#ReadingLife: The Witch Elm

 

My own elm tree, though not a wych elm.

I think my luck was built into me, the keystone that cohered my bones, the golden thread that stitched together the secret tapestries of my DNA; I think it was the gem glittering at the fount of me, coloring everything I did and every word I said. And if somehow that has been excised from me, and if in fact I am still here without it, then what am I?

~The Witch Elm, by Tana French; 2018

"What am I?" is the refrain woven continuously throughout this novel, and, in variations, through all of French's novels, I'd posit. Hers are mysteries in which those trying to solve them learn more about themselves, their own faults and failures, than about those of the killer. They're deep-dive self-reflections in which the main character is forced examine all their preconceived notions, prejudices, and the way they see themselves. Save The Secret Place, The Trespasser, and The Searcher, all of them end on a melancholy, sometimes haunting note that I think of as uniquely Irish. That sense of life rushing by as a great locomotive, and our narrator sitting pinned down beneath the weight of all that they know, world upended by an experience that reached into the very core of their consciousness and rearranged all the carefully-stacked boxes there. Some characters are more resilient than others - my dear Frank - and some, like Toby in The Witch Elm, are left as scraped-clean shells...if he had much substance to begin with.  

Sounds delightful, huh? As far as reading experiences go, Tana French is delightful. I'm a French-pusher: get me talking about books too long, and I'll try to coerce you into reading one of hers. I've said before, but I'll say again: she's my favorite currently-writing author. The author whose work I most admire. 

The Witch Elm was a reread, part of a continuing reread of all her work that I started with Broken Harbor last year. I still have The Searcher left, but I'm thinking of going back to the beginning with In The Woods, since I haven't read it recently, then move on to The Likeness and Faithful Place. 

I think we've all read books in which it becomes clearly apparent early on that we're reading the author's thoughts and feelings, rather than those of a fully-realized fictional character. Lots of generalized language in which the men try to represent all men, the women all women. When the politics get heavy and preachy. When you're not seeing much conflict, or diversity of thought or speech patterns between characters. All of that. By contrast, though I obviously don't know Tana French personally at all, I couldn't guess anything about her - save that her mind is a complex, vivid, lyrical place - based on her work, and for that I applaud her. Her books are instantly, consumingly immersive: not once do I consider the author while reading. The narrator establishes him- or herself concretely in the opening paragraphs, and never lets go of the story. Her characters are so real in that we can't love or hate them completely; they're distressingly human, full of poor choices, ugly streaks of vanity, and great big blind spots. Then you layer in the prose itself, which walks the line between nostalgic embellishment, and brutal, unpretty honesty. Not too purple, not too sparse. The small, physical details of each scene - cobwebs in the corner of a window frame, nicotine stains on someone's fingers - are too specific and visual to be dismissed as fluff. She's painting you a picture, and it's one you need to see. 

The Witch Elm is her first standalone after the excellent Dublin Murder Squad series, and the first time the POV character hails from the other side of the law. What I love is that Toby is the sort of character who normally doesn't do much in other books. He's the well-dressed, boring, handsome, middle-class guy with good hair and a casually cruel dismissal of everyone he deems lesser. He's your average douchebag character who would serve as a boyfriend who gets dumped in a romance, or a red herring in a mystery. The sort of boy your grandmother always encouraged you to date, because she never had to hear him encouraging the women he dated to get plastic surgery. You know the type. He's full of himself, and woefully ordinary. But in the beginning of the novel, Toby suffers a brutal attack when his apartment is broken into, and that moment of violence, and the struggle in the aftermath, slowly flay him raw over the rest of the novel, until he comes face to face with his own uninspired, petty inner ugliness. It's brilliant, and satisfying, and even if I don't ever like Toby over the course of the novel, I can't help but empathize with his inner journey here, because Tana French is just that good. She's never trying to say, "Hey, look, my characters are good, moral people you should root for." They're people, and her writing unspools like a perfectly balanced orchestra number, full of ups, and downs, and elegant solos. 

Stylistically, she tries something a little different with each book, and in TWE, we see a departure from the semicolons and em-dashes that usually mark her sentences, and see lots more commas, even when a semicolon or em-dash would be more appropriate. I attribute this - though I'm only guessing - to Toby's brain injury; he's telling the entire story after his hit on the head, and the prose reflects his slip-sliding struggle to find his old voice, thoughts tumbling one after the other in a fashion less orderly than she normally presents, but very effective in drawing the reader into the sideways, unsettling landscape of Toby's mind post-injury. 

In short: go read Tana French. I'm forever mourning the fact that when I try to search for similar books, I always have slick, artless mysteries, or summer blockbusters thrown my way. *Sad face.* I am, though, currently reading a book by Jane Casey that I'm enjoying so far. I'll report back when I'm finished.