We’ve come to the end of Susannah Clarke’s novel, which means it’s time to discuss whether the somewhat controversial ending is ultimately satisfying, different ways of interpreting the book, the way it presents it’s myriad philosophical contemplations, and much more.
"You have to like very specific things for the House to be interpreted as God. you have to like statues and stairs and seaweed soup"
That feels like a fundamental misunderstanding of how a Christian reading of the book works. I don't think you have to believe the House is God, just that Piranesi has had a mystical enlightenment and that he attributes to the House the transcendent realities of which he has become aware. What you have to buy into is the narrator's goodness and innocence and purity and that *to him* the House is the *experience* that has enacted the transformation of his character.
The House is encounter. The House is the wilderness in which he has met his first glimmering experience of God. The House is his personification of a benevolence and a providence that he perceives at work in the world. Just as Narnia is the place where the children encounter God in the guise of Aslan. Just as the children must find Aslan under a new name in our world, it's Matthew/Piranesi's task going forward to find a new name for that Infinite Beauty and Kindness that he has encountered in the House. He has to find what it is called in our world. It's not that the House is God for the reader, but that we can recognize in his love for Infinitely Kindness and Eternal Beauty that he has encountered one of the aspects of God.
No, he has not yet fully encountered the person of Christ in as clear a way as Aslan is Christ. But in his mystical vision of the albatross, he's encountered at least a harbinger of Christ. A cross which becomes a bird. A bird for whom he makes a significant sacrifice, giving up a part of his hoard of seaweed so that the birds can make a nest and nurture new life. In helping the albatrosses to have a baby, he is nurturing his own infant faith. The albatross is clearly meant to be significant. It's the basis for his dating, just like Christ is the basis for the Christian calendar. It's coming changes everything, gives him a place to start counting a new year from.
I think Piranesi's encounter with the albatross is like St Kevin's encounter with the blackbird, it's a transformative moment, enacted by a hermit who is communing with nature but the communion with nature is also a communion with the Creator. Piranesi's faith is a simple medieval sort of faith, a faith which finds parables in the birds of the air and the fish of the sea. It reminds me of St Francis preaching to the birds or St Anthony preaching to the fish. It's not pagan, it's early medieval Christianity.
My frustration with listening to this episode is with Heidi's wanting to separate the Christian vs Classical meanings of the text, insisting that you have to pick one or the other as the interpretive lens through which you read the novel. To me that feels like an embodiment of the statue of the man using a sword to break the globe to understand it. I don't think we are meant to parse out Christian vs Classical in this way as if they are opposing forces. I think they're both contained in the Globe and the process of pulling them apart like that breaks something that is whole in the narrative. The story is a synthesis of the Classical and the Christian (kind of like Narnia is with the fauns and Bacchus and Silenus and the river gods and dryads as well as Aslan who tames them all) and you can't pick one or the other or you lose something. It's both/and, not either/or.
I don't think the Cave reading makes sense if you toss out the Christian elements. I don't think the Christian parable makes sense if you ignore the classical elements. I think it only makes sense if you allow those elements to mingle mysteriously. If you apply the Classical lens too strictly you get the dilemma of having to decide if our world is the cave or the House is, if our world is Real or the House is. But that dilemma is not how the narrator sees it. I think the key to finding this novel satisfactory is trusting the narrator and not dismissing him as a madman.
I think seeing it as an either/or question is a mistake. The House has something our world lacks. Our world has something the House lacks. It's only in bringing those elements together in a synthesis that wholeness can be achieved. Likewise, both the readings of the story as a Christian parable or as a Classical parable are lacking. It only makes sense if you don't choose between them.
And this is the meaning of the narrator's having three different names. Matthew Rose Sorensen is the man of "the real world" the materialist, post-enlightenment, postmodern world of academia. Piranesi is the man of the House, the man of wonder and enchantment. But the narrator at the end is neither Matthew nor Piranesi. He's a new man, the Beloved Child of the House who agrees to leave the house out of kindness. This is his act of self sacrifice, not his refusal to kill the Other, but his willingness to leave the House as an act of kindness for Matthew's family who he doesn't even remember.
