Perhaps the first thing to do when considering Hannah Tinti’s debut novel is either avoid all the blurbs covering the back and inside flaps of the dust jacket, or refuse to take them too seriously. These well-intended advance promotions would have you believe that Tinti is the heir apparent to such authors as Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain and even J.K. Rowling and Walt Disney. (Disney?)
Such comparisons could have you expecting The Greatest Thing Since Movable Type. Or, since a few of these authors evoke horrid memories of your middle school required reading list, you might be tempted to avoid THE GOOD THIEF altogether. But please don’t.
While there are indeed echos and influences of some of those literary giants mentioned (especially Dickens), this is nothing more — and certainly nothing less — than a throughly approachable, wonderfully entertaining and often touching novel from a very talented and promising author.
Twelve-year-old Ren can’t remember life prior to his arrival at the St. Anthony’s Orphanage for Boys in nineteenth-century New England. Nor can he remember how he lost his left hand. So, like the other boys, he suffers the daily abuses of the monks running the orphanage while yearning for a family of his own. His only diversions are the Catholic prayers he recites, either out of faith or habit, and his skill for stealing items small enough to tuck into his shirt — like Father John’s copy of THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS.
Being a cripple means little hope of adoption. But one day, a man named Benjamin Nab arrives at the orphanage and loudly proclaims Ren as his long-lost brother. The monks release Ren into Benjamin’s care. But no sooner do they leave the orphanage when Benjamin confesses that the story is a hoax. He and his partner, Tom, are scam artists and petty thieves. And Benjamin immediately sees Ren’s deformity as a way to pry donations from sympathetic onlookers.
It’s just one of the several means Benjamin and Tom have of making money, including selling the jewelry and clothing off bodies they dig up from the local cemetery. But soon they learn that a hospital in the nearby town of North Umbrage will pay top dollar for freshly exhumed bodies to be used for medical studies, so the three travel via a stolen horse cart to begin their new careers as grave robbers.
So many things might have gone terribly wrong with this novel that it’s a wonder it is as good as it is. The basic premise of an orphan boy taken in by thieves during this period in time, for example, could easily become overly sentimental or end up reading like a parody of either Dickens or Stevenson. But Tinti wisely avoids becoming too precious with her frequent dips into the Gothic and grotesque. Like the quirky boarding house landlady who shouts at everyone due to her own near-deafness. Or the mysterious dwarf who lives on the roof of the boarding house and descends the chimney each evening for his dinner. Or the huge, haunting McGinty’s Mousetrap Factory and Distribution Company, which hovers over North Umbrage and employs most of its young girls. And the many and various residents of the town whose oddball mannerisms and behavior are both amusing and frightening.
There are those, however, who might find the picaresque structure of the novel difficult. Owing perhaps to Tinti’s background in short stories, this first full-length work is mostly a series of interconnected adventures. But her descriptions of the locale and period, along with her fascinating characters, are more than enough to pull you along until the story finds a central thrust in the third and final section.
Genre fans will also find much to like in what is essentially a mainstream novel. There is the recurring mystery of Ren’s family origin and how he lost an appendage. And the scenes of grave robbing and other eerie undertakings have just enough gore and violence to keep contemporary horror readers amused.
Time alone, obviously, will determine if THE GOOD THIEF becomes a member of the World’s Greatest Books, as the promotions predict. For the moment, it is a highly recommended first novel from a writer whom everybody should know about and follow. —Alan Cranis
