The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt – review
'It feels as if Tartt simply forgets from time to time what's driving her juggernaut forwards.' Photograph: Grant Delin/Corbis
Like almost everyone else, I consumed Donna Tartt's electric first novel The Secret History in a couple of fevered sittings. Here was a psychological page-turner concocted with such genuine emotional sophistication that you felt you'd stumbled on a whole new way of writing. Tartt conveyed the sly evil of amorality with a subtlety that chilled, and in doing so created that relatively rare thing: an immensely readable, yet properly grown-up, debut novel.
But that was 20 years ago. And, with only one novel since, our appetite for a new Tartt remains lusty. I don't know what I was expecting when, with some excitement, I picked up The Goldfinch, but a Harry Potter tribute novel was definitely not it.
Theo is 13 when he survives a bomb attack that kills his mother. Caught in a rainstorm, ducking into a museum to take in an exhibition of old Dutch masters, she has just shown him her favourite, Fabritius's The Goldfinch – "the smallest in the exhibition and the simplest" – when the explosion hits.
Though Theo was stirred by the painting, he was even more stirred by a feisty red-haired girl whom he'd seen accompanying an elderly man around the exhibition. Now, bloodied and dying, this same man presses an antique ring on Theo, which he tells him to take to a place called Hobart and Blackwell – "Ring the green bell!" He also urges him to grab Fabritius's painting, lying there frameless and unguarded, and take it home. In a post-traumatic daze, Theo obeys
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Theo is 13 when he survives a bomb attack that kills his mother. Caught in a rainstorm, ducking into a museum to take in an exhibition of old Dutch masters, she has just shown him her favourite, Fabritius's The Goldfinch – "the smallest in the exhibition and the simplest" – when the explosion hits.Though Theo was stirred by the painting, he was even more stirred by a feisty red-haired girl whom he'd seen accompanying an elderly man around the exhibition. Now, bloodied and dying, this same man presses an antique ring on Theo, which he tells him to take to a place called Hobart and Blackwell – "Ring the green bell!" He also urges him to grab Fabritius's painting, lying there frameless and unguarded, and take it home. In a post-traumatic daze, Theo obeys
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