At the end of the novel, the nameless narrator doesn't belong to one world or the other, but to both. He's like the Pevensie children who have left the wardrobe and Narnia who now have the task of finding what Aslan's name is in our world. He's a character at the beginning of a journey, not at the end. Full of childlike wonder, his task will be to hold on to the wonder and enchantment of the House and not become jaded by the materialist world. Because it's not that our world isnt' real, it's that it's disenchanted. All the enchantment has been taken away from it and deposited into the House. It's the narrator's job to re-enchant our world and to bring his love for the beauty of the tides (which represents the enchantment of nature, like the dryads and naiads in Narnia) and the statues (which represent maybe the Platonic Forms but also maybe something more like poetic archetypes) into our world.
What the House has that our world lacks is enchantment. Modern man lacks the sense of unity with nature that premodern man had. Modern Man also lacks a sense of mythopoesis-- and it's that mythologizing principle that's embodied in the statues. I think the statues are less Platonic forms and more a vision of the Imago Dei.
Really enjoyed these conversations! It’s been awhile since I was able to read and complete a book and all the episodes. I agree with David. I enjoyed the book, but I didn’t find it satisfying.
As I was listening to your conversation about the end of the book, I began to think the book and it's ending very closely mirror the experience of being a third culture person, someone who has lived for an extended period in a foreign (to them) environment and then returned to their "home" culture. Our main character was one person, Matthew R. S., before coming to the house, another person, Piranesi, in the house, and a third person after the house. So also those who have lived cross culturally. My own experience of living in a foreign country, making a home there, and then returning to my birth culture makes the end of the book feel familiar. The third person in Piranesi embodies this convergence of worlds, not totally in one or the other and somewhat in both at the same time. He isn’t quite Matthew, nor is he Piranesi either. Perhaps the ending feels unsatisfying because it mirrors this third culture experience, which can make one feel unsatisfied or unsettled.
Enjoyed this discussion today. I wanted to comment from a (perhaps) unique perspective. As someone who is healing from spiritual abuse and religious trauma, I related more deeply than I wanted to to Piranesi. To find that a place you thought was thoroughly good was, in fact, being controlled by evil men is so difficult to wake up from. To lose something you once loved (and viewed as good) in that way is so hard. I resonated deeply with the fact that Michael Rose Sorenson was inside of him, but he couldn't quite get back to him. The sad reality is that there are evil things that happen to us in this life that impact our souls in ways that leave lasting damage. The fact that he is neither Piranesi nor Michael Rose Sorenson feels exactly right to those of us waking up from spiritual abuse. To anyone else who may have been impacted by this book in that kind of way - may we all find our way back to our true selves. (PS - Heidi - I am Lily Jacob's mom!! Take the girls to tea sometime?)
Hiiiii! I LOVE this comment & I wholly agree that the book can be read through the lens of psychological lament & hope. And YES, let’s get the girls together for tea & a chat. ❤️
I have two questions: 1. Matthew Rose Sorensen only maintains his goodness within The House, governed by The Other whether your interpretation of the book sees him as a prisoner or not. What does this say about our relationship to hierarchy? I find the implications troubling, especially given the nature of The Other, but I’m curious to hear what you think. 2. Piranesi says in Part 1 that he once thought The Folded-Up Child had been intended to be his wife. This gives me pause, as it hints at child trafficking particularly in light of the experience of James Ritter, or the possibility of forced or at least manipulated mating pairing under authoritarian control. Even if you apply Plato’s forms and The Child is the essence of The Child and The House exists beyond time, it suggests that females are either dead or transient beings (Raphael). I’m curious how you resolve this and still maintain a positive interpretation?
