Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi is a novel of magical realism. There are three reasons that the ACX crowd should be interested. First, it’s about reason versus naive religious belief. Second, it’s about good versus evil. And third, the novel is an adult post-traumatic response to C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia.
Spoiler alert: Piranesi is also a mystery. If your enjoyment of mysteries is ruined by foreknowledge, you should stop reading here and go read Piranesi instead. On the other hand, great mysteries are ones that bear re-reading, and with Piranesi there’s no danger of boredom the second time through.
I’ll talk about the themes listed above in almost reverse order. First is the novel’s obvious engagement with The Magician’s Nephew and the twist it puts on the magical setting (the “House”). Second is the portrayal of the main protagonist’s two weird psychological states: (a) almost total amnesia and (b) a unique fusion of naive mysticism and an astute scientific method. Third is the nature of good and evil inside the House, the otherworldly labyrinth in which most of the novel’s plot occurs, and what it means for trauma in the grown-up world.
Piranesi and C.S. Lewis
Piranesi is not a children’s story. But it involves The Magician’s Nephew as directly as if it were a graduate student in 2012 dabbling in Lewis studies, Greek classics, the occult, and criminal activity. (As Piranesi’s main villain does.) The opening epigraph in the book is a quotation from The Magician’s Nephew’s secondary villain, Uncle Andrew:
“I am the great scholar, the magician, the adept, who is doing the experiment. Of course I need subjects to do it on.”
It turns out that Clarke bases almost the entire plot of Piranesi on Uncle Andrew. In fact, she even gives her villain the same name and provenance—Andrew Ketterley from Dorsetshire, England—apparently indicating that her Andrew Ketterley in 2012 is a distant younger relation of Lewis’s Andrew Ketterly. And the apple does not fall far from the tree.
In The Magician’s Nephew, Uncle Andrew is a black-magic magician who enjoys a notable success: he figures out how to reach other worlds. But he’s too cowardly to try the process himself. He thus uses two children as guinea pigs (after literally using a guinea pig, which vanishes and never returns). Said children successfully reach the Wood Between the Worlds, a beautiful forest where they can see all the possible other worlds around them like pools between the trees, and they can jump into any to visit a new cosmic arrangement.
The down side of the Wood Between the Worlds is that people who stay there too long forget everything about their own world—including who they are, why they’re in the wood to begin with, and how to get back home. Thus, the dangers of world-traveling (world-hopping? -plunging?), and the devious prudence of Uncle Andrew in sending other vulnerable people to try out the dangerous stuff first.
As far as I know, everyone who reads The Magician’s Nephew is so enchanted by Lewis’s beautiful description of the Wood Between the Worlds (it is so peaceful! and did I say beautiful?) that we forget how repulsive Uncle Andrew is. He sends two children into what is likely cosmic danger. We all know that Lewis is writing the story, so naturally we don’t expect the worst. But from Uncle Andrew’s point of view, the worst could happen.
The novel Piranesi asks the question, “What if it did happen?” What if there were someone in 2012 like Uncle Andrew—maybe a whole supporting cast of minor black-magic magicians—who found a way to reach another world, and what if they did exactly what Uncle Andrew did? What if most of their victims were adults, including graduate students and a male prostitute picked up by an anthropology professor? What if most victims didn’t live to tell the story? And what if the two who did live ended up losing their memories, going insane, and coming back with permanent trauma and shattered psyches?
But what if, at the same time, the other world were so beautiful that those same characters wanted to live there forever?
The House
In Piranesi, the other world is a House. It’s also a labyrinth. It extends infinitely along the four points of the compass, with innumerable halls and vestibules full of statues. The House has three floors. The top floor has the clouds, sending rains that run down walls and staircases to provide fresh running water. The bottom floor is submersed in the sea. Tidal waves occasionally sweep up through the higher floors, but for the most part the sea remains below, supplying the House with food in the form of fish and seaweed. The middle floor is the most inhabitable. There (mostly) live the birds, there are the House’s few skeletons, and there is the House’s one living human inhabitant, our protagonist Piranesi.
