In The Magician’s Nephew (1955) by C.S. Lewis, one of my favourite childhood books, two children, Digory and Polly, are tricked into exploring other worlds. They first alight in a mysterious wood full of shallow pools. Each pool is a world. The first one they choose takes them to an empty, crumbling city filled with “tired-looking light.” Wandering in a vast palace, the children find a Hall of Images. It contains life-like seated statues of rulers clad in magnificent clothes, their expressions gradually morphing from benign to cruel. The last seated figure is the Witch-Empress Jadis, whom Digory unwittingly awakens from her enchanted sleep. Though she’ll soon turn to wreaking havoc, Jadis nevertheless leads the children to safety as the palace begins to collapse. They pass through “a whole maze of halls and stairs and courtyards.” Outside, Digory and Polly see the full expanse of the ruined city of Charn beneath an ancient “withered sun.” What had become a decadent civilisation rent by civil war was finally destroyed by Jadis’ transgressive magical knowledge, a “Deplorable Word” that obliterated all but herself.
Reading Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi (2020), I quickly became attuned to the correspondences between Charn and its protagonist’s mysterious world of the House, a series of Halls filled with statues and windows that “look out upon Great Courtyards.” Clarke’s narrator believes himself to be one of only two living people in the world, whose marvels he records in numbered and indexed journals, capitalising nouns like an early modern gentleman. With his intimate knowledge of the House he aids his supposed friend “the Other,” who searches for the “Great and Secret Knowledge” that includes such Jadis-like powers as the “vanquishing of Death” and the “penetration of lesser minds.” The Other mockingly christens him Piranesi, after the eighteenth-century artist who created repeated images of cavernous imaginary prisons. Gradually it is revealed that he was once an arrogant young academic called Matthew Rose Sorensen, whose interest in the “transgressive” thinking of the disreputable Laurence Arne-Sayles and his acolytes led to his own entrapment in another world.
Repressing the memory of this trauma, Piranesi identifies merely as “Myself” or the “Beloved Child of the House.” Unlike Charn, the House is hospitable. He has learned to survive by collecting freshwater rain from the Upper Halls, fishing in the watery Lower Halls, and calculating the Tides that wash through the Middle Halls. Nesting albatrosses and his beloved statues provide companionship. His reverent refrain is “The Beauty of the House is immeasurable, its Kindness infinite.”
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Piranesi
Piranesi’s favourite statue is a faun holding his finger to his lips. He dreams of a girl meeting such a creature amidst snow—a clue that he originates from the reader’s own world, with a hazy formative memory of the iconic scene between Lucy Pevensie and Mr Tumnus in Lewis’ first book about the magical world of Narnia, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950). Upon Piranesi’s publication, Susanna Clarke was explicit about the impact of the children’s writer, scholar, and Christian apologist on her writing. “I found Lewis at a very impressionable age,” she said in an interview with the Guardian, “and then he sort of organised the inside of my head.”
Both writers have merrily magpie-like minds, lacing their books with eclectic allusions to other literary works. Narnia embraces both Father Christmas and a classical Arcadian landscape of fauns, dryads, and nymphs. The Magician’s Nephew merges Genesis and the Garden of Eden with the Apples of Youth from Norse myth. Clarke refers to the likes of Plato, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (those albatrosses), the Minotaur’s labyrinth, Jorge Luis Borges, and of course, Lewis himself. Even the subtler nods to Narnia produce pleasing jolts of recognition in me: Piranesi’s mistaking of London’s Battersea for “Batter-Sea” echoes Mr Tumnus’ misunderstanding of the wardrobe in the spare room through which Lucy travels as the city of “War Drobe” in “Spare Oom.”
Clarke also professes an “old longing” to find Lewis’ Wardrobe, the portal that first leads the Pevensie children into Narnia. Yet it is The Magician’s Nephew, Narnia’s origin story, that has perhaps the most profound influence upon Piranesi. The affinities between the two books illuminate the major themes of both, particularly their interest in the ethics of scholarship and different ways of knowing. Piranesi’s reworking of Lewis reveals just how profoundly our childhood reading can shape us, providing us with our first Other Worlds to explore.