Thanks for the thorough and thoughtful analysis of the book! Loved reading along with y'all. I wanted to suggest that Clarke is not discouraging people from analyzing the book or the world, but rather giving us a way to do so. The connection of The Other inspecting The House in a way similar to the tower in The Monster and the Critics was spot-on; he breaks a thing in an attempt to see what's inside. But Clarke provides us with another way to be a scientist in the narrator and Raphael: They study The House with reverence, recording note so that they and others can better navigate it. Made me think of the National Parks principle "leave no trace." I think that gives us a framework for how to approach a world, or a book, or a person.
Also, if anyone enjoyed Piranesi, I would highly recommend Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Incredible world-building and witty prose (more humor than in this one). It's worth reading for the footnotes alone.
The house has one effect on all, including the villains and those who don’t stay long enough to lose their memory: everyone agrees that everything in the house is meaning-full. Not even the pattern of bird flight is incidental. Some respond by trying to extract and control this meaning; others are simply receptive to it. Perhaps only those emptied of themselves by the house can be fully receptive.
And in this lies the house’s attraction—if we begin with the assumption that our world is devoid of meaning, or at least less saturated with it. For it is not that Piranesi returns to our world with an enhanced ability to perceive meaning in all things. He can only do so where he finds a direct analogue to the meaning he once discerned in the house.
A few thoughts after enjoying the book and podcast discussions. To me it seems the house must be good as a part of Creation, just as the kind of in between world in the Magician’s Nephew would be good, all of it having been created by Aslan, just as a multiverse, if it existed (sorry, it doesn’t), would be good because it is created by God. I realize that this may seem like an imposition of Christian theology, but I feel like the book calls for something of an interpretation like this. The judgment on the search for transgressive gnosis ascribed to the house by Piranesi, that is, its judgment on the Other’s quest as wrong headed and harmful, which Piranesi accepts and agrees with, I think is to be taken as right and part of why Piranesi seems in some ways improved by the labrynth- because he has a kind of religious in-tunedness with the creation though he may tend toward a pantheistic interpretation. I don’t understand the role, though, of his memory loss. (There are a few dark hints of sexual exploitation, it seems, but these are never elaborated. If this were the case, and the memory loss was connected to the theory of traumatic suppression, what would Paul McHugh say, who battled pop notions of trauma and memory suppression). His experience of the house has taught him, it seems, to not look for wisdom in what transgresses the Creation.
- Piranesi is a better person because of his religious openness which leads him to cherish life. His veneration of the dead or care for their remains and their memory is of course a sign of in-tunedness with the image of God in man to some extent, interpreted from the outside with a Christian lens.
-I appreciated the illumination of the allusion to Yates’s boyhood town in the last conversation after having recently read a book of his poetry and a small biography of him. It brought me to recognition of the connection.
-I thought Heidi’s suggestion about the labyrinth being psychological an interesting possibility. Perhaps it is like St. Teresa of Avila’s interior castle.
To the question why is Piranesi good and the other not. Is it the forgetting that makes him good? Matthew stays in the house so long he forgets the world he came from but the other never stays log enough to forget. perhaps she is saying that the real world is what makes people behave badly and the influence of other people and drive for success or fame corrupts. But that when left alone to simply survive in a hostile environment where his every moment is spent in keeping himself alive and safe from the elements or exploring and learning an almost endless environment is what keep him good. Because I totally see the house as hostile and him as a prisoner and I had a very motherly desire to rescue him because he seemed almost unwilling to rescue himself because he no longer felt lost. But the house being what it was took Matthew back to an almost Adam and Eve existence where he is innocent but I felt there was a void to the situation a lack of the divine. It felt almost purgatorial
Someone on Substack posted a conversation between Lucy and Aslan recently, and I realized a problem I have with seeing the house as a god in this book is that it doesn't speak. The true God speaks and listens (thank you Daniel Nayeri). Piranesi seems to long for human interaction and even speaks to the dead, the birds, etc. although in the end finding people insufficient to his happiness.
To Sean's point about whether the author is leaving it to the reader to realize her judgment of the house, I point to the title and narrator. Can a prison be benevolent?
I think human imagination is a wonderful, God-reflecting thing but cannot answer the ultimate questions.
