Forrest’s Reviews > The Jade Cabinet > Status Update

The gun has appeared.

Poor, mad Baconfield. Why do I find him such a sympathetic character (at least at this point of the novel)? Probably because I'm sorry his insane journey into transcendence has been irrupted by the appearance of the Hungerkünstler.

It's intriguing and horrifying to see a man completely break under the weight of his own broken character. But no one deserves to be undone like poor Tubbs.

A self-admittedly unreliable narrator is not something one often sees in literature, but the self-deprecating notion actually adds a depth to the narrative here. We simultaneously see the curtain and what is behind it.

The scene of Etheria's spontaneous demonstration of legerdemain and the following visit to a street fair freak show lend a strong thread of magic realism to the book. The question, as with most magic realism, is "what is supernatural and what is deception?" Or, more properly, how literally do we take the imaginative? I tend to fall in the undeceived camp; the fantastical becoming credulous. I want to believe.

Tubb's desire for smooth geometric architecture, "so that his infant son would always be visible to the nakedness eye and thus never in mischief," echoes with the glass walls of the Panopticon.

Ugh. Absolutely brutal and self-justifying. Tubbs is a monster.

Laughing out loud while reading this in my workplace break room and people are giving me amused looks. Tubby and the poor Walking Stick - great Victorian slapstick (quite literally - was this how the term was coined? No, that's an anachronism).

Feeling like I should read Byatt's Angels & Insects in tandem with this. Ah, the dark underbelly of victoriana.

Ah, neighbors of Alice Liddel, sharing in the relationship with Mr. Hodgson (aka "Lewis Carroll". This is a fairy-tale world, a palace in the element of air. Soon, this palace, I fear, will fall to the ground.