One of the most hyped books of the year has just reached bestseller status.
You are at a party celebrating this: the theme – crossdressing; the guests – Tumblr, Steven King and a whole bunch of iBook’s romance novelists. Liquor is flowing freely. Twenty four hours later, you wake up with a headache in a haunted house attraction (the fairground deserted) with your fellow party-goers. Between you, you appear to have written a mashup of the collected works of Oscar Wilde, the history of the Old Bailey and the Sylvanian families catalogue; it’s brilliant at some points, with a slightly ramshackle sense of progression.
Miraculously, it is not your name, but Jessie Burton’s on the front page by the word ‘by’. Paradoxically, the book that the party was for, has just been written.
And so, with the essentials of the novel resolved, onto the plot we go:
Our (true) author leads us through 1600s Amsterdam, a city that was already printing banned books but still doused in religion, shoving us into one of the weirdest three-strand plots since Game of Thrones, though her description of the Brandt family, the main focus of the book. Petronella Brandt – newly married and barely legal by today’s standards – has arrived at her husband Johannes’ canal-side house in central Amsterdam. Her sister-in-law Marin, and husband Johannes are up to all sorts of shadowy activities and the family’s merchant business is stagnating. Struggling to understand the house’s internal dynamics, and belittled by her outrageously ugly and expensive wedding present of a cabinet house (doll’s house) that seems to mock her inability to control her household, Burton then throws Petronella into the deep end, with other characters’ prior actions setting the stage for tragedy.
It’s very much a book filled with every kind of angst and discrimination: race, gender, sexuality, harassment, social boundaries... reminding everyone of the consequences of intolerance, with the Brandt family’s fate. It was a bit preachy at times, but nothing too dramatic, which made it bearable. The Miniaturist is all about what is right, what is not and the predetermined factor involved.
The writing is pretty good and elegant and the descriptions are wonderfully textured, although there is the odd moment when some details feel unnecessary and only there in order to be ‘cute’ (which is not adorable in the slightest). I got a bit confused in the fast-paced, ‘let’s move around Amsterdam’ sections – the basic sense of direction is always somewhat off, as with most books, and the character somehow manages to, by the grace of God, move in a straight line when all they do is run left. There’s also a little inconsistency with some of the plot, with what seemed to be key, logical, plot points just cast aside, but all in all, it pulls through.
Just about.
It’s a good debut novel and casual, on-off book, but definitely not her best.
- Buy this book at the Guardian Bookshop
