The Witch Elm a Novel by Tana French Reviews
Fiction
Stephen Rex Reviews Tana French's 'Extraordinary' New Novel
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THE WITCH ELM
By Tana French
509 pp. Viking Press. $28.
"I've always considered myself to be, basically, a lucky person."
That'south the outset line of Tana French'southward boggling new novel, "The Witch Elm," and much of what follows is a meditation on luck — the expert, the bad and the extremely ugly. Here'due south a things-go-bad story Thomas Hardy could have written in his prime, although the Hardy version would probably comprise no lines such as "I looked similar the lowlife in a zombie movie who isn't going to make it by the outset one-half-60 minutes."
French has eschewed her popular Dublin Murder Team series here to write a stand up-alone novel, and as often happens, her work — never dull to begin with — has gained a certain lively freshness. Oh, there are detectives, and they make it equipped with all the surface bonhomie and dangerous, non to say feral, undertones that nosotros are used to in a French novel. The only difference here — and it's a large 1 — is that when they finish one of their nerve-jangling interviews and leave Ivy Firm, the Dublin manse where most of "The Witch Elm" is set, we are not privy to their speculations or deductions. (This reader would enjoy a small companion volume, or perhaps an e-volume, where at least some of those station-house conversations were available.)
Every bit a reviewer, information technology's my chore to at least brand a scratch at describing the plot of the novel, just as a boyfriend novelist, I balk at giving more than a few bare details. (In my opinion, the flap copy gives away far too much — when you know everything that's going to happen in the start 140 pages or so, somebody went overboard.) A skillful novel, especially one that fits, however uncomfortably, into the mystery genre, is like an expensive Swiss watch. My job is to admire information technology, non overwind it.
[ You might be surprised to larn what Tana French'due south favorite book is . ]
Toby Hennessy, the self-avowed lucky narrator, handles publicity for an fine art gallery. The current show beingness prepared features street artists with no fixed accost and, in some cases, detailed arrest records: skangers, in French'southward pungent Irish argot, which also includes the unforgettable (to me, at to the lowest degree) line "I knew I should swallow something, but I couldn't be arsed."
Prototype
One of the creative person-skangers, a fellow who goes by the colorful alias of Gouger, shows particular talent, but not quite plenty for Tiernan, i of the gallery employees. Our narrator catches Tiernan touching up Gouger'south work to make it more interesting and salable. Toby keeps silent (his moral compass doesn't ever point to true north), just the gallery owner finds out. Tiernan is fired; Toby is not.
Presently thereafter, Toby'southward luck runs out. Intruders enter his home, and when Toby catches them at their break-in, they shell him within an inch of his life. He awakes in the infirmary with holes in his retentivity, aphasia, splitting headaches, a limp and PTSD. When he returns to some form of consciousness and a doctor tells him, "You were very lucky," the irony is then strong yous could bottle it and sell it equally a vitamin supplement.
So we accept the archetype mystery-novel situation, correct? It'due south the whodunit someone, virtually likely Toby himself, must solve. Was it Tiernan who set up the beating? Was information technology Richard, the gallery possessor? Perchance the mysterious Gouger, seeking vengeance for having been booted from the exhibition?
Except the classic situation turns out to be tangential to the main story (although it returns to our attention in the novel'southward jaw-dropping final 40 pages). Toby's moral lapse at the gallery and his subsequent chirapsia recede into the background when he goes to his Uncle Hugo's house to recuperate, and a skull is found in the wych elm at the foot of the Ivy House garden. I tell yous this only because it's in the damn flap re-create, and I trust your own powers of deduction, love reader, to surmise that an entire skeleton before long follows.
