Review by New York Times Review
"I'VE ALWAYS CONSIDERED myself to be, basically, a lucky person." That's the first line of Tana French's extraordinary new novel, "The Witch Elm," and much of what follows is a meditation on luck - the good, the bad arid the extremely ugly. Here's a things-go-bad story Thomas Hardy could have written in his prime, although the Hardy version would probably contain no lines such as "I looked like the lowlife in a zombie movie who isn't going to make it past the first half-hour." French has eschewed her popular Dublin Murder Squad series here to write a stand-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 arrive equipped with all the surface bonhomie and dangerous, not to say feral, undertones that we are used to in a French novel. The only difference here - and it's a big one - is that when they finish one of their nerve-jangling interviews and exit Ivy House, 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-book, where at least some of those station-house conversations were available.) As a reviewer, it's my job to at least make a scratch at describing the plot of the novel, but as a fellow 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 first 140 pages or so, somebody went overboard.) A good novel, especially one that fits, however uncomfortably, into the mystery genre, is like an expensive Swiss watch. My job is to admire it, not overwind it. Toby Hennessy, the self-avowed lucky narrator, handles publicity for an art gallery. The current show being prepared features street artists with no fixed address and, in some cases, detailed arrest records: skangers, in French's pungent Irish argot, which also includes the unforgettable (to me, at least) line "I knew I should eat something, but I couldn't be arsed." One of the artist-skangers, a fellow who goes by the colorful alias of Gouger, shows particular talent, but not quite enough for Tiernan, one of the gallery employees. Our narrator catches Tiernan touching up Gouger's work to make it more interesting and salable. Toby keeps silent (his moral compass doesn't always point to true north), but the gallery owner finds out. Tiernan is fired; Toby is not. Shortly thereafter, Toby's luck runs out. Intruders enter his home, and when Toby catches them at their burglary, they beat him within an inch of his life. He awakes in the hospital with holes in his memory, 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 so strong you could bottle it and sell it as a vitamin supplement. So we have the classic mystery-novel situation, right? It's the whodunit someone, most likely Toby himself, must solve. Was it Tiernan who set up the beating? Was it Richard, the gallery owner? Possibly 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's jawdropping final 40 pages). Toby's moral lapse at the gallery and his subsequent beating 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 you this only because it's in the damn flap copy, and I trust your own powers of deduction, dear reader, to surmise that an entire skeleton soon follows. So far, so Agatha Christie (who is even name-checked in passing). You have the murder victim, another skanger (although a rich one) whose passing we need not mourn; you have the small pool of possible suspects; you have the manor house with the walled-in garden where the body was discovered. But an Agatha Christie novel might run 250 pages or so. "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 core of the book, 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 strange and rich territory inhabited by such novelists as Michael Robotham, Laura Lippman, George Pelecanos, James Ellroy and Ruth Rendeli. All of these novelists (and a dozen others) have "transcended the genre," as they say, none of them in quite the same fashion. The fine-drawn quality of French's characterizations is one measure 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 especially taken by Toby's cousins, the former wild-child Susanna and the twitchy I'm-gay-so-deal-with-it Leon. The cops are good, too, with their cheerfully matey dialogue and their probing offhand questions. (Uncle Hugo was a bit too saintly for my taste, but you can'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 always reminded of David Goodis ("Dark Passage," "The Moon in the Gutter" and "Shoot the Piano Player"). She has that same need to go over it, and over it and over it again, like a farmer who can't plow the field just once but must go at it from every point of the compass, sweating over the wheel of his tractor, not satisfied until every clod has been crumbled away. It's this obsessiveness, coupled with French's smooth, almost satiny prose, that made "Broken Harbor" and "The Secret Place" such knockout books. In the former we see the step-by-step degeneration of a fine mind, mirroring the destruction of the Irish economy following the crash of ' 08; in the latter we spend a feverish day of delirium in a girls' boarding school. (Warning: There's a lot of "amazeballs!" and "totes adorbs! ") To read a French novel - this also goes for Goodis - is to enter an O.C.D. world where madness seems very close. In "The Secret Place," it's the hormone-driven madness of adolescent girls; in "Broken Harbor," it's that of a man who becomes increasingly convinced there are wild animals in the walls of his family's house. In the current novel, Toby can't even be sure of his own past and keeps returning to the holes in his memory like a man feeling the gum-cavities where teeth used to be. He's about as far from Miss Marple as amateur detectives come, and yet he stumbles to some semblance of a solution, just the same. Two scenes, both involving Toby and his cousins, are avatars of how French, like Goodis, doubles back on herself, not so much narrating as drilling down. Both are conversations running about 35 pages each. In lesser hands, these scenes would be a trudge. In French's, the reader simply can't let go. There's a delirious intensity to them that seems to be French's sole property. It's not about the dialogue, as in a George V. Higgins or Richard Price novel; it's about the obsession to make sure everything gets said. Is the novel perfect? Nope. There's a genealogical subplot that goes nowhere, and the elder generation of Hennessys are mere shadows. Toby and his cousins are nearing 30, but in the company of their elders - whose contributions are sort of like the conversations of adults in the "Peanuts" cartoons, just trombone wahwah-wahs - they seem much younger. Saintly Uncle Hugo is an exception, but he's a bit 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 call "a heapin' helping." The prose, as fine as it is, as dense as it is, as obsessive as it is, remains in service to the story. This is good work by a good writer. For the reader, what luck. STEPHEN KING'S next novel, "Elevation," will be published on Oct. 30.