We know blessedly little of Piranesi at the beginning. He knows blessedly little of himself. The entire book is written in the first person, in the form of journal entries that Piranesi makes as he explores the halls in the House. The House is his entire world. As he tells the reader near the start of the book:
“I am determined to explore as much of the World as I can in my lifetime. To this end I have travelled as far as the Nine-Hundred-and-Sixtieth Hall to the West, the Eight-Hundred-and-Ninetieth Hall to the North and the Seven-Hundred-and-Sixty-Eighth Hall to the South…. I have explored the Drowned Halls where the Dark Waters are carpeted with white water lilies. I have seen the Derelict Halls of the East where Ceilings, Floors—sometimes even Walls!—have collapsed...
I have never seen any indication that the World was coming to an End, but only the regular progression of Halls and Passageways into the Far Distance.”
Everywhere in these halls are statues. Clarke takes the idea of statues partly from Charn in The Magician’s Nephew, where the statues are wax-like bodies of magically preserved kings and queens, and partly from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, where they are victims turned to stone. But in Piranesi, the statues are not obviously real people, nor are they obviously waiting to come to life. Clarke leaves their function and identity ambiguous, though she gives a hint at the end of the novel. The clearest thing that can be said about them is that, in the words of one reviewer, they “seem to represent all the ideas and knowledge and experiences that have ever existed.” Curiously, Piranesi himself knows nothing of what the statues might represent in our world, and he instead engages with them directly almost as if they were living beings.
A few of the statues are significant. One is clearly the faun Tumnus from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; the reader recognizes it, though Piranesi does not. Other statues include an angel caught in a rose bush, where Piranesi hides his journals; a woman with a beehive, where he weathers a tidal wave; and a gorilla, to whom he resorts when he wants strength. Some statues depict horrible sufferings, especially in the “Derelict Halls,” where the infrastructure has inexplicably been damaged. One gigantic statue, whom Piranesi calls the “Trampled Man,” is laid out horizontally across a broken floor, face up, with his arms flung back over his head in the agony of death as a great centaur tramples on his chest. At the place where his arms arch back from his body, the whole floor below has broken away, and there is nothing except the abyss of the Drowned Halls below.
Notably, statues of minotaurs fill the first hall from which Piranesi begins all his explorations. As the reader discovers later, this hall also hides the magic “door” into the House from our world. The placement of the minotaurs is odd, since the classical Minotaur is traditionally portrayed at the center of its labyrinth, not the entry point. But possibly Clarke’s rationale is that the labyrinth, being infinite, does not have a center. Thus the minotaurs guard the center of human passage into and out of the labyrinth. But this is just one of many riddles about the statues that the novel leaves unresolved.
In his journeys through some 7,000 halls around the minotaurs, Piranesi eventually discovers a strange windowless hall like a temple. It has a single door through which the moon can be seen at night, and inside is a small army of statues straining forward as if to see the light. Here Piranesi has an almost mystical experience in which he acquires a “knowledge of reality” directly from the House itself—but more on that later.
During Piranesi’s exploration of the halls, it is clear that some statues are missing. As Piranesi notes in his journal, “These Absences are as mysterious in their way as the Statues themselves.” To the reader, absences in the statues run parallel to strange absences in Piranesi’s memory. One of Clarke’s most compelling feats is the slow revelation that Piranesi is from our world but has forgotten it. Originally lured into the House by a second-rate black magician, he has suffered near-total amnesia of everything except the House.
Two Weird Psychological States: Amnesia and Scientific Mysticism
Early in the book, we learn that Piranesi can’t remember coming to the House and believes he has always been there. He suspects that his real name is not Piranesi, but he doesn't know what it is. His earliest journals are dated with the years 2011 and 2012, but his later ones describe the years qualitatively (“The Year of Weeping and Wailing,” “The Year I Named the Constellations”) because he cannot remember why his original dating system involved 2000s at all.
