"D'ye know the word 'outlaw'?" Mart asks the table in general. "D'ye know where that comes from? Back in the day, a man that done the dirt on his people was put outside the law. If you could catch him, you could do whatever you chose to him. You could tie him up hand and foot and hand him over to the authorities, if you wanted. Or you could beat the shite outa him, or hang him from a tree. The law didn't protect him anymore."
It's surreal to know that Tana French has only penned eight novels, given the space they take up in my mind; that corner dedicated to admiring the work of wordsmiths, and learning what I can from master craftsmen. And I don't use the term master craftsmen lightly. There are plenty of writers who can structure a correct and informative sentence. Who can roll those one after the next into cogent paragraphs. Who can stack those into highly readable pages, over the course of which plot unfolds, and characters develop. Before you know it, a whole book's been birthed. But it takes a whole other kind of creative to transmute the elements of a decent novel into a work that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Tana French has such a keen understanding of human frailty and resilience that her writing elevates even the simplest of situations into razor sharp, goosebump-inducing moments of dread, expectation, and a sort of Irish melancholy so sweet it stings as well as soothes. Every character is so nuanced, so perfectly gray, that you never hate any of them, even if they deserve it, even if they're working against our protagonists. From the first page, you understand that you aren't reading a morality play; there is no agenda here, political or otherwise. These are stories about people, their hearts messy, French's handling of their tales spun with a deft hand. Hers is a lush but particular skill with prose.
The Hunter is her first multi-POV novel, which I thought might blunt the mystery, but, as ever, she held her cards close to the vest until the very end, the reveal as satisfying as it was unremarkable in its execution, and all the more artistic because of it.
It's rare for me to find French readers in the wild, and so I'll keep pounding the drum. If you haven't read her work, you should. I am, as ever, thankful that her first novel, In the Woods, caught my eye in a Borders bookstore more than a decade ago. I've always said that I want to write like her when I grow up, and that still holds true today. If I get back into writing, it'll be in no small part thanks to her inspiration.
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