Customer Reviews

The Dumb House

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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."

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'...

The novel relates a highly elaborate experiment carried out by an insane genius: whether language is innately acquired, or whether it is a product of environment and conditioning. The protagonist (who is unnamed) proceeds to murder a vagrant girl he shelters, preparatory to kidnapping her two children (of whom he, incidentally, is the father) and imprisoning them for years in a secure chamber. Throughout this period, he attends them while totally mute, administering food to them and preventing them from coming into any contact with the outside world in his bid to discover the origin of human communication. However, his experiment takes a turn for the worse, as the two children manage to surprisingly turn the tables on their deranged father, ending with grisly results. This is an unforgettable and deeply fascinating crime thriller.

Nazi doctors must have been very much like "Luke." His apparently higher quest for the soul and its "location" and nature is in fact nothing but a vehicle to cause pain to other creatures and to vent his frustration at his being shut out from the rest of humanity. The book is heavy with irony: he looks for the soul, but he himself is soulless and therefore the meaning of "soul" will be forever lost to him; he despises small talk, but apparently between him and other people, including his "beloved" mother, no other kind of talk seems to have ever been exchanged. He ridicules people who bestow their affection on "dumb animals," and the only creature he seems to have any kind of affection (or something close to it) for is Lillian, a human version of a stray puppy. The irony, of course, resides on the fact that he never discovers any of this. This book is pretty horrifying sometimes, but because of its general iciness in tone it remains one step short from being really disturbing.

The subject matter of this novel creeped me out, yet I found myself picking it up again and again just to finish and find out what happened. The question "Is language innate or learned?" is an interesting one, but the main character - whose name you discover in the final pages of the novel - is so inhuman, so cold and unemotional, that as a reader you lose sight of your interest in that question. I suppose I knew throughout the novel that there would be no consequences for narrator's bizarre behavior, but I kept reading just to see if there would be. While this book greatly disturbed me, and I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, I have to say I am not going to forget it any time soon - which perhaps was the author's objective.

When I read this book I was taken in by the lyrical quality of the writing, the simple, musical flow of words. The words were in a harmony with the narrative, which flowed on without any contrivance or strain. Burnside has created a character whose actions seem inexplicable, but entirely imaginable. It is the best kind of fiction - that which is out of our everyday experience, but that we can experience with the same vividness as we do everyday life. It was the cool quiet of the narrative voice which endeared me to this book. The ideas which the book expresses are inextricably tied up with the events, but they are at the same time the cause of the events and incidental to them. It is not a lecture in linguistics, but a wonderful story. When I met John Burnside at a reading he was evidently disturbed that he had written such a book. I found this fascinating. It does not have the quality of a nightmare, but of a frighteningly lucid dream, where all of what happens is possible, and very real. The ideas of the novel are old, but not cliched. The novel is not a laboured discussion of the origins of language, but a strange and intriguing description of one man's perverse fascination with language.

I was intrigued by the concept of this book and it got off to s fairly interesting start but the whole thing fell apart quickly and in the end-which I somehow managed to get to-I couldn't wait to ditch this monstrosity.

The book is based on an old fable or story or whatever you want to call it about a king trying to determine if language is learned or innate. The character of this book sets out to recreate this concept-with very disastrous results.

The problem isn't that the character is a sicko-which he definitely is-it's that he a boring, insipid, unconvincing sicko. The completely non-emotive sociopath has been done before-see Silence of the Lambs-but even totally non-emotive sociopaths need some sort of character to be interesting. This fellow is a boring a last years fashion news.

The book also rotates around the concept of this exercise as an intellectual experiment in social engineering. Unfortunately the character comes across as a 15th rate intellect and the whole exercise is therefore colored as demented sadism pretending to be something else-unconvincingly at that.

In the end the book would have been just as interesting-and relevant-had it been about some sort of mechanical device that has run amuck and maimed people in it's path simply by circumstance. That's what this protagonist is-an animated device.

It's all very dreary and cold and uninspiring and-ultimately-boring.

Very, very boring.

This tiresome little novel uses a "Silence of the Lambs" style character to convey the author's alarmingly facile views on 'Scientific Method'.

Or something. The book is so poorly arranged and the writing so lumbering it is hard to tell.

In several cringeworthy segments of the book the main character goes to the library to read vauge unmentioned linguistic books. (In this book, 'going to the library' is a high point in terms of excitment). Perhaps if the author was aquainted with a library he would have been able to find more interesting things to say about science, or linguistics, or anything.

Using a very poorly sketched and corny 'psycho-killer' to drone on and on spouting ill-informed cliches about the difference between science and art would be bad enough if it was done with any sort of narrative flourish. But it isn't. The narrative is completely lacking in any sort of page-turning quality.