Ren, the young protagonist of Hannah Tinti's darkly wonderful novel, The Good Thief, begins his tale with only pieces of a life. He finds himself at a Catholic orphanage and does not know how he came to be there. He is missing a hand and does not know why. He holds on to the scraps of cloth where he mother sewed his name into a nightshirt that is now threadbare, hoping that they will give him some clue to his true identity.
Life is bleak but uneventful for Ren until a mysterious stranger named Benjamin Nab comes to claim Ren as his brother. Surprise! It's a lie; it's not his first and certainly won't be his last. Ren and Nab join Nab's friend Tom in North Umbrage -- a town as ghastly as its name -- to unearth dead bodies for loot, except some of the bodies aren't totally dead.
Tinti has been compared to both Dickens and Rowling, but she has something unique to offer readers. While the plot is reminiscent of Oliver Twist, Tinti's prose style has none of Dickens' humor. She is steady and authoritative, and makes the odd and extraordinary seem perfectly regular. By doing so, she allows us to see with the child's eyes of her protagonist. There is authority, there are absolutes, but when evil appears -- when, for instance, a dead body rises from a wagonload of corpses -- we realize how fragile that authority is.
Tinti, Hannah. The Good Thief. New York: Random House, 2008. 325 pp.
I like what you say about Tinti being "steady and authoritative." She's got an almost magical story to tell, and she manages to tell it straightforwardly without losing any of that magic.
ReplyDelete