Zombie Round! I find that my
judgment in this round, between two books I enjoyed but didn’t love, is colored
by my anticipation of, and excitement for, THE GOLDFINCH—I expected more from
it, and it fell short of my hopes. I hadn’t heard anything about THE GOOD LORD
BIRD, on the other hand—when I first saw it I thought it was going to be about
the hunt for this thought-to-be-extinct woodpecker—and so when it turned out to
be funny, and educational for someone who knew next to nothing about John Brown
and Harper’s Ferry, I was surprised and pleased. For that matter, the sections
that those who found THE GOLDFINCH charming cite (the Las Vegas interlude, and
those scenes with Boris) I didn’t find particularly amusing. I loved Popchik,
and I was glad that Theo got away from New York for a while, but I certainly
wouldn’t have spent time with Boris on my own. He seemed like far more of a
caricature than the similarly expedient Hobie. I liked Hobie, and I would read
a short story about his life, but for Theo to remain loyal to Boris while
screwing Hobie over with unnecessary deceit was too painful and unmotivated for
me. I can’t see why Theo would have continued to create forgeries after the
initial thrill of succeeding with one, and I think it happened simply because
Tartt wanted to show that Theo continued to give in to his worst impulses like
his father before him, without being overly tedious with the descriptions of
drugs and drugged stupor and a few pills, and some drugs hidden under the bed.
I understood Onion better, even
though his lived experiences are much farther removed from mine than Theo’s
life of privilege and self-doubt. Onion’s motivations were clear to me:
self-preservation is something we all have in common as a species, and wanting
to avoid violence, as a theme I identified in the first review round, is very
relatable. Onion didn’t have much regret for his father’s death, which I found
strange, but he also got swept up into half-captivity half-adventure
immediately afterward, and was understandably preoccupied with learning how to
please his new master (and learning that he no longer had a master, no matter
how important it was to stay with John Brown’s army.)
As much as I hate to level this
judgment against any novel, I think THE GOLDFINCH was too long. THE GOOD LORD
BIRD had the benefit of being constrained by the timelines of an actual event,
John Brown’s life, but at least it had the good sense to stay within those
constraints, keep the action moving, and introduce us to a broad enough range
of characters that if we grew tired of the moralizing orator we could stay
interested in the double-crossing prostitute. THE GOLDFINCH kept bringing me
back to the same characters, whether likeable or not, and it ended up backfiring;
even if I had had enough of the Barbours, they kept coming back, and even if I
thought Boris was destined for an early grave, he escaped scrape after scrape.
But not even by becoming a zombie can these characters survive this round…
My winner and ToB’s: THE GOOD
LORD BIRD
Read the official Tournament
judgment here.
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