In the figure of the Other, who in our world is Valentine Ketterley, one of Arne-Sayles’ former students, Clarke creates a new version of Digory’s Uncle Andrew Ketterley, the eponymous magician. Born in 1955, the year of The Magician’s Nephew’s publication, he too hails from “a very old Dorsetshire family,” has a predilection for elegant clothing, and possesses an intellectual curiosity that does not extend to personal fieldwork.
The Magician’s Nephew’s plot begins when neighbours Polly and Digory attempt to venture into the empty house beyond their two homes. Instead, they stumble into Uncle Andrew’s attic study, where he greets them with the unsettling words: “I am delighted to see you … Two children were just what I wanted.” He has created a series of magical rings capable of transporting beings between worlds. Initially testing the rings with guinea pigs, the magician now requires human subjects to report back. Polly vanishes after being tricked into touching one of the rings and Digory is manipulated into following her. Uncle Andrew has no intention of acting as his own test subject. In a speech that provides one of Piranesi’s epigraphs, he boasts, “I am the scholar, the magician, the adept, who is doing the experiment. Of course I need subjects to do it on.”
In Piranesi, after equilibrium is disturbed by an incomer to the House, a lost journal entry finally pieces together what happened to Matthew Rose Sorenson. It relates an encounter that parallels the scene in Uncle Andrew’s study. Five years ago, Matthew went to interview Valentine Ketterley in his Battersea home, asking Ketterley about his time in Laurence Arne-Sayles’ circle, hoping to learn more about the man who “wrote about magic and pretended it was science” and who “convinced a group of highly intelligent people that there were other worlds and he could take them there.” Clarke’s presentation of Arne-Sayles’ theories draws heavily on Lewis’ ideas about modern humanity’s alienated mechanistic view of the external world, as well as his friend Owen Barfield’s philosophical concept of Original Participation. Arne-Sayles believed that “the Ancients” enjoyed an active kinship with the universe, a relationship of mutual communication that gave them immense power. Shifts in this (Western) worldview literally disenchanted the world.
In his “Theory of Other Worlds,” Arne-Sayles argued that the energies of this Ancient knowledge must have leaked away somewhere, creating a doorway. He claimed the door could be found by returning to a pre-modern state, before the “iron hand of modern rationality gripped one’s mind.” In the garden of his childhood home, the doorways to many worlds appeared before him. He entered the one “into which everything forgotten flows” and finds himself in “a vast chamber” while a “strange thundering—as of a sea” fills his ears. At this point, Matthew believes that Arne-Sayles is a charlatan, but the world he describes is one Matthew will come to adore.
During the interview, Matthew’s supercilious attitude irritates Ketterley, although he is interested in his meticulous methods of record-keeping with physical journals. After Matthew unwisely reveals that he has not told anyone of his visit, Ketterley offers to perform the ritual that Arne-Sayles taught his students to help them cross worlds. Unexpectedly, it works. An incredulous Matthew finds himself in a room of looming Minotaur statues, hearing the “dull thud” of waves in other rooms. He notices that Ketterley is completely at ease, “smiling as if I was an experiment that had gone surprisingly well.” Repeating Uncle Andrew’s words almost verbatim, he says: “Forgive me for not saying anything before now … but I really am delighted to see you. A young, healthy man is just what I wanted.”
Both Ketterleys are scholars who use other people to achieve their aims. Both fail to appreciate other realms for their inherent worth. Although Piranesi’s Ketterley willingly enters the House, meeting regularly with Piranesi in order to give him tasks, perform empty rituals, or test his kidnappee’s continued amnesia, he limits the time he spends there, taking care not to venture far into its depths lest he should lose his sanity. Lewis’ Uncle Andrew does not willingly travel between worlds. He is forced into it, however, when Jadis manages to run amok in London, and the children use the rings to transport them all back to the Wood Between the Worlds, along with a cabby and his horse. The next world the group stumbles into is entirely new; they witness the golden lion Aslan sing Narnia into existence.