Piranesi is not bothered by these gaps in his own memory. As he confidently announces to his friend the Other (of whom more soon), “I remember everything.” That is, he remembers everything he has ever learned about the House. His memory in that regard is nearly photogenic, and he views himself as a scientist. He meticulously catalogs and maps every hall and statue he encounters; he knows the motions of the stars; he calculates the motions of the tides and successfully predicts floods.
There is one other living person who regularly visits the House. He never stays long. Piranesi calls him the Other and is always delighted to see him. For Piranesi, the Other is the one great friend, the wise scientist directing his investigations, the benefactor who brings him (oh happiness!) notebooks and pens and multivitamins—and once, even shoes. To the reader, the Other’s character is more obvious. The Other wears crisp suits and carries a cell phone; he is from our world, and he is using Piranesi to explore the House as a proxy. The Other is Andrew Ketterley.
Ketterley is looking for a “Secret Knowledge.” Like Uncle Andrew, he is willing to throw things away, especially other persons, to get at the Secret. And yet his designs are something Piranesi is entirely innocent of. Piranesi’s amnesia and naivete are so complete that he cannot recognize the most basic traits of a master-servant relationship. He provides data and descriptions to Ketterley with charming gratitude and simplicity, even while Ketterley effectively functions as a master and jailer.
It is Ketterley who gives Piranesi his name. In the real world, Piranesi was the name of a great Italian Enlightenment architect whose most famous works are fantastical drawings of carceri d’invenzione, imaginary prisons. Ketterley’s Piranesi is a prisoner of amnesia in an equally fantastic world.
And yet Piranesi retains a strange assortment of learned skills from our world, which he employs in his “scientific” enterprises in the house. This brings us to the unique juxtaposition of Piranesi’s amnesia with an extraordinary fusion of “scientism” and “mysticism” in his relationship to the House.
Scientific Mysticism
Piranesi regards himself as a scientist. At the beginning of the novel, he mentions his commitment to observation without speculation. But since he is also hamstrung by his amnesia and naivete, we get charming entries like this:
“Since the World began, it is certain that there have existed fifteen people. Possibly there have been more; but I am a scientist and must proceed according to the evidence. Of the fifteen people whose existence is verifiable, only Myself and the Other are now living.”
Piranesi’s evidence for other people are the thirteen skeletons he has found throughout the House. (One of them, notably, is a child’s skeleton.) He is enough of a scientist to distinguish the sex of some of them, but not enough to be sure of all of them. Having scientifically examined and documented the skeletons, Piranesi proceeds to bring them food and drink offerings. He himself notices nothing discordant about the two activities, one scientific and the other classically pagan.
Piranesi has other odd mystical instincts that dovetail seamlessly (for him) with his role as a “scientist.” He sees no tension between his detailed observations of the House’s birds and his suspicion that they are trying to warn him about the future by their flight patterns. He talks to both the birds and the skeletons as if they could understand him. As I’ve noted before, he even has an occasional moment of mystical rapture.
Though Piranesi’s mysticism is often met with disappointment, the House and the novel itself never completely prove him wrong. The birds in fact are consistently right. The most striking instance occurs early in the book when Piranesi sees an albatross in flight, and he reacts as if it were an angel speeding toward him to join in a mystical union. Both he and the albatross are in for a hard landing (literally). But despite the fact that the albatross turns out to be merely a clumsy albatross, its coming to the House is not a random occurrence. As in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the albatross is a symbol of both divine warning and help. (It plays the same role in Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawntreader.) The albatross’s arrival signals Piranesi’s impending deliverance from the Other; and though Piranesi himself has no premonition of it, he naively names the current year in his journal “The Year the Albatross Came to the South-Western Halls.” This heading appears in every single journal entry throughout the novel. The mystical moment of rapture, as Clarke signals to us, was not completely wrong.
