Donna Tartt's third novel flies high

The Goldfinch
by Donna Tartt
Little, Brown and Co
5 stars

Furniture restoration is perhaps not an obvious subject for one of the most keenly anticipated novels of the 21st century. But Donna Tartt has rarely traded in the obvious.

Tartt's two previous novels, the much-heralded debut The Secret History and its long-awaited successor The Little Friend, were enigmatic but eminently entertaining concoctions. Tartt could do high-mindedness (classics, American gothic) and murder mystery with equal ease.

Renovating antique forms for a modern audience offers an elegant expression of Tartt's literary approach in The Goldfinch. The theme is introduced after a series of convoluted events and encounters when our narrator, Theo Decker, meets a towering bohemian craftsman called Hobie, who lives in Greenwich Village.

Hobie takes Theo under his wing, an act of kindness he will both cherish and live to regret, and teaches him the basics of his trade. Theo is spellbound by the confusion of imitation and originality, truth and lies, old and new. Hobie teaches him that perfectionism in restoration requires flaws to be included: "Anything too worn was a dead giveaway," Theo notes. "Real age … was variable, crooked, capricious, singing here, and sullen there."

Theo could be describing himself, or even The Goldfinch as a whole, whose knowingly forensic attention to minutiae imitates Hobie's painstaking labours to update "ancients and honorables", working "by hand like one of the old masters". The seeds of this exploration is proposed by Tartt's title, which was inspired by another artwork: Carel Fabritius' painting of the same name, a mini-masterpiece whose fusion of hyper-realism and trompe l'oeil blurs some serious lines between art and life, past and present: "A power and shine came off it," Theo notes lovingly, "that rendered everything sharp-edged and yet more tender and lovely than it actually was, and lovelier still because it was a part of the past, and irretrievable."

Tartt's Goldfinch attempts something similar, but does so by expanding Fabritius' canvas a few trillion per cent. Whereas the painting is modest (Fabritius' bird is no bigger than, well, a goldfinch), the novel is vast at 771 pages. Somehow, despite its scale, this extraordinary work manages to remain intensely intimate, thanks largely to Tartt's microscopic powers of description. The Goldfinch exults in using three adjectives where one might suffice. The effect in the opening pages is challenging but oddly gripping, as if fictional time has slowed to that of real life itself - an homage, perhaps, to Fabritius' goldfinch, which imitates reality in scale, shape and colour, but is irrevocably contrived.

The novel progresses by exploring how matters of a moment unfurl unpredictably over time. For 13-year-old Theo, this begins with an explosion: a terrorist bomb destroys a wing of a New York museum. The device deftly reminds us of Fabritius' own death almost four centuries before, setting in place what Theo later describes as a "dreamlike mangle of past and present". Tartt's forensic prose is intent on tracing the unforeseeable consequences of this blast - not only for the characters who were present, but those yet to appear.