The deeply disturbed narrator creates a twisted variant of the mythical Persian "Gang Mahal" or Dumb House, where babies are raised in silence in order to discover whether language is innate or acquired. His own children succeed in developing a language, for which he extracts an appalling revenge.
Dumb House
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Reader beware: The Dumb House is not for the faint of heart. This debut novel by Scottish poet John Burnside is subtitled A Chamber Novel, but "Chamber of Horror" might better describe it. The central character and narrator is Luke, a terrifyingly lucid madman with a hankering to "know the soul." His deceased mother told him once that the soul resided in language, and he's been obsessed ever since with discovering if this is true. To that end, Luke takes a page from an old fable about a king who kept babies sequestered in silent isolation in order to discover whether language is a natural or an acquired skill. For his own experiment, Luke impregnates a young stranger, takes the twins she gives birth to and locks them up in a basement where he raises them in complete silence. Eventually, however, the children begin to annoy him, and Luke feels he must "cut them down." How he does this isn't pretty.
From dissecting live animals as a boy to his latest outrage perpetrated on his own infant children, Luke is completely unconcerned with the sufferings of others, so intent is he on his "scientific" inquiries after the human soul. The fact that he is obviously lacking in this department is one of the book's ironies. The gruesome details are plentiful enough in Burnside's novel, but it is what goes on in the mind of this depraved character even more than what happens under his scalpel that terrifies; The Dumb House is likely to be one of those books that sticks in your memory long after it's done, whether you want it to or not.
From Kirkus Reviews
An adenoidally creepy, affecting debut about one man's mad hunt for the origins of language and the soul. Scottish poet Burnside's bravura performance has everything to do with preeminence of tone. He's a master of the art of establishing persuasive personal atmospherics, based here on the voice of Luke, the precociously anomic and amoral first-person narrator. Effectively orphaned from society on a secluded rural estate in Britain, Luke has been headily influenced by his remote, beautiful mother and left indifferent to his anonymous father, not encouraged by either, while they were living, to consider himself as real kin of anybody. Estranged and yet entitled, he never doubts that he lives at the center of a world. Perhaps as a result, the nature of communication obsesses him. He's fascinated, for instance, by the legend of the Moghul King Akbar's ``Dumb House,'' where chosen children of the empire were sequestered from infancy on, cared for by mute adults and observed to determine whether speech was an inborn or acquired skill. (The conclusion: Acquired.) Appalled by the behavior of the humanity lurking on his own distant periphery and yet seduced by the idea that we may possess a redemptive spirit nonetheless, Luke wants ``to know the soul,'' and so sets out to reproduce Akbar's experiment on a more modest scale at home. The novel successfully raises Luke from the realm of morbid thrill-seeking to the more poignant role of artist gone wrong. Playing god in a series of cruel physical and metaphysical exploits, he recruits humans into his lair but is never himself humanized. The flaw is that all the people here rarely seem wholly real; they live (and perish) in a vaporous, unhappy epic of inflamed and narrowing sky. Still, Burnside's poetry urges us with remarkably few misgivings into his story, which seizes hold of readers like a virus. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Shocking in nature,
By Daniel Kenneth Jones (Nuevo Laredo, Mexico) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Dumb House (Paperback)
I came accross this book in a rather strange way. I was traveling to Monterrey, Mexico departing from the bus station in Nuevo Laredo, when an English couple came up to me and offered me the book, noticing I was the only American, hense the only obvious english speaker of the bunch. I took it and read during my three hour bus ride into metropolitan Monterrey. I was immediately wrapped tightly around the story line, for I hadn't read a book so off the beaten path in as long as I can remember. It's an interesting story to start with, and gets stranger and stranger as the "experiements" with the, better said, HIS children continue. I found myself in the end reading the book simply to find out how it ended. When I did finish it, I was completely surprised, and wished that it would have continued and had some better explanation for the actions of the gentelmen. But it was definately worth the time, and I have recommended it to several people since reading it.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A chilling, wonderful read,
By Steve Baumgarten (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Dumb House (Paperback)
A. L. Kennedy's blurb on the back cover sums up this dark and disturbing book perfectly: "The Dumb House is a wonderfully disturbing book -- chillingly focused and lyrically amoral with moments of remarkable stillness and beauty. A poetic novel in the best and most troubling sense."
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A bizarre experiment,
This review is from: The Dumb House (Paperback)
This book is special, I have read nothing like it. The world is seen through the eyes of a madman, but somehow everything he does makes sense. There is a logical explanation to everything and soon you start to almost approve of his behaviour, as if nothing is allowed to jeopardize 'The Experiment'...
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