The Good Thief — Hannah Tinti

The Good Thief tells the story of 12 year old Ren, a compulsive thief who is missing his left hand, for reasons unknown to him. He has been living in St. Anthony’s orphanage since being anonymously dropped off there soon after his birth. One day a stranger shows up, and after examining all the boys in the orphanage, singles out Ren, claiming to be his long lost brother. Ren is released into the custody of this man, Benjamin Nab, and into the world beyond. It does not take Ren long to figure out that Benjamin is not who he says he is, and the journey Ren takes with him leads to many discoveries about his past. The story is set in the 19th century, in what appears to be New England and is itself an homage to the stories of that era  – The Deerslayer features prominently in the imagination of Ren, and Tinti herself has said that the book is in the style of Dickens and Twain. (I would say, thankfully, that there is much more Twain at work here than Dickens.) 

 

The book accomplishes this by eschewing many of the stylistic conventions of modern “serious” fiction, making it seem even more like a novel of another time. The main characters do bad things without themselves being bad–thieves who don’t swear and who aren’t violent; Tom is a drunk who never acts drunk on page, and who in fact turns to a life of sobriety when presented with the prospect of adopting two orphans; Dolly is a murderer, but the only violence we see him commit is in the interest of helping his friends. Dolly also refuses to use a gun to commit his murders, saying that they cause “too much noise,” but even this seems a quaint notion in the context of the story. (p. 193) Perhaps the most serious departure from modern convention is the ending of the story, which sees characters we like getting what they most want–in other words, it has a happy ending. As a result, the book also eschews many of the thematic elements of the Modern Serious Novel: it is free of irony, 

 

Another shared trait of older conventions is the convenience of some of the plot points. That Nab is Ren’s father, that the house they board in just happens to be adjacent to the factory that is owned by Ren’s grandfather, who has kept Ren’s hand encased in glass all these years, that Nab is able to fool McGinty at the end into signing the factory over to Ren– these things come together perfectly and, while convenient, don’t necessarily feel contrived. Tinti avoids contrivance by building in just enough plausibility to keep the reader from falling out of the story. For example, the town in which most of the action takes place is only a couple days journey from the orphanage at which Ren was abandoned–it’s therefore plausible that the person who abandoned him might be from there. The adventure story pacing of the book also helps to keep the reader from dwelling too long on any one matter–chapters are short, and generally end on a plot point.  These techniques, en masse, combine to let the reader know early and often that they are reading a book with an atypical conceit.

Blindness — Jose Saramago

Narrative voice

 

One of the most interesting stylistic aspects of the book is the narrative voice. The story is told in what I came to think of as third person mostly omniscient–that is, the voice inhabits the consciousness of the group of inmates, at times (particularly at the beginning) inhabiting the consciousness of one character, at other times it seems to be speaking for the group as a whole. It relays to us information that cannot possibly be known to the characters of the book. For instance, when they have been freed and are walking the streets towards the home of the doctor and the doctor’s wife, they come across a car:  ”The building at whose door the limousine is parked is a bank. The car had brought the chairman of the board to the weekly plenary meeting, the first to be held since the epidemic of while sickness had been declared, and there had been no time to park it in the underground garage.” (p.264) But it is not a truly omniscient voice–it  has limits to what it knows. Later in the same passage, we learn of the potential fate of the chairman, as they were in an elevator in the bank: “The chairman saw the attendant who was accompanying him go blind, he himself lost his sight an hour later, and since the power did not come back and the cases of blindness inside the bank multiplied that day, in all probability the two are still there, dead, needless to say, shut up in  a coffin of steel, and therefore happily safe from voracious dogs.” (p.265) This works to give us enough information that is beyond the scope of the characters to give us a sense of the world they are living in–the realism of their situation, but not so much that the main conceit–the blindness epidemic–is put in jeopardy.  That is, too know too much beyond the immediate situation of the characters would call into question other towns, other countries, things happening elsewhere that would raise distracting questions.

 

If we are to assume that one of the points Saramago is making is that the blindness has the effect of returning (or reducing) human beings to a more animal like state, we can see a general de-escalation of the people’s humanity shown in several ways. One of these is his focus with the scatalogical and biological. Several passages detail the problems the characters have with defecation and waste management (the flip side of this being, of course, that significant a significant hallmark of civilization is the allowance for private, sanitary shitting, which is interesting in itself). The characters walk through shit, shit on them selves, shit in front of each other, which has the effect of the eradication of shame and humility: “Scattered throughout the back garden, groaning with the effort, suffering whatever remained of futile shame, they did what had to be done, even the doctor’s wife who wept as she looked at them, she wept for all of them, which they seemed no longer to be able to do. . .she saw them squatting on the weeds, between the knotty cabbage stalks, with the hens watching, the dog of tears had also come down to make more.” (p. 254). In this passage we actually have the  people squatting in the garden along side a dog, which further drives home the point. This is another technique Saramago uses, the direct (or indirect) comparison of humans to animals, particularly in combination with a biological act. When the doctor shits himself: “Then he lowered them, when he thought he was alone, but not in time, he knew he was dirty, dirtier than he could ever remember having been in his life. There are many ways of becoming and animal, he thought, this is just one of them.” (p.93)  And, in the asylum, when a couple is having sex: “At that moment sighs could be heard, moaning, tiny cries, muffled at first. . . Someone protested at the far end of the ward. Pigs, they’re like pigs.” (p.93)  This constant linking of biological acts with dirt and animals helps to establish a major tenet of the story.

 

The de-escalation of the humanity of the characters is also demonstrated through an escalation of depravity. For instance, at the beginning we have a car thief taking advantage of a blind man by stealing  his car, then, chronologically, the car thief gropes the girl with dark glasses, and she retaliates with violence. Then inmates start hoarding food. Then, the inmates turn to rape, and then, finally, murder. The chronology of these events is what’s important in establishing theme. 

 

 

There is also a meta conceit of the story–that it is a story that is meant to be viewed as parrable– that is established in several ways. Instances of the narrative voice contribute to this effect. This is done through direct address: “For this to be effectively the case, the patient would have to see everything black, if you’ll excuse the use of the verb to see, when this was a case of total darkness. The blind man had categorically  stated that he could see, if you’ll excuse that verb again.” (p.21) Another is moments of direct authorial intrusion: “From this point onwards, apart from a few inevitable comments, the story of the old man with the  black eyepatch will no longer be followed to the letter, being replaced by a reorganized version of his discourse, re-evaluated in the light of a correct and more appropriate vocabulary.” (p120)  The narrative voice also calls direct attention to the narrative itself: “There being no witnesses, and if there were there is no evidence that they were summoned to the post-mortems to tell us what happened, it is understandable that someone should ask how it was possible to know that these things happened so and not in some other manner, the reply to be given is that all stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened.” (p. 265)