Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, and I hated it.
It takes a very cool premise, then fills it with incongruences and predictable twists that you understand chapters ahead of the protagonist. Then it all ends up being (SPOILERS AHEAD) a “humans used to literally talk to nature, modern society bad” mumbojumbo with some kind of unexplained multiverse in it.
It’s an old (early-internet?) joke iirc. And yes, I think that’s the answer