Memory Leaks

~ The Witch Elm, by Tana French ~

From the very first paragraph, Tana French’s latest novel draws you into the inner thoughts of its protagonist.

I’ve always considered myself to be, basically, a lucky person. I don’t mean I’m one of those people who pick up multi-million-euro lotto numbers on a whim, or show up seconds too late for flights that go on to crash with no survivors. I just mean that I managed to go through life without any of the standard misfortunes you hear about. I wasn’t abused as a kid, or bullied in school; my parents didn’t split up or die or have addiction problems…

Toby has had, indeed, a charmed life. His looks, quick thought and tongue, and easy charm have got him out of childhood scrapes, adolescent problems, and in his twenties, job issues. But this changes when he is the sudden, apparently random victim of a violent burglary that leaves him with longterm memory lapses and physical injuries. He goes to his comfort home, The Ivy House, a family house now owned by his dying uncle.

He is settling into an approximation of calm routine with his girlfriend Melissa and his Uncle Hugo when a skull is found in the eponymous wych elm in the garden. The family — his cousins Leon and Susanna, all their parents — gather together, stunned, against the subsequent assault of policemen, detectives, and forensic investigators.

As with all French’s novels, the crime at the center of the novel ties back to the narrator’s past. In the previous Dublin Murder Squad novels, the narrator was a detective, and had to confront his or her own demons while investigating a murder that drew them unavoidably back into their own history. Each one of those novels was a gem (my personal favourite is Faithful Place), but this one is not part of the series: here Toby is on the other side, the one being interrogated wondering what strategies the detectives employ and what they know.

Toby is the classic unreliable narrator. Is he forgetting episodes from his past because of his memory lapses? or because he has simply chosen not to remember any unpleasant events? Does he conveniently forget anything that doesn’t fit with his self-image? His anxieties, perplexity, and occasional paranoia are brilliantly drawn. French’s protagonists are sometimes not easy to like, but are always riveting.

The other main characters are also excellent: Susanna, the loving but matter-of-fact mother, the unapologetically gay Leon, the quiet academic Uncle Hugo. Toby’s girlfriend, Melissa, came across as less realistic to me: she was almost impossibly supportive, understanding and capable, and bore no real scars from her own rough childhood. And the group of six parents who appear only occasionally, are also somewhat less distinct characters. But to this reader, that’s all to the good; it’s like a painting with four characters in the foreground and a bunch more in the background, somewhat fuzzy but with a few sharp details.

Plot aside, the great pleasure of French’s writing is the dialogue and the dreamy, mood-setting yet precise description.

My eye kept being pulled back to the bloodstain shadows on the carpet. The memory caught me like a singeing crackle of electricity: clogged snuffle of my breath, pain, green curtains, a gloved hand reaching down — “The candlestick”, I said — I was glad to hear that my voice sounded normal, even casual. “I had a candlestick. Black metal, about this big, shaped like one of those twisted railings with a,a petal thing at the top” — I couldn’t make myself tell them how I had brought it out of the bedroom with me, the big hero all ready to smash the living shit out of the bad guys. “It was there, on the floor”. [p73]

The Witch Elm struck me as a distinctly feminist novel. Although I’m not sure it would pass the Bechdel Test (I don’t recall many conversations between Susanna and Melissa), Susanna’s views on the indignities, harassment, and condescension she experienced as a woman are strongly and clearly articulated. French is a writer with an awareness of privilege: although some characters, naturally, lack this awareness, subtleties of class, gender and money are gently but firmly made clear to the reader.

I pre-order all of Tana French’s novels.

The Witch Elm, by Tana French. Viking, 2018.