The children are entranced as stars appear, responding to the first song with their own “cold, tingling, silvery voices.” Next a joyful sun, then grass and trees to clothe the earth. Narnia’s creation song reverberates through the land. Everything bursts with life. When the alarmed and alarmingly strong Jadis throws the torn-off bar of a London lamppost she has brought with her at Aslan, he takes no notice. The bar becomes a seed that grows a new, whole lamppost. Rather than share in the children’s awe, Uncle Andrew’s mind instantly leaps to potential exploitation, colonialism, and violence:
Columbus, now, they talk about Columbus. But what was America to this? The commercial possibilities of this land are unbounded. Bring a few old bits of scrap iron here, bury ‘em, and up they come as brand new railway engines, battleships, anything you please … I shall be a millionaire. And then the climate! I feel years younger already. I can run it as a health resort … The first thing is to get that brute shot.
Valentine Ketterley shares the acquisitive motivations of his antecedent, bearing no affection for the House. He views it as empty a husk as Charn, “just endless dreary rooms all the same, full of decaying figures covered with bird shit.” Ketterley’s limitations are witheringly summarised by Arne-Sayles himself, who meets Piranesi in his last visit to the House from a hospital bed: “Ketterley is an egotist. He always thinks in terms of utility. He cannot imagine anything should exist unless he can make use of it.”
Thus, the Ketterleys belong to the Jadis School of destructive knowledge and unrestrained power. When Polly points out the terrible price paid by Charn’s population by Jadis’ use of the Deplorable Word, “the ordinary people … who’d never done you any harm. And the women, and the children, and the animals,” the Witch replies without remorse: “I was the Queen. They were my people. What else were they there for but to do my will?”
By contrast, Digory and Polly—children who have not lost their sense of wonder—and Piranesi—who communes with his “Complete and Whole” world like an Ancient—surpass the sinister Ketterleys in ways of knowing. In Clarke’s novel, Piranesi views himself as a scholar. This identity is foundational to his selfhood, one of the only constants between his consciousness and that of Matthew Rose Sorenson, from whom he has otherwise completely dissociated. He defines himself as a lover of “Reason” and “Science” with a “keen and lively” intellect. From the beginning of their story, Polly and Digory have strong exploratory impulses, like many children. Digory’s initial recklessness leads to Jadis being unleashed in Narnia. At the end of the book, he manages to resist Jadis’ temptation to use an apple conferring eternal youth to live forever himself. He rejects the Witch’s enticement of gaining immense power, saying “I don’t know that I care much about living on and on after everyone I know is dead.” Although the possibility of saving his ill mother agonises him, Digory chooses to honour his promise to bring the apple back to Aslan to help protect the land from evil. Prioritising Narnia, he is rewarded with the means to save his mother anyway and Digory grows up to become “a famous learned man, a Professor, and a great traveller.”
Piranesi, too, does not seek personal gain. The Other’s goals have always troubled him; he has no desire to control lesser minds, if lesser minds exist. Piranesi believes that accepting the House’s essential integrity would provide new possibilities: “Abandoning the search for the Knowledge would free us to pursue a new sort of science. We could follow any path that the data suggested to us.” He realises that:
the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a certain riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted, and that if ever we discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery … The House is Valuable because it is the House. It is enough in and of itself. It is not the means to an end.
Piranesi, Digory and Polly are all able to hear a world’s symphony, their musica universalis or cosmic music of celestial bodies posited by scholars from antiquity to the Renaissance. Meanwhile, Uncle Andrew seeks refuge in incomprehension: “the longer and more beautifully the Lion sang, the harder Uncle Andrew tried to make himself believe he heard nothing but roaring … Soon he couldn’t have heard anything else even if he had wanted to.” In a similar opposition, while Ketterley fails to view the House as anything more than an empty labyrinth, at night Piranesi listens and sings along with “the Song that the Moons and the stars were singing.” For the reverent scholar, worlds live, breathe, and sing.
