The Searcher (20200
By Tana French
Viking, 464 pages.
★★★★
Irish mystery writer Tana French has a devoted following and yours truly is a long-time member of the pack. Unlike most within her genre, French doesn’t have a go-to detective, thus most of her novels treat us to a new cast of characters. Few can rival her when it comes to building new settings into which she places them. The Searcher was partially inspired by American Westerns, hence French’s decision to set the action in the West–of Ireland. Her village, Ardnakelty, is fictional, but internal clues suggest it’s near the coast, perhaps in County Clare. It’s a stunningly beautiful place, but also a hard and wild land.
Most French novels move at a crisp clip. The Searcher is a departure in that its main character, Cal Hooper, is trying to slow the pace of his life. He is a recently retired Chicago cop attempting to build life anew by moving to an Irish village, restoring a small cottage, and settling into rural life. Locals can’t imagine that a big city Yank actually wants to live in their village and most assume he’s either secretly working with the Garda (police) on a big case or renovating the abandoned cottage as a rental for summer tourists. Actually, Cal is a classic burn-out case fed up with violent crime, corrupt cops, and drug-infested neighborhoods. He’s also divorced and has a grown daughter, Alyssa, who lives in Seattle. Cal telephones her regularly, though there is tension between them.
Cal’s first mistake was assuming that a remote Irish village would somehow be immune from the problems he left behind. The second was imagining he could simply ease his way into the rhythms of Irish life. That’s hard to do when you’re tall, single, and your very attempt to keep to yourself makes you a curiosity object. Not that anyone with a neighbor like Mart can expect ‘round the clock peace. Mart has a dog named Kojak, a sweet tooth that Cal feeds every time he goes to Noreen Dunne’s store, and he’s Cal’s entrée into the local pub. Mart’s also a bachelor, though he doesn’t approve of such a life for Cal and is keen to match him with Noreen’s divorced sister Lena. But the biggest irritant in Cal’s life is his suspicion he’s being spied upon.
He’s not wrong about that; he catches a kid named Trey Reddy red handed. Trey comes from a dirt-poor home with too many kids headed by a single mum. Soon Trey and Cal form an odd bond of sorts. In exchange for some free labor, Trey can hang around, learn things from Cal, and get fed. What Trey really wants, though, is for Cal to find older brother Brendan, who disappeared. Trey is so persistent that Cal agrees to make queries.
If The Searcher has a moral, it’s don’t mess around in things you don’t understand using methods that don’t immigrate. Cal’s Chicago-style investigations are not nearly as clever or as effective as he imagined. My only real criticism of the novel is that Cal’s questioning techniques were too ham-handed to be believable. As anyone who has lived in a small place can tell you, you are seriously deluded if you think you can keep secrets or ask questions without word getting around. They’d probably also tell you that drugs, gangs, and shady characters are not just big-city problems. And they’d surely tell you that no one takes kindly to being considered a yokel.
The worlds of Cal, Trey, Lena, and Lena will attract, collide, clash, and resolve, though resolution comes in messy and open-ended ways. This is the first French novel not written with a first-person narrator, as she wanted to focus on Cal the stranger via his relationship with and impact upon others. In this way, Cal is analogous to Wild West movie loners who drift into a new town cloaked in mystery. Will Cal stay or, like the title character in Shane, ride off in the sunset?
The Searcher takes time to develop, but its slow traipse across moors, hills, and bogs heightens our sense of Cal adrift. He is a man looking answers about Brendan, but also seeking life-affirming footholds.
Rob Weir
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