I think the birds, the dead, the statues, all of that is how the House speaks. Those are it's voices.
Just as God often speaks to us through other people, through nature, or through small events of our days, but rarely speaks in thunderous voice directly.
Omggg! Its been so long since I’ve listened to a full Close Reads series, and honestly, I just wanted to say I miss you guys. I chuckled as David volunteered as tribute to sit on Heidi’s book therapy couch. I feel like you each are macrocosmic objective correlatives to the little arguments I had with myself when I read this book a few years ago. 😂 From Heidi’s “But that’s the question!” To David’s “But it feels like a cop-out!” To Sean’s “Its kinda cool, I guess…”
Loved this episode and wanted to piggyback on one of the last things David mentioned: the reference to the occult. My husband and I both listened to the Audible version, so I can't go back and quote the portions I would like to reference, but my husband was very put off by the idea that the house could be good (my interpretation) when the only people seemingly able to access it did so through occult practices. Our "good" characters were tricked into getting there (Matthew Rose Sorensen) or had to be guided there (Sara Raphael) by a "transgressive thinker." What does this say either about the labyrinth or about Clarke? Labeling the occult leader as "prophet" by Piranesi seems to glorify him, but he has clearly been abusive, manipulative, and cruel. Unlike C.S. Lewis, who ultimately credits Aslan for Uncle Andrew's stumbling upon the magic for world jumping, Clarke gives this honor to Arne-Sayles. Why did Clarke create a super villain as the one who finds the "door" to the other world?
I’m so glad Heidi brought up the pagan take. I’ve been reading Greek myths alongside my daughter so that was what I had in mind this episode in my “reading” of the House.
I’m with Graham in being disappointed with the ending. It felt like waking up from a dream to an episode of a tv crime drama. Totally didn’t meet its potential for true transcendence. I enjoyed reading it, but it felt like the author herself was searching for meaning, and this is the product of her search though she hasn’t really found the full Truth yet.
"You have to like very specific things for the House to be interpreted as God. you have to like statues and stairs and seaweed soup"
That feels like a fundamental misunderstanding of how a Christian reading of the book works. I don't think you have to believe the House is God, just that Piranesi has had a mystical enlightenment and that he attributes to the House the transcendent realities of which he has become aware. What you have to buy into is the narrator's goodness and innocence and purity and that *to him* the House is the *experience* that has enacted the transformation of his character.
The House is encounter. The House is the wilderness in which he has met his first glimmering experience of God. The House is his personification of a benevolence and a providence that he perceives at work in the world. Just as Narnia is the place where the children encounter God in the guise of Aslan. Just as the children must find Aslan under a new name in our world, it's Matthew/Piranesi's task going forward to find a new name for that Infinite Beauty and Kindness that he has encountered in the House. He has to find what it is called in our world. It's not that the House is God for the reader, but that we can recognize in his love for Infinitely Kindness and Eternal Beauty that he has encountered one of the aspects of God.
No, he has not yet fully encountered the person of Christ in as clear a way as Aslan is Christ. But in his mystical vision of the albatross, he's encountered at least a harbinger of Christ. A cross which becomes a bird. A bird for whom he makes a significant sacrifice, giving up a part of his hoard of seaweed so that the birds can make a nest and nurture new life. In helping the albatrosses to have a baby, he is nurturing his own infant faith. The albatross is clearly meant to be significant. It's the basis for his dating, just like Christ is the basis for the Christian calendar. It's coming changes everything, gives him a place to start counting a new year from.
I think Piranesi's encounter with the albatross is like St Kevin's encounter with the blackbird, it's a transformative moment, enacted by a hermit who is communing with nature but the communion with nature is also a communion with the Creator. Piranesi's faith is a simple medieval sort of faith, a faith which finds parables in the birds of the air and the fish of the sea. It reminds me of St Francis preaching to the birds or St Anthony preaching to the fish. It's not pagan, it's early medieval Christianity.