The complete fusion of Piranesi’s “scientific” and “mystical” sides is one of the novel’s main themes and most compellingly executed achievements. As the reader discovers much later in the book, the magical realism of the House grants direct knowledge of its most important realities to the naive and simple. Black magicians like the Other mistakenly think the House hides the key to controlling the natural world and perhaps even all humanity. The House resists them. The main thing the House actually holds is direct knowledge of reality for its own sake. The House is not a means for dominating other minds or even altering natural forces like tides. It is knowledge for the love of knowing—especially knowing other minds.
The House is thus the object of scientific analysis and naive religious experience simultaneously. Both attitudes assume (naively!) the reality of the experience and the fundamental trustworthiness of that reality. Neither science nor mysticism, nor any interpersonal relationship for that matter, gets off the ground without a deep faith that reality is not random, perverse, or maliciously deceptive. Both the scientist and the mystic trust simply in the deepest realities. They believe they can know things, and they turn to experience for direct knowledge.
In his simplicity, Piranesi thinks the most reasonable interpretation of nature (by which he means the House) is that it exists as an end to be loved and enjoyed. Similarly, he thinks other persons exist to be loved and enjoyed. That is true even if the persons persist only as skeletons. The dead, the statues, and even the Other, for Piranesi, are not tools or obstacles or artifacts but ends.
But Andrew Ketterley, of course, needs tools. Especially he needs Piranesi to explore the House for him—whatever the cost to Piranesi. When it suddenly turns out that someone else has gotten access to the House and is looking for Piranesi, Ketterley becomes murderous.
Good and Evil
And here we come to the central, intentional paradox of the book. The Other’s actions are evil. Piranesi was originally a highly educated researcher who was lured into the House and who suffered a near-total mental breakdown before the onset of his amnesia. He is thereafter unable to leave because the Other knows the magic and he does not. The sudden return of his memory later in the book precipitates another breakdown. The psychological harms inflicted on Piranesi turn out to be real and permanent. And yet the House is always—always—portrayed as good. In fact, Piranesi is not alone in thinking it good. The reader thinks so too.
Piranesi’s relationship to the House is one of a child to a benefactor or good father. At times, Piranesi seems to view the House as God. He prays to the House when he is in danger, and he thanks the House for its many gifts. Repeatedly, Piranesi speaks of the House having consciousness, desires, and good will:
“It is my belief that the World (or, if you will, the House, since the two are for all practical purposes identical) wishes an inhabitant for Itself to be a witness to its Beauty and the recipient of its Mercies.”
“It is my belief that the House itself loves and blesses equally everything that it has created. Should I try to do the same?”
“The beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.”
On one occasion, Piranesi is exploring the House in a cloud so thick that he can’t see his own feet. He steps off the edge of a floor that has completely crumbled away. But before he plunges to his death, he is caught inexplicably by the outstretched hands of the Trampled Man, the giant whose arms writhe over the gaping abyss as he is hoofed to death by a centaur. Piranesi scrambles up the Trampled Man’s arms and huddles like a child in the giant’s lap until the cloud lifts and he can see his way safely. Piranesi marvels at his rescue, and both he and the reader silently attribute it to the House.
On another occasion, Piranesi spends the night in a hall that is unlike the others. It has no windows and no birds; it is pitch black and silent. The Other suspects the place is a temple, and he sends Piranesi to determine whether it is suitable for black magic. Like a child, Piranesi fears what will happen in the dark:
“Suppose... I lay down to sleep, only to wake and find Myself surrounded by horrors?”
He does fall asleep, and he does wake. What he finds is a full moon shining through the hall’s doorway. The moonlight reveals thousands of statues packed into the hall, all turned toward the doorway as if to gaze at the light. They are calm and reverent; there are figures embracing, parents with their children, even a dog with its owner. One statue stands in front of the rest, “elation in his Face, a Banner in his Hand.” As Piranesi says,
“I almost forgot to breathe. For a moment I had an inkling of what it might be like if instead of two people in the World there were thousands.”
