At the start of The Witch Elm, Toby Hennessy introduces himself by saying, “I’ve always considered myself to be, basically, a lucky person”. This is the first line of the novel, in fact, and proves to be the key to its dark heart.
The unfolding story deconstructs that statement. It confronts Toby with the fact that - despite feeling that his life changed beyond recognition after being beaten to oblivion in the early chapters - he has always been, basically, oblivious.
Luck? Is it really ‘luck’ that gave young, white, male, middle-class, able-bodied, straight, handsome Toby Hennessy a leg-up in life? Just dumb luck? This is a novel about power and privilege.
The story is set in the elegantly dilapidated surroundings of the Ivy House, a mansion belonging to uncle Hugo, where Toby spent childhood summers with his cousins, Susanna and Leon. At times, The Witch Elm takes on the air of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, as the three cousins meander through the pages, drinking good wine, slagging less-fortunate ‘skangers’ and philosophising at length. No-one (except uncle Hugo) is especially sympathetic and some of these sections feel directionless.
But French has an important point to make, symbolised by the Ivy House. The cousins inhabit the same world - literally the same house - but different realities. A macabre discovery in a tree in the garden, the wych elm of the title, forces Toby to dig back into their shared and unshared past experiences. He discovers the true meaning of ‘luck’.
A departure from her Dublin Murder Squad series, Tana French once again offers a work of literary fiction that happens to feature a murder. The plot is slow moving and character led. It won’t please fans of a rapid page-turner, although sections of the novel - especially the build up to the ending - are gripping. Both frustrating and brilliant, its strength hits after the ending; rather like the giant wych elm, you only realise the magnitude and scale of the ideas after stepping away and regarding it from a distance.
Review: The Likeness, Tana French
In the second of her police procedural series set around the Dublin Murder Squad, Tana French focuses on Detective Cassie Maddox, a traumatised cop who bears an uncanny likeness to a murder victim.
A former undercover police officer, Cassie is recovering from the fallout of a prior case. When her new boyfriend, the solid and dependable detective Sam O’Neill, is called to a crime scene where a woman’s body has been found in a broken down cottage, he at first thinks it is Cassie. Instead, the victim is identified as Lexie Madison, a mature student who lives with a group of intellectual misfits at a grand house in the nearby village.
Although the privileged and aloof gang has a knack of making itself unpopular, there is no obvious motive for Lexie’s murder. With no leads or clues, the police hatch a plan to take advantage of the similarity between Cassie and Lexie to solve the crime. What ensues reveals that the two women may have had more in common than just outward appearance.
This slow-burning suspense invests time in building up characters, motives and tension. With the large cast of housemates and villagers, French expertly allows us to ponder their possible involvement in the killing. The mood of eccentricity, elitism and anachronism that pervades Whitethorn House slowly casts even battle-hardened Cassie under a spell; although the friends will also ring bells with anyone who enjoyed Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History”.
The most engaging element is the collision between personal and professional in Cassie’s mind - we, like her, gradually conflate the officer and the victim until we don’t know where Lexie ends and Cassie begins. This is the heart of the novel: Cassie identifying and healing herself in the guise of the lost woman. So much so that the resolution of the central mystery — who killed Lexie Madison? — is almost an anticlimax that gets in the way of the more compelling curiosity about how Cassie will ever step out from the shadow of her ill-fated doppelgänger.