The Good Thief: Hannah Tinti

Image Credit: The Guardian

I was watching a cricket match on TV tonight, part of the IPL that is going on, so first of all apologies if my review is a bit warped. For those of you outside India, this is equivalent to the American Super Bowl, where the entire nation is glued to the TV set to watch cricket matches for the next one month. Well, despite being the ardent fan that I am, I couldn’t resist finishing up the last few pages of Hannah Tinti’s “The Good Thief,” while the advertisements came on. And the nature of the book added to my warped state.

What a bizarre book. The story is just too wild to be encapsulated in brevity but I will try. Ren is an orphan at St Anthony’s Orphanage, where he was abandoned when he was a baby. But he is soon adopted by a fine looking young man one day who takes him on a journey that tests Ren’s physical as well as mental powers.

Tinti’s first novel received much acclaim for its picaresque twists and turns through 19th century New England, in America. The story is packed with escapades, macabre descriptions that include severed hands and broken feet, a strange doctor who pays for corpses to be brought to him stealthily and a quirky woman with a dwarf for a brother. In fact, all of Tinti’s characters are just a bit off on a trip of their own. The Good Thief is quite a page turner and entertains with its humor, albeit dark.

“A few moments passed before he had the courage to look. When he did, he found nothing but the empty road. To his right the cemetery gate stood open. To his left was the town common, the grass bending to the wind. I’m not afraid, Ren thought. Then he glanced at the back of the wagon. One of the bags was sitting up.”

Such incidents, that cause you to hold your breath momentarily with a slight shiver and then release it in a laugh later, abound in the book. We get a glimpse of the murky side of New England in all its autumnal and winter beauty and the characters are well drawn in all their strangeness.

My one grouse is that towards the end it seemed a bit too contrived and I felt as if Tinti desperately wanted a good and happy ending. There were too many things falling into place too perfectly and too many explanations coming out in a rush from unlikely sources. As Caribousmom rightly says, Tinti ‘redeems’ some of her characters in the end but it doesn’t serve much to convince an imagination already stretched thin by then. However, if all of this is taken in the novel’s stride, its wacky concoctions, peopled with charming presences like Ren and Benjamin, are drunk holding your nose then The Good Thief is highly amusing in its own peculiar way.

Verdict: Take your mind off boring realities and let yourself go in the fantastic phantasms of this novel

Rating: 3.2/5