What Piranesi most fears turns into one of the best moments in the book. He dreads horror but finds light. This is a major theme not only in Piranesi but in Clarke’s view of fantasy more generally. As she recently told a journalist, she is working on an “anti-horror novel.” In her own words, “Horror novels have this idea that there’s a kind of secret at the center of the world. And that secret is horrific…. So this would be more about the fact that, at the center of things, there’s a secret or mystery, and it is joyful.”
What Does It All Mean?
What are we to make of a House like this?
We cannot get away with an appeal to poetic license. “The House is a beautiful fictional device which Clarke uses to showcase her rich imagination and keep the reader reading.” Or “the House is a symbol for the psychological coping mechanisms used by people experiencing amnesia / mental instability / various kinds of suffering.” It is clear that Clarke intends the House to mean more than this.
Piranesi’s final journal entry in the novel—after his return to our world—records two discoveries. First, he suddenly recognizes a few people in the real world who are clearly represented by statues in the House. An old man in a city park has the same features as a great king in the forty-eighth western hall, and two children in the same park have their counterpart statues in the twenty-seventh southern hall. Second, Piranesi’s desire to return to the House meets with an unexpected realization: he has not really left the House. His concluding entry in the novel is that here too, in the real world, “the beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.”
“Infinite,” of course, means “without limits.” So we should have guessed from the beginning. Clarke means the House to be here too, and she means Piranesi to ultimately be about the real world.
This brings me to the central insight of the book. The central insight is simple and has been written a thousand times in sacred texts, philosophical treatises, novels, epics, and romances. It is that, despite all appearances to the contrary, God is good. Moreover, reason itself tells us that God’s providence for his creatures is overwhelmingly good.
The references in Piranesi to ancient philosophy are relevant here. Clarke brings in very few sacred or religious allusions; instead, the main intellectual references are to the Greeks. This is in keeping with C.S. Lewis’s approach: reason and faith are not at odds. If inquiring minds want to know whether God exists and whether He is good, they do not need either Judaism or Christianity. Ancient Greek philosophy answered those questions on its own. Plato argued that the One was identical to the Good and the True and the Beautiful. Aristotle argued that there is an Unmoved Mover, and that the world of movable things (e.g., nature) is ordered to the good as an end. This was not blind faith, according to the philosophers. It was reason.
And yet how persuasive is that central insight for most people in Clarke’s audience? It’s one thing to rehearse the goodness of the One in Greek philosophy or the mercies of God in ancient texts. It’s another to tell a story in which the fundamental goodness of reality appears psychologically compelling to someone who is suffering in 2012.
How Psychologically Compelling Is Piranesi?
As an evaluation of Piranesi, I have two personal stories that relate to the psychological plausibility of the novel. The first story is about a close family member who died from dementia about six years ago. The second is about my father’s undergraduate professor, now an elderly man, whose family helped Jews escape from Germany during World War II.
Story One: Dementia
Just over eight years ago, our dear “E” was diagnosed with dementia. Her decline was painful, and about 18 months into it she died. In many ways, reading Piranesi reminded me of the fragmented reality we lived through as her memory degenerated.
In the early stages, E’s delusions were happy. She would see children whom the rest of us couldn’t see. She would talk happily about recent conversations with her sister-in-law, who had passed away several years ago. “Don’t engage with these beliefs, either positively or negatively,” the medical advice said. “Change the subject, and the delusions will usually go away.” And they did.
But then came episodes that were not pleasant. She would stand up from her overstuffed easy chair to go somewhere else in the house, and she would look down her hallway, which had two doors on the right and two doors on the left, all very similar. Instantly she would be lost—as lost as Piranesi in an infinite hall with infinite rooms. Where was she to find the room she wanted? Tremulously, she would ask us.
