Recently Read: The Dumb House (Where I try to decide if I liked this book)

Author: John Burnside
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Date: 1997
Page Count: 204
Rating: 4/5

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WARNING: This novel is very dark and violent, (though not extremely detailed concerning the violence)

 trigger warning for physical, sexual, and child abuse

In Persian myth, it is said that Akbar the Great once built a palace which he filled with newborn children, attended only by mutes, in order to learn whether language is innate or aquired. As the year passed and the chidren grew into their silent and difficult world, this palace became known as the Gang Mahal, or Dumb House. In his first novel, John Burnside explores the possibilites inherent in a modern-day repetition of Akbar`s investigations. Following the death of his mother, the unnamed narrator creates a twisted varient of the Dumb House, finally using his own chidren as subjects in a bizarre experiment. When the children develop a musical language of their own, however, their gaoler is the one who is excluded, and he extracts an appalling revenge. Goodreads

I had a bit of trouble rating this book, which actually made me thankful for the Goodreads rating system. Without this site to force me to come to more concrete terms with my feelings about this book, I might have just went, "huh, not sure how I feel about that one" and set the book aside. Instead, I continued to think about the novel and whipped out my laptop to start writing my thoughts down.

This book is twisted, uncomfortable, perhaps a bit pretentious, but beautifully written, and captivating. I couldn't put this book down once I picked it up, and although I was appalled by what I was reading, I couldn't stop. I think Burnside was going for a small amount of shock-value with some of the events in the novel, but for some reason, perhaps because of the lyrical writing and interesting ideas the novel wrestles with, it seems more literary than say Palahniuk or Brett Easton Ellis.

Luke is an unstable and unreliable narrator (which admittedly, I tend to enjoy) but he is also violent and disconnected from human emotion. His fascination with language development and the process of scientific experiments pretty much define his character. The female characters in this novel are weak and only valued for their reproductive skills, BUT I was willing to look past that and was pulled into the story. I'm not sure if I should get the credit for that, or Burnside, but there it is.

I can see this novel being extremely polarizing, and I can easily understand how someone could hate it, but somehow, it captured my attention, which made it work for me. The short length and fast pacing with the dark and twisted plot (which starts at the end and the works backward in an almost linear fashion) was enough to keep my full attention for two hundred pages, although, I don't think I would have done many more pages than that.

Burnside wrestles with the humanity of science and if language and communication (and perhaps the soul but that idea was kind of loosely floating around the novel and wasn't as strong as the other ideas) can even be understood or categorized in scientific terms. To me, it seemed like Burnside was raising a question about the humanity of science as a whole, but then again, I could be giving him too much credit. I was thinking and interacting with this novel the whole time I was reading it, and although it is far from perfect, I was so enthralled by it that I had to settle on a positive rating.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this novel if you have read it? Did you have a strong but confusing reaction to it too? Let me know!