on his mind; he forgets things (though never details about the House) and any remotely genre-savvy reader³ will always be several steps ahead of Piranesi when figuring out what, exactly, happened to bring him here, and who the Other is and what he’s about. In order to discover the solution to the mysteries, Piranesi needs to explore the House, read his old journal entries (including some he may have forgotten writing) and find the occasional clue or piece of writing in the House itself.

Piranesi’s life is dangerous: parts of the House are broken, and it would be possible for him to slip and fall a very long way down to an unforgiving marble floor if he’s not careful. Tides from the imprisoned sea will occasionally rise up to the higher floors and threaten to drown him or bash him against the walls. Though there is ample food, he has to catch it all himself, and in the winter, when the fish retreat away and the temperature drops, he is always cold; if he does not store up enough dried seaweed with which to build fires, he might very well freeze to death. These mundane tasks take up most of Piranesi’s days, rather than the more exciting events of the story.

To sum it all up: Piranesi is an at least quasi-amnesiac man faced with a Mystery, which he has to decipher through old journal entries and other short clues, and whose day-to-day life is concerned with the simple task of surviving in a dangerous⁴ environment.

Compare this summary to games as wide-ranging as Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Don’t Starve, and BioShock. In Amnesia (and its sequels), a character wakes up in a strange and dangerous castle⁵ with no idea how they got there, and has to figure out how to survive the horrors of the place while piecing together what happened and their own complicity in it, often through journal entries they finds scattered around the place. In Don’t Starve you find yourself on a mysterious island and must escape, but your first goal is just to find enough food and fuel to eat and light fires. In BioShock, 95% of plot of the game has already happened, and you just piece it together from audio logs and snatches of conversation while you survive the hellish underwater city of Rapture.

Many other games start with amnesiacs piecing together a past plot and their own prior actions, including things like Planescape: Torment and Disco Elysium; many games follow the BioShock route of placing a character in a strange place that has fallen to pieces, and the plot of the game involves learning what happened by reading journal entries (Gone Home, Portal 2, Dark Souls, etc.) In most of these games (though not Disco Elysium or arguably Planescape: Torment) your minute-to-minute gameplay is not about reading these journal entries; each crumb of plot is a reward you gain after spending most of your time shooting lunatics (BioShock), solving puzzles (Portal 2), or hiding from lumbering monsters that want to rip you apart and scatter your viscera around the castle (Amnesia: The Dark Descent).

In this way, although the experience of reading Piranesi (the book) is not very much like the experience of playing any of these games, the experience of being Piranesi (the character) is a fair amount like many of these games.

One could easily imagine⁶ what a Piranesi videogame would look like. You wake up in the morning and set out across the vast sandbox of the House, trying to gather enough food and fuel to keep your stores up, gazing at the beautiful statuary, and occasionally finding clues to the larger plot that will help you understand what’s going on. Eventually you either find enough clues to piece together how to advance the plot, or you trip and fall down a hall and drown in the Drowned Halls and then try again with a new character.

The largest difference between Piranesi and most games, of course, is that there is very little violence in Piranesi, and the character himself is genuinely horrified by the thought of himself committing any act of violence. No misshapen monsters roam the halls of the House, and if they did, Piranesi would try to understand them, not kill them.

So, what does it mean that Piranesi’s life is like a videogame? Many of these videogames are about placing you squarely inside the psychology of the person you are playing; whereas Super Mario Bros. is about reflexes, BioShock and Amnesia try to keep you firmly rooted inside the brain of the person you are portraying. BioShock’s famous twist⁷ helps to explain why you have perceived the videogame the way that you have. Similarly, although Piranesi has a lot of interesting things to say about metaphysics, epistemology, and history, it is always primarily a character study. Sure, it’s fun to unravel the plot and to learn more about the theories underpinning the House, but the real joy of the novel is watching how Piranesi himself interacts with the House and with the strange discoveries he makes within it.

1. The second time I listened to the Chiwetel Ejiofor audiobook. I highly recommend both of these approaches, though it’s hard not to compare one’s own performance with an audiobook narrator, and obviously Ejiofor did a better job than I did.

2. It’s conceivably possible that videogames were an influence but that she just hasn’t talked about that out of embarrassment, given that videogames still have a sort of sticky, unfashionable sheen on them in the circles I expect she moves in, but I expect she would have mentioned it anyway.

3. The tension between Piranesi’s own understanding of what’s happening and that of the reader is one of the great strengths of the book. It’s not that Piranesi is unintelligent, or that he’s irrational; it’s that his brain works so differently from ours that it can be difficult for him to understand things that we grasp easily. The book thus is a sort of mystery box plot, but the joy of the book isn’t so much unraveling the mystery as watching the way Piranesi does so. It’s incredible.

4. It’s important to note that Piranesi does not believe he lives in a hostile world, though he understands its dangers. For Piranesi—despite the risks of starvation, drowning, freezing to death, or cracking his skull falling off of a statue—“The Beauty of the House is Immeasurable; its Kindness, Infinite.”

5. Or, in the third game, the wreckage of an airplane.

6. Please don’t actually make a videogame of Piranesi, though, or at least not without making a lot of changes and thinking very seriously about what you are doing and why.

7. That your main character has essentially been brainwashed and has had no choices in the game up to this point.