The hardest part was when reality broke down so much that it made communication impossible. That happened when she went into the nursing home. Communication is literally the holding of something in common, but what happens when reality refuses to be common? The standard pattern for our conversations became the following:
- we would walk into her room, smiling and saying it was great to see her,
- she would beam back at us,
- she would say something good-natured that made no sense at all (“Please stop flying around up there and come down to the floor” or “This morning they washed my hair with peanut butter”),
- we would look puzzled and shift the conversation to what we thought was totally normal and non-threatening,
- she would get the saddest look on her face, lower her eyes, and stop responding to us at all.
One example was especially puzzling. We were visiting her as a group, bringing along a family friend she hadn’t seen in a while. We all walked into her room beaming, waking her up from where she’d dozed off at her bedside table. She saw the friend and immediately brightened up.
“Well!” she announced with delight. “He’s bigger than me, but I’m smarter than him!”
The friend laughed. “I’m not sure where that came from,” he said jovially, “but it’s good to see you! How are you?”
“Well, it’s all German to me,” she said, with a tiny hint of exasperation, as if she were explaining an obvious problem. This puzzled all of us, so we naturally shifted to the most normal and non-threatening conversation. How was she doing? She looked great! Wasn’t it fantastic to have X here (the friend)? It had been a while!
She sadly lowered her eyes and stopped talking to us.
As we were sitting around trying to make cheerful and non-distressing conversation, I noticed what was on the bedside table. A word search puzzle lay there, apparently brought in by the staff, who probably knew that puzzles are recommended for memory-ward patients. I kept thinking about it for the rest of the day. I thought it was strange because it was overly optimistic. E’s condition for weeks had been so bad that she probably no longer knew what a word search puzzle was, let alone how to solve one.
And then it hit me. She didn’t know what a word search puzzle was. It was a jumble of letters. It probably looked like a foreign language. We would say, “It’s Greek to me.” But she had grown up during the 1930s and 40s, during the World War II years, when the quintessentially foreign language was German. “It’s all German to me!” Was she talking about the word search puzzle?
A possible chain of events formed in my head. It made sense of her. The staff had brought in the puzzle. She didn’t remember what exactly it was, but she knew it was a game. She dozed off while trying to figure it out. Then we suddenly showed up—perhaps without a moment’s loss in her perception of time. We were clearly there to play the game. The family friend was first in the group, and she clearly remembered him. She may have even remembered that he was always good at games. She was overjoyed. So she immediately issued a friendly challenge: “He’s bigger than me, but I’m smarter than him!”
Then we made the mistake of responding the wrong way. We were puzzled. She tried to explain that she didn’t understand the game. “It’s all German to me!” But we hadn’t even noticed the game. So we made an even worse mistake. We changed the topic. She realized that we weren’t there to play the game. We weren’t even in the same slice of reality. As the pagan princess Orual puts it in C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces: “The world had broken in pieces and Psyche and I were not in the same piece.”
The problem was us.
Many times afterwards, I wondered during our visits if the same process was repeating itself in every conversation. What if her own reality was fine—whole and reasonable and even enjoyable? What if she still liked games, and friendly competition, and peanut butter? What if it was only we who didn’t make sense? What if we were the ones shut out from an otherwise good time?
Clarke is a master of psychological sense-making. Piranesi’s reality always makes sense to him. It makes sense right up until the great crisis of the book, when the terrible pressures of self-contradiction finally break his trust in his own memories, awaken terrible suspicions about his life before the House, and at last shatter his own personality. But along with that terrible process, Clarke points to something else. Tragedy is different on the inside versus the outside.
To view tragedy from the outside is almost all we ever do. It’s the only way we can view others’ suffering in real life. We assume the suffering is worse than it looks, and that’s a safe assumption. But with Piranesi we see the tragedy from the inside. And in that tragedy is something we can only see from the inside: the degree to which the House in which we suffer is inexhaustibly beautiful and infinitely kind.
