'The Goldfinch' review by Book Club member April..

I have always loved Donna Tartt’s debut novel, “The Secret History”, with its bleakly nostalgic and dark tale of a group of college students who, mesmerised with the ancient world and their own golden youth and privilege, commit murder. I loved how, reading it as a student, it spoke of both the allure of the clique and its suffocating, corrupting grasp. It was pure tragedy – unrequited love, fatal flaws, a plot hinged on coincidence and fate and human error.

So I approached “The Goldfinch”, Tartt’s award winning third novel, with high expectations. The novel begins with its young teenage protagonist, Theo, who is caught up in a terrorist bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This catastrophic event, vividly rendered, drastically alters the entire course of Theo’s life – and thus sets in motion the key themes and plots of the novel. His mother is tragically killed, which precipitates Theo into a troubled, rootless existence, exploring how fractured and difficult modern families are, and how our true connections and relationships are not necessarily those forged by blood, but by experience and empathy. An old man, in his dying moments after the explosion, urges Theo to take a rare Dutch masterpiece, “The Goldfinch”, along with a signet ring and a message for his family. These actions, split second decisions made by a traumatised adolescent in extreme circumstances, explore the butterfly effect of such instances in our lives.

We follow Theo through dislocation and relocation, through a mixture of interiors and miniature portraits of family lives, through intense friendships and addictions, exploring the nature of our passions and whether we determine our own destinies – to pick but a few themes. This is a big novel, both in length and breadth of thought. It feels like a modern Dickensian novel, episodic and with extreme characters that cause a visceral reaction for the reader, almost lurching into stereotypes – gentle Hobie, the fatherly antiques dealer whose benign trust and acceptance for Theo is in stark contrast to his drunk abusive father and his harridan wife. Boris the nihilistic Russian is a scene stealing character, and his exaggerated traits and speech have a Marmite effect – you’ll either love him or you’ll hate him, and it is here where the novel starts to become less satisfying.  Huge swathes of pages with beautiful descriptions of alienation and loneliness, of arid desert and hallucinations start to tire. The point is made, again and again, of Theo’s mistakes, his guilt and the destructive nature of his obsessions – with the painting and with the past, and the novel starts to lose momentum. Whilst every detail somehow twists back into significance, with characters you’d almost forgotten about popping up again handily at moments of dire need and saving the day, the sheer contrast between these moments of synchronicity and grand design can jar against those which emphasise the unpredictable and the chaotic irreverence of time.

With so many divergent storylines weaving throughout the central narrative, some are accorded more focus and are therefore more convincing than others. One of the weakest elements for me was the unrequited love story between Theo and Pippa, the granddaughter of the old man whose final moments instigate the whole dramatic thrust of the plot. Pippa remains less a fully realised character and more receptacles for Theo’s burgeoning desire, an unobtainable and therefore idealised female who lacks agency and remains an unsatisfyingly passive sketch.

It would be difficult to conclude a novel of this magnitude and scope even if it did have a more conventional plotline. Again, the structural similarities with stonking 19^th century novels is clear, with characters improbably meeting and colliding, and a final set piece which does feel too contrived and not terribly authentic. Whilst this is where the telling of this story ends, there is a clear sense that, for the characters, resolution has not yet been reached. Threads are left dangling, and you may wonder, after reaching the last page, what exactly happens next. The world is so absorbing that, as with any truly great novel, the forcible eviction from it when you finish reading comes as a shock, particularly when the ending itself has been so ambiguous.

But this is not a novel you read for the simple enjoyment of going from A to B, and a predictable finish. Once you suspend your expectations of how you wish the story to be, you start to unearth, beneath the fine surface detail, how wonderfully “The Goldfinch” works as a metaphorical device. It demonstrates, through its brief intense portraits hidden within the stark realities of life, that those things in our lives that give meaning are effectively like the miniature painting of the title; intensely realised, close portraits of singular beauty and transience, that we cannot cling to, or keep beyond our allotted time.

April Cursons (@charitychiccat)