The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

The Goldfinch
by Donna Tartt

I was very excited when I saw that Donna Tartt had written a third novel. Her first, The Secret History, was published to critical acclaim in 1992 and I absolutely loved it. She had us waiting 10 years for her second novel - The Little Friend was published in 2002. So another 11 years have passed and she has produced another tome of a book - the 771-paged The Goldfinch. This book is not only of epic proportions size-wise, but also content-wise. The story may itself be simple - 13-year old Theo is visiting a museum with his mother when there is an explosion and his mother is killed. Theo takes a painting which his mother loved, in order to keep it, and the memory of her, alive. But it is this painting, and the struggle to keep it safe and hidden over the next 14 years, which draws him into a world he could not have foreseen for himself.

You will become addicted to this book. Its size will become invisible, until you near the end and you wish it to continue further. Theo becomes your best friend, you want all the characters to like him, and most of them do. You will fall in love with Theo's best friend, Boris, with his heavily-accented speech and his bad-boy but totally adorable personality. You want Hobie, Theo's 'guardian', to be your father and to live in his eccentric sounding house. But above all you want Theo to survive all the bad stuff that gets thrown at him. Donna Tartt details so much that you wonder whether it is research or real life that she is basing it on - the horror of drug use and abuse; the minutiae of the art world. But wherever it's from, the fact it feels real is what makes a great story, and a brilliant read.

For me the only downside of the whole book is the last few pages of philosophising. I'm a 'black and white' type person, so all questions on the 'meaning of life' make me glaze over. Donna Tartt, through her character Theo, makes a couple of comments during the book about the pointlessness of bringing children into a world of misery and unhappiness - mortgages, divorce, hip-replacements and loneliness in care homes are what they face in life. Her own reflection on life perhaps?