Clarke's long-awaited second novel is nothing like her first, the very British and esoteric Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Piranesi is weird and haunting and gorgeous, a meditative narrative suffused with innocence and melancholy. It's the story of a man wandering a vast House with infinite halls filled with statues, flocks of birds, and oceans that rise and fall, who slowly realizes the world is not what he thinks it is.
Piranesi is an innocent who delights in the world around him -- the endless rooms, the tides, the marble statues representing every human thought, the birds winging through the air and the fish swimming in the seas. He writes everything down in his journals with the enthusiasm of young explorer, but earlier journals have very different accounts from a life he does not remember. As the memories come back he is both made and unmade by them, until two different lives are at odds within him. That tension dominates the last section of the book, but despite everything Piranesi retains what The House gave him -- the capacity to notice the world around him, to take it as it is and find value in every detail.
It's a skill that all too many people have lost, and that some of the other characters are seeking, but they misunderstand it as a putative source of power. For Piranesi, it is a form of inner strength, and indicative of his basic decency. Clarke has taken a genuinely disturbing premise and turned it into a quiet celebration of creation.
