Donna Tartt’s third novel, The Goldfinch, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2014, so I
must admit I read it partly out of curiosity. At nearly eight hundred pages it
is quite a marathon, like reading two books back-to-back, so was it worth it,
when I have such a long list of books to read? I was expecting a ‘coming of age’
novel but this is so much more.
Bleak and depressing in parts, I’m not giving
too much away to say it starts with the untimely death of thirteen year old Theo
Decker’s mother. She was one of two, perhaps three likeable characters in the
book, replaced by a succession of troubled – and troubling companions, so I shared his grief at her loss.
I read in a Telegraph
interview that it took Donna Tartt ten years to write. She says, “So many people say to me, why don’t
you write books faster? But working that way doesn’t come naturally to me. I
would be miserable cranking out a book every three or four years. And if I’m
not having fun writing it, people aren’t going to have fun reading it.”
Did I have
fun reading it? On the back cover The Goldfinch is described as a ‘a gripping page
turner’. Several times I found myself
turning back and reading a page again to see if I had missed something. Rich in
metaphor, coincidence and serendipity save the plot on more than on occasion. Readers
have to work hard to understand character motivation and often shocking action is
interspersed with long, indulgent passages. The Goldfinch reminds me there really are no rules
in novel writing. For that reason, I have to say yes.
Tony Riches
Tony Riches
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for commenting