By modelling her House on Charn rather than Narnia, however, Clarke also subverts Lewis, drawing attention to absences and prejudices in the Narnia Chronicles. Despite the criticism of colonialism in The Magician’s Nephew, Lewis still displays attitudes formed by the British imperial culture of his era. Jadis and Charn are delineated as “the Other” of Narnia using an Orientalist template of despotism: the tyrannous Empress’ city had temples and pyramids alongside its palaces and bridges. Jadis is presented as a Scandinavian Snow Queen figure in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but stereotypes of Middle Eastern decadence and corruption also appear in the characterisation of the Calormenes in The Horse and His Boy (1954).
I believe that Clarke responds to this Western-centric view by mentioning in Matthew’s academic biography that he is “the English son of a half-Danish, half-Scottish father and a Ghanaian mother.” Matthew’s notes on Ketterley’s background record him as being the son of a colonel (and occultist), perhaps picking up on Lewis’ brief mention that Digory’s father is “away in India,” hinting at both Ketterley families’ active involvement in Empire. This adds a crucial dimension to Matthew’s plight as Ketterley’s victim. Once he finally rediscovers the truth, Piranesi calls his predicament an “enslavement.” Piranesi reminds us that historically, whenever “magicians” needed “subjects,” it was colonised, racialised, or enslaved individuals who suffered most for many advances in scientific and medical knowledge.
In Scripture, Jesus says to his disciples about heaven: “In my Father’s house are many mansions” (John 14:2), a verse both Clarke and Lewis would be familiar with as practicing Anglicans. This is the King James’ version, but other translations use “abodes,” “dwellings,” or “small rooms.” Narnia and the House, the Wood Between the Worlds and Arne-Sayles’ many doorways, are just some of the many mansions or small rooms awaiting us. Lewis intended a Christian sensibility for his Narnia books, but Piranesi is more ambivalent, as demonstrated by the lasting psychological consequences of Matthew’s imprisonment. Creating Aslan as a fiercely gentle avatar of God, Lewis sought to instil a sense of joy in religion that he feared was lost. Joy was complex for Lewis, distinct from pleasure, bound up with a sense of “inconsolable longing,” “a desire for our own far-off country.” Clarke discussed Matthew-as-Piranesi’s own sense of joy in the House in the Church Times podcast, living “not an easy life but a joyful one.” As readers, we cannot be certain whether Piranesi’s perceptions are real or deluded. I don’t believe, however, that this ultimately matters very much. It is Piranesi’s approach to his environment that enables his ingenuity of survival and enriches his existence, as opposed to the wretchedness of the Other’s incurious avarice.
One man’s Charn is another woman’s benevolent House. Critics have suggested Piranesi’s Halls as a metaphor for Clarke’s own isolating experience of chronic illness, and Lewis’ Wood Between the Worlds for a great library. Both writers’ realms have many layers of potential meaning. There are myriad ways to know them. An author writes a doorway into existence, a portal to another world. We readers must hope they are friendly magicians, who do not want to seal us in airless rooms but instead take us down many winding ways, inviting our own wanderings. I hope to keep visiting and revisiting expansive texts, including The Magician’s Nephew and Piranesi, where I can freely interpret these worlds I find within worlds within worlds.
Sources
- Historian uncovers gynecology’s brutal roots in slavery, Berkeley News
- Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind (2022).
- Julie M. Dugger, ‘Lewis and Clarke in the Caves: Art and Platonic Worlds in the Caves’, Mythlore 40:1 (2021).
- Laura Miller, ‘Susanna Clarke’s Fantasy World of Interiors’, New Yorker, 7th September 2020.
- Maria Popova, ‘The Thing Itself: C.S Lewis on What We Long for in Existential Longing’, Marginalian.
- ‘Susanna Clarke: “I was cut off from the world, bound in one place by illness”’, Guardian, 12th September 2020.
- Medical experimentation on slaves in 18th-century Caribbean colonies, Stanford News
Iona is a writer and gallery worker living in Edinburgh. She has written for Literary Hub, Lucy Writers, and the Wellcome Collection, and posts essays exploring the intersections between art, nature and longing on her Substack newsletter the cherry log.
