The novel changes gear and, for a while, is primarily involved with showing us, affectingly, the dislocation of Theo's life – a dislocation both emotional and physical. This is, of course, where the danger comes in: if, at the end of the kind of set piece to which the word 'climactic' should emphatically apply, you still have 700 pages to go, aren't you setting your readers up for disappointment?Īstonishingly, the answer is no. Her death takes place in New York's Metropolitan Museum, as a consequence of an exploding bomb – mother and son are in separate rooms when the bomb blast occurs, and the descriptions of Theo regaining consciousness in the wreckage, and trying to find his way out of the ripped-apart museum before returning home, expecting to find his mother there, are written in astonishingly gripping prose. Before any of this is explained, the story moves back 14 years to the day Theo's mother dies, when he is on the cusp of adolescence. In the first section, the narrator, Theo Decker, is holed up in an Amsterdam hotel, looking at newspapers written in Dutch, which he can't understand he is searching for his name in articles illustrated with pictures of police cars and crime scene tapes. And now, in The Goldfinch, Tartt has a 50‑page two-part opening. The Little Friend starts with the death of a child who, by page 15, is found hanging by a piece of rope from a tree branch, his red hair 'the only thing about him that was the right colour any more'. In The Secret History, the one-page prologue gives us a murder and a narrator who has helped to commit it. I t is dangerous to write openings as compelling as Donna Tartt's.

The goldfinch novel book review