[ Read reviews of Tana French's last three books: " The Trespasser ," " The Secret Place " and " Broken Harbor ." ]
So far, so Agatha Christie (who is even name-checked in passing). Y'all accept the murder victim, some other skanger (although a rich one) whose passing we need not mourn; yous have the small-scale puddle of possible suspects; you take the manor house with the walled-in garden where the body was discovered. Simply an Agatha Christie novel might run 250 pages or and then. "The Witch Elm" is twice that length, and I'm relieved to report that those added pages aren't just filler.
They are, in fact, the cadre of the volume, and what lands French's novel in that twilight zone between mystery and suspense (where this book will undoubtedly be shelved at your local bookstore) and literature. It is a foreign and rich territory inhabited by such novelists as Michael Robotham, Laura Lippman, George Pelecanos, James Ellroy and Ruth Rendell. All of these novelists (and a dozen others) have "transcended the genre," equally they say, none of them in quite the same fashion.
The fine-drawn quality of French'due south characterizations is one measure out of the novel's above-average success as literary fiction, which is to say fiction that enriches our lives rather than just serving to pass the time on an airplane or in a doctor's waiting room. I was specially taken by Toby's cousins, the erstwhile wild-kid Susanna and the twitchy I'1000-gay-so-deal-with-it Leon. The cops are good, besides, with their cheerfully matey dialogue and their probing offhand questions. (Uncle Hugo was a bit as well saintly for my gustatory modality, but yous tin't have everything.)
Characters aside, the book is lifted by French's nervy, almost obsessive prose. Although they are of different sexes and nationalities, when I read Tana French I'm e'er reminded of David Goodis ("Dark Passage," "The Moon in the Gutter" and "Shoot the Piano Player"). She has that same need to go over information technology, and over it and over it once again, like a farmer who can't plow the field just once simply must go at it from every bespeak of the compass, sweating over the bike of his tractor, non satisfied until every clod has been crumbled abroad.
It'due south this obsessiveness, coupled with French's smoothen, almost satiny prose, that made "Broken Harbor" and "The Hole-and-corner Place" such knockout books. In the former we see the stride-past-footstep degeneration of a fine listen, mirroring the destruction of the Irish economy following the crash of '08; in the latter nosotros spend a feverish day of delirium in a girls' boarding school. (Alarm: In that location'south a lot of "amazeballs!" and "totes adorbs!")
To read a French novel — this likewise goes for Goodis — is to enter an O.C.D. world where madness seems very shut. In "The Secret Place," it's the hormone-driven madness of boyish girls; in "Broken Harbor," it's that of a man who becomes increasingly convinced at that place are wild fauna in the walls of his family'southward house. In the current novel, Toby tin't even be certain of his own past and keeps returning to the holes in his memory like a human being feeling the gum-cavities where teeth used to be. He'south about as far from Miss Marple as amateur detectives come, and still he stumbles to some semblance of a solution, just the aforementioned.
Two scenes, both involving Toby and his cousins, are avatars of how French, like Goodis, doubles back on herself, not then much narrating as drilling down. Both are conversations running about 35 pages each. In lesser easily, these scenes would be a trudge. In French's, the reader simply can't allow get. There's a delirious intensity to them that seems to be French's sole property. It's non almost the dialogue, as in a George V. Higgins or Richard Toll novel; information technology's about the obsession to make certain everything gets said.
Is the novel perfect? Nope. There'southward a genealogical subplot that goes nowhere, and the elder generation of Hennessys are mere shadows. Toby and his cousins are nearing 30, only in the company of their elders — whose contributions are sort of like the conversations of adults in the "Peanuts" cartoons, just trombone wah-wah-wahs — they seem much younger. Saintly Uncle Hugo is an exception, but he's a chip of a stereotype.
These are mere quibbles, the kind reviewers are paid to make, I suppose. The bottom line is this: "The Witch Elm" is what another novelist, Stewart O'Nan, likes to phone call "a heapin' helping." The prose, as fine as it is, as dense as it is, as obsessive every bit it is, remains in service to the story. This is good work past a good author. For the reader, what luck.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/books/review/tana-french-witch-elm.html
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