My frustration with listening to this episode is with Heidi's wanting to separate the Christian vs Classical meanings of the text, insisting that you have to pick one or the other as the interpretive lens through which you read the novel. To me that feels like an embodiment of the statue of the man using a sword to break the globe to understand it. I don't think we are meant to parse out Christian vs Classical in this way as if they are opposing forces. I think they're both contained in the Globe and the process of pulling them apart like that breaks something that is whole in the narrative. The story is a synthesis of the Classical and the Christian (kind of like Narnia is with the fauns and Bacchus and Silenus and the river gods and dryads as well as Aslan who tames them all) and you can't pick one or the other or you lose something. It's both/and, not either/or.
I don't think the Cave reading makes sense if you toss out the Christian elements. I don't think the Christian parable makes sense if you ignore the classical elements. I think it only makes sense if you allow those elements to mingle mysteriously. If you apply the Classical lens too strictly you get the dilemma of having to decide if our world is the cave or the House is, if our world is Real or the House is. But that dilemma is not how the narrator sees it. I think the key to finding this novel satisfactory is trusting the narrator and not dismissing him as a madman.
I think seeing it as an either/or question is a mistake. The House has something our world lacks. Our world has something the House lacks. It's only in bringing those elements together in a synthesis that wholeness can be achieved. Likewise, both the readings of the story as a Christian parable or as a Classical parable are lacking. It only makes sense if you don't choose between them.
And this is the meaning of the narrator's having three different names. Matthew Rose Sorensen is the man of "the real world" the materialist, post-enlightenment, postmodern world of academia. Piranesi is the man of the House, the man of wonder and enchantment. But the narrator at the end is neither Matthew nor Piranesi. He's a new man, the Beloved Child of the House who agrees to leave the house out of kindness. This is his act of self sacrifice, not his refusal to kill the Other, but his willingness to leave the House as an act of kindness for Matthew's family who he doesn't even remember.
At the end of the novel, the nameless narrator doesn't belong to one world or the other, but to both. He's like the Pevensie children who have left the wardrobe and Narnia who now have the task of finding what Aslan's name is in our world. He's a character at the beginning of a journey, not at the end. Full of childlike wonder, his task will be to hold on to the wonder and enchantment of the House and not become jaded by the materialist world. Because it's not that our world isnt' real, it's that it's disenchanted. All the enchantment has been taken away from it and deposited into the House. It's the narrator's job to re-enchant our world and to bring his love for the beauty of the tides (which represents the enchantment of nature, like the dryads and naiads in Narnia) and the statues (which represent maybe the Platonic Forms but also maybe something more like poetic archetypes) into our world.
What the House has that our world lacks is enchantment. Modern man lacks the sense of unity with nature that premodern man had. Modern Man also lacks a sense of mythopoesis-- and it's that mythologizing principle that's embodied in the statues. I think the statues are less Platonic forms and more a vision of the Imago Dei.
Really enjoyed these conversations! It’s been awhile since I was able to read and complete a book and all the episodes. I agree with David. I enjoyed the book, but I didn’t find it satisfying.
I'm realizing this book has some nice Tobit vibes.
How can the house be good when there is no love for other humans possible?
As I was listening to your conversation about the end of the book, I began to think the book and it's ending very closely mirror the experience of being a third culture person, someone who has lived for an extended period in a foreign (to them) environment and then returned to their "home" culture. Our main character was one person, Matthew R. S., before coming to the house, another person, Piranesi, in the house, and a third person after the house. So also those who have lived cross culturally. My own experience of living in a foreign country, making a home there, and then returning to my birth culture makes the end of the book feel familiar. The third person in Piranesi embodies this convergence of worlds, not totally in one or the other and somewhat in both at the same time. He isn’t quite Matthew, nor is he Piranesi either. Perhaps the ending feels unsatisfying because it mirrors this third culture experience, which can make one feel unsatisfied or unsettled.
Man, I love this reading too. The boundary-crossing character. So good.