In portraying tragedy from the inside, Clarke is also echoing Lewis. Sometimes the inside of a thing is bigger than its outside. In the last book of the Chronicles of Narnia—the only real defeat in the whole series—the ill-fated heroes are beaten in battle and forced into a small wretched stable. Their enemies view it as an ultimate triumph: they’ve trapped the last Narnians and can kill them however they like. But unbeknownst to them, the door of the stable has become a door straight into the heart of the best reality. The main characters inside the stable find themselves talking face to face with Aslan and their dearest friends. The stable is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
It is as if C.S. Lewis were allegorizing an ancient Jewish text:
“The souls of the just are in the hand of God,
and the torment of death shall not touch them.
In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die:
… but they are in peace.”
Taking up this theme from Lewis, Clarke’s Piranesi aims at the same thing. Whatever the Other meant for evil, the House turned it to good. That is why the two living victims who escape from the House—Piranesi and a single survivor before him—both ultimately want to return. The good on the inside was greater than the evil on the outside.
Story Two: A Different Professor
This brings me to my father’s professor and lifelong academic mentor, Herr Doktor Professor M. He is now very old but is still in touch with the family. He was the opposite of the Uncle Andrews of the world. He grew up in a German family that was helping Jews escape in the 1940s. His earliest memories are of standing at the windows of his childhood home, watching for strangers at dusk. Strangers sometimes appeared. They would come in and eat a meal with the family. They would sleep in a hidden room in the basement. The next evening they would move on. No one ever found out their names or whether they got to where they were going.
Sometimes more exciting things happened. One day, as M relates, he was looking out the window when a car of Nazis pulled up to the neighbor’s house. They charged in and dragged out the 30-year-old daughter of the couple who lived there. She was not Jewish, but she had been overheard criticizing Hitler. The Nazis sped away with her in the car. Weeks later her parents heard she had died of a heart attack. Years later, they found out she had been poisoned in prison. Even without that immediate knowledge, the neighbors all got the point: next time it could be us.
And yet M’s little family kept helping the Jews. It was M’s grandfather who spearheaded the effort. What motivated him to do it? The risks were real, and other evils were not wanting. Young M’s own father was forcibly drafted into Hitler’s army and was never seen again. American bombers shelled M’s little town for weeks based on a miscalculation. Innocent townspeople, including at least one child, died during the bombings. M’s mother died not long after the end of the war. Even then, when there were no more Nazis, fleeing Jews, or bombings, there were totalitarian Russian officials setting up a nuclear plant near their East German town. Eventually, by a stroke of bureaucratic incompetence (or perhaps, as Piranesi would put it, by the strange providences of the House), M was sent official paperwork allowing him to leave for the West, alone, at the age of 12.
M is old now, and his hands are crippled with terrible neuropathy. But he insists that his family acted the way they did because they believed in the goodness of God. Theirs was a naive faith in what J.R.R. Tolkien later called the great “eucatastrophe”—the horror at the heart of reality that turned out to be its greatest joy. Man killed God. But in dying, God undid death and made possible a resurrection for every soul of man.
As M often repeats, “God is too wise to make a mistake, and he is too good to be unkind.” How naive and simplistic is it to believe such a thing?
Clarke answers: as naive and simplistic as the scientist’s belief that there are patterns, that one can map stars and predict tides. Faith in God is not different from faith in “nature”; both must be assumed simplistically, and then depended upon, in order for anything else to happen or make sense. Piranesi is naive and simplistic and observationally keen and scientifically astute all at once. By the end of the novel, he is shattered. But at the beginning, and in the middle, and at the end, Piranesi has the same things to tell us:
“I am the Beloved Child of the House.”
“The sea sweeps through the house. Sometimes it swept over me, but always I was saved.”
And repeatedly:
“The beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.”