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* French, author of the award-winning Dublin Murder Squad series, delivers a spellbinding stand-alone novel carefully crafted in her unique, darkly elegant prose style, which Stephen King has called incandescent. Toby Hennessy always considered himself a lucky guy, trading on his considerable charm for a successful life, until he has the misfortune to surprise two burglars in his flat. He is beaten and left for dead, and after a less-than-successful recovery, he agrees to care for his dying uncle, Hugo, at the family's ancestral home while working on regaining his own cognitive and motor skills. When a skull is found in the trunk of an ancient tree in the garden, his dysfunctional brain struggles to reassess the past, evidently not what it once seemed and now abounding in million-euro questions. Issues of identity permeate the narrative. Toby's previous forays using fake social-media accounts become an issue for the police. Welcome comic relief comes via Hugo's genealogy investigation service, now in high gear because of Americans confounded by their Irish DNA test results. Toby finds himself wondering how much he had ever really known about his family, now so disconcerted that their misery is like some rampaging animal, and the reader gets pulled into the vortex right along with them. As Oscar Wilde wrote, The truth is rarely pure and never simple.--Jane Murphy Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Reviewed by Julie Buntin. The Witch Elm is Tana French's first standalone, following five Dublin Murder Squad mysteries. It's as good as the best of those novels, if not better. In theme and atmosphere, it evokes her earliest two books, Into the Woods and The Likeness, using the driving mystery-of course, there's a murder-as a vehicle for asking complex questions about identity and human nature. But in this latest work, privilege is French's subject; more specifically, the relationship between privilege and what we perceive as luck. Who might we become if the privileges we take for granted were suddenly ripped away? Instead of a world-weary detective, our narrator is Toby, an easygoing 20-something who has always taken his wild good fortune as a matter of course. He's attractive, clever, and universally liked. A publicist for a Dublin art gallery, he has a girlfriend so saintly that it takes a while for her to register as a real character (or at least for him to see her that way). Then robbers break into his apartment and beat him so badly that the physical damage permeates every aspect of his life, fundamentally altering his appearance, his gait, and his sense of self. His memory is newly riddled with gaps; his frustration as he attempts to discern what's real, what's remembered, and what's paranoia adds fuel to the plot. While he's in the hospital, his beloved Uncle Hugo, keeper of the Ivy House, a family property that's rendered with French's signature attention to real estate, is diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Toby moves in with him, both to keep him company and because he, too, needs a caretaker. When a human skull turns up in a hollow of a witch elm in the backyard of the Ivy House, the plot revs its engine. Who does the skull belong to? And what does Toby have to do with whoever died in his backyard, or at least who was buried there? In typical French fashion, just when you think you've started to piece it all together, the picture shifts before your eyes. It's a bold move to wait until nearly a third of the way into the book to deploy the body. But what might seem like throat-clearing in another writer's novel is taut and tense in The Witch Elm, thanks to a layered network of subplots and the increasing fragmentation of Toby himself. In many ways, the most interesting question the novel asks is not whodunit; it's whether, and how, Toby will come back together again. Stepping outside the restrictions of the Dublin Murder Squad format suits French. Readers used to the detective's perspective might miss the shop talk, not to mention the pleasure of inhabiting the POV of the smartest character rather than (in this case) the most bewildered. By channeling the story through a narrator who's unfamiliar with the very worst parts of human nature, she's able to put her thematic questions at center stage . She carefully builds Toby up, and then strips every part of him away; the result is a chilling interrogation of privilege and the transformative effects of trauma. Julie Buntin is the author of Marlena, a novel. © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This first stand-alone novel by French ("Dublin Murder Squad" series) features personable Dubliner Toby. Toby does social media work for an art gallery, maintains close relationships with his cousins Leon and Susanna, and has loose plans to marry girlfriend Melissa. Then one night, two burglers in his apartment beat him senseless and leave him for dead. Struggling mentally and physically, Toby is unable to continue working or living on his own, so he and Melissa move in with his Uncle Hugo, who is in the late stages of brain cancer. When a skeleton found in a tree in the backyard is identified as a high school friend of Toby's, long-held secrets bubble just below the surface. But with Toby's memory problems, he can't be sure how much he knows about Dominic, his death, or any of the people in his life-including himself. VERDICT French's slow-burning, character-driven examination of male privilege is timely, sharp, and meticulously crafted. Recommended for her legions of fans, as well as any readers of literary crime fiction.-Stephanie Klose, Library Journal © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A stand-alone novel from the author of the Dublin Murder Squad series.French has earned a reputation for atmospheric and existentially troubling police procedurals. Here, the protagonist is a crime victim rather than a detective. Toby Hennessy is a lucky man. He has a job he enjoys at an art gallery. He has a lovely girlfriend named Melissa. And he has a large, supportive family, including his kind Uncle Hugo and two cousins who are more like siblings. As the story begins, Toby's just gotten himself into a bit of a mess at work, but he's certain that he'll be able to smooth things over, because life is easy for himuntil two men break into his apartment and brutally beat him. The damage Toby suffers, both physical and mental, undermines his sense of self. His movements are no longer relaxed and confident. His facility with words is gone. And his memory is full of appalling blanks. When he learns that his uncle is dying, Toby decides that he can still be useful by caring for him, so he moves into the Hennessy family's ancestral home, and Melissa goes with him. The three of them form a happy family unit, but their idyll comes to an abrupt end when Toby's cousin's children find a human skull in the trunk of an elm tree at the bottom of the garden. As the police try to solve the mystery posed by this gruesome discovery, Toby begins to question everything he thought he knew about himself and his family. The narrative is fueled by some of the same themes French has explored in the past. It's reminiscent of The Likeness (2008) in the way it challenges the idea of identity as a fixed and certain construct. And the unreliability of memory was a central issue in her first novel, In the Woods (2007). The pace is slow, but the story is compelling, and French is deft in unraveling this book's puzzles. Readers will see some revelations coming long before Toby, but there are some shocking twists, too.Psychologically intense. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