Enjoyed this discussion today. I wanted to comment from a (perhaps) unique perspective. As someone who is healing from spiritual abuse and religious trauma, I related more deeply than I wanted to to Piranesi. To find that a place you thought was thoroughly good was, in fact, being controlled by evil men is so difficult to wake up from. To lose something you once loved (and viewed as good) in that way is so hard. I resonated deeply with the fact that Michael Rose Sorenson was inside of him, but he couldn't quite get back to him. The sad reality is that there are evil things that happen to us in this life that impact our souls in ways that leave lasting damage. The fact that he is neither Piranesi nor Michael Rose Sorenson feels exactly right to those of us waking up from spiritual abuse. To anyone else who may have been impacted by this book in that kind of way - may we all find our way back to our true selves. (PS - Heidi - I am Lily Jacob's mom!! Take the girls to tea sometime?)
Hiiiii! I LOVE this comment & I wholly agree that the book can be read through the lens of psychological lament & hope. And YES, let’s get the girls together for tea & a chat. ❤️
I have two questions: 1. Matthew Rose Sorensen only maintains his goodness within The House, governed by The Other whether your interpretation of the book sees him as a prisoner or not. What does this say about our relationship to hierarchy? I find the implications troubling, especially given the nature of The Other, but I’m curious to hear what you think. 2. Piranesi says in Part 1 that he once thought The Folded-Up Child had been intended to be his wife. This gives me pause, as it hints at child trafficking particularly in light of the experience of James Ritter, or the possibility of forced or at least manipulated mating pairing under authoritarian control. Even if you apply Plato’s forms and The Child is the essence of The Child and The House exists beyond time, it suggests that females are either dead or transient beings (Raphael). I’m curious how you resolve this and still maintain a positive interpretation?
Thanks for the thorough and thoughtful analysis of the book! Loved reading along with y'all. I wanted to suggest that Clarke is not discouraging people from analyzing the book or the world, but rather giving us a way to do so. The connection of The Other inspecting The House in a way similar to the tower in The Monster and the Critics was spot-on; he breaks a thing in an attempt to see what's inside. But Clarke provides us with another way to be a scientist in the narrator and Raphael: They study The House with reverence, recording note so that they and others can better navigate it. Made me think of the National Parks principle "leave no trace." I think that gives us a framework for how to approach a world, or a book, or a person.
Also, if anyone enjoyed Piranesi, I would highly recommend Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Incredible world-building and witty prose (more humor than in this one). It's worth reading for the footnotes alone.
I like that except with the caveat that I write all over my books and trying to do more of that, not less
The house has one effect on all, including the villains and those who don’t stay long enough to lose their memory: everyone agrees that everything in the house is meaning-full. Not even the pattern of bird flight is incidental. Some respond by trying to extract and control this meaning; others are simply receptive to it. Perhaps only those emptied of themselves by the house can be fully receptive.
And in this lies the house’s attraction—if we begin with the assumption that our world is devoid of meaning, or at least less saturated with it. For it is not that Piranesi returns to our world with an enhanced ability to perceive meaning in all things. He can only do so where he finds a direct analogue to the meaning he once discerned in the house.
Oh that’s such a good take. Nice.
A few thoughts after enjoying the book and podcast discussions. To me it seems the house must be good as a part of Creation, just as the kind of in between world in the Magician’s Nephew would be good, all of it having been created by Aslan, just as a multiverse, if it existed (sorry, it doesn’t), would be good because it is created by God. I realize that this may seem like an imposition of Christian theology, but I feel like the book calls for something of an interpretation like this. The judgment on the search for transgressive gnosis ascribed to the house by Piranesi, that is, its judgment on the Other’s quest as wrong headed and harmful, which Piranesi accepts and agrees with, I think is to be taken as right and part of why Piranesi seems in some ways improved by the labrynth- because he has a kind of religious in-tunedness with the creation though he may tend toward a pantheistic interpretation. I don’t understand the role, though, of his memory loss. (There are a few dark hints of sexual exploitation, it seems, but these are never elaborated. If this were the case, and the memory loss was connected to the theory of traumatic suppression, what would Paul McHugh say, who battled pop notions of trauma and memory suppression). His experience of the house has taught him, it seems, to not look for wisdom in what transgresses the Creation.
