Griffin’s House is drenched in foggy, gaslit, garbage-strewn detail (not to mention several heavy echoes of A Tale of Two...
Images of Hogarth’s Gin Lane and Fielding’s Inns of Court arise from this densely atmospheric historical tale, the second from the young English-born author of The Requiem Shark (2000).
A potentially good novel lies within it, somewhere between two narratives of unequal interest and uncertain interrelationship. The first, and better, traces the dark doings of eminent London anatomist (and former surgeon) Sir Edmund Cathcart and his student and apprentice Joseph Bendix, fresh from a Parisian education in both medicine and l’amour. Griffin persuasively characterizes both men as credible mixtures of scientific integrity and intellectual arrogance and heightens interest in their researches (which, predictably, require clandestine purchases of fresh corpses) by adding to the mix the historical figures of novelist-pamphleteer (and ultimate London insider) Daniel Defoe and such notorious malefactors as brigand Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild, who’s both master criminal and “Thief Taker” for hire (“Useful and perhaps the vilest man in London”). So far so good—until Griffin shifts the focus to Bendix’s fascination with his mentor’s closeted daughter Amelia, an albino beauty whose skin “blisters” in the sun and whose blindness motivates her father’s amoral pursuit of the medical knowledge that may enable him to restore her sight and give her normal health. A little past the midway point here, Joseph’s courtship of, and later (sexless) marriage to, the fragile Amelia takes center stage—and much of the story’s energy drains away, leaving it as bloodless as its passive (in fact, really rather tiresome) heroine. This despite a flurry of carefully staged surprise twists that clutter the novel’s repeatedly delayed climax (following some inexcusably overextended authorial foreplay).
Griffin’s House is drenched in foggy, gaslit, garbage-strewn detail (not to mention several heavy echoes of A Tale of Two Cities), but it fails to live up to the viscerally dramatic promise of its yeasty opening chapters. Disappointing.Pub Date: April 27, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50472-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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SEEN & HEARD
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