- Piranesi is a better person because of his religious openness which leads him to cherish life. His veneration of the dead or care for their remains and their memory is of course a sign of in-tunedness with the image of God in man to some extent, interpreted from the outside with a Christian lens.
-I appreciated the illumination of the allusion to Yates’s boyhood town in the last conversation after having recently read a book of his poetry and a small biography of him. It brought me to recognition of the connection.
-I thought Heidi’s suggestion about the labyrinth being psychological an interesting possibility. Perhaps it is like St. Teresa of Avila’s interior castle.
-My question would be why the memory loss?
To the question why is Piranesi good and the other not. Is it the forgetting that makes him good? Matthew stays in the house so long he forgets the world he came from but the other never stays log enough to forget. perhaps she is saying that the real world is what makes people behave badly and the influence of other people and drive for success or fame corrupts. But that when left alone to simply survive in a hostile environment where his every moment is spent in keeping himself alive and safe from the elements or exploring and learning an almost endless environment is what keep him good. Because I totally see the house as hostile and him as a prisoner and I had a very motherly desire to rescue him because he seemed almost unwilling to rescue himself because he no longer felt lost. But the house being what it was took Matthew back to an almost Adam and Eve existence where he is innocent but I felt there was a void to the situation a lack of the divine. It felt almost purgatorial
Someone on Substack posted a conversation between Lucy and Aslan recently, and I realized a problem I have with seeing the house as a god in this book is that it doesn't speak. The true God speaks and listens (thank you Daniel Nayeri). Piranesi seems to long for human interaction and even speaks to the dead, the birds, etc. although in the end finding people insufficient to his happiness.
To Sean's point about whether the author is leaving it to the reader to realize her judgment of the house, I point to the title and narrator. Can a prison be benevolent?
I think human imagination is a wonderful, God-reflecting thing but cannot answer the ultimate questions.
I think the birds, the dead, the statues, all of that is how the House speaks. Those are it's voices.
Just as God often speaks to us through other people, through nature, or through small events of our days, but rarely speaks in thunderous voice directly.
Omggg! Its been so long since I’ve listened to a full Close Reads series, and honestly, I just wanted to say I miss you guys. I chuckled as David volunteered as tribute to sit on Heidi’s book therapy couch. I feel like you each are macrocosmic objective correlatives to the little arguments I had with myself when I read this book a few years ago. 😂 From Heidi’s “But that’s the question!” To David’s “But it feels like a cop-out!” To Sean’s “Its kinda cool, I guess…”
Loved this episode and wanted to piggyback on one of the last things David mentioned: the reference to the occult. My husband and I both listened to the Audible version, so I can't go back and quote the portions I would like to reference, but my husband was very put off by the idea that the house could be good (my interpretation) when the only people seemingly able to access it did so through occult practices. Our "good" characters were tricked into getting there (Matthew Rose Sorensen) or had to be guided there (Sara Raphael) by a "transgressive thinker." What does this say either about the labyrinth or about Clarke? Labeling the occult leader as "prophet" by Piranesi seems to glorify him, but he has clearly been abusive, manipulative, and cruel. Unlike C.S. Lewis, who ultimately credits Aslan for Uncle Andrew's stumbling upon the magic for world jumping, Clarke gives this honor to Arne-Sayles. Why did Clarke create a super villain as the one who finds the "door" to the other world?
Great question
Why did Clarke create a super villain as the one who finds the door to the other works? I think this is an excellent question
I’m so glad Heidi brought up the pagan take. I’ve been reading Greek myths alongside my daughter so that was what I had in mind this episode in my “reading” of the House.
I’m with Graham in being disappointed with the ending. It felt like waking up from a dream to an episode of a tv crime drama. Totally didn’t meet its potential for true transcendence. I enjoyed reading it, but it felt like the author herself was searching for meaning, and this is the product of her search though she hasn’t really found the full Truth yet.