The Witch Elm (2108)
By Tana French
Penguin/Random House,
528 pages.
★★★
Toby Hennessy has it all: education, supportive parents,
charm, good looks, a cool PR job with an avant-garde Dublin art gallery, snarky
BFFs, and a sweet girlfriend named Melissa who adores him. He's an only child,
but his first cousins Susannah and Leon are like siblings to him. Maybe.
Everyone loves Toby. Maybe. But one night he is beaten by burglars and suffers
some pretty major physical injuries, including a concussion that leaves big
memory gaps. Doctors tell him that he'll recover most of his memory. Maybe.
The Witch Elm is
about lots of maybes, as in possible scenarios based upon what is remembered
and forgotten. One thing that's for sure is that Toby isn't going to work soon.
But being the lucky guy he is, he can get away from the bad vibes of his burgled
apartment by retreating to Ivy Hall, a grand-if-dowdy suburban family home
occupied by his beloved uncle Hugo. Hugo is the prototype of an eccentric
bachelor, and he certainly indulged Toby, Su, and Leon as kids and adolescents.
The sad note is that Hugo is dying of cancer, so Toby and Melissa settle in to
help him, mostly with meals and his genealogy studies as he's a resourceful old
coot otherwise.
Things get hairy when one of Su's kids finds a human skull
while climbing in the giant wych elm* in the walled-in yard. Detectives soon
discover an entire skeleton inside a hollow section of the tree. No such luck
that it's ancient; it belongs to an old friend of Toby's named Dominic. How can
that be? Dominic allegedly committed suicide by throwing himself into the sea a
decade earlier, and Toby went to his memorial service. What ensues is like
Edgar Allen Poe's "The Telltale Heart" crossed with The Girl on the Train.
Tana French is (rightly) famous for her Irish detective
novels, but The Witch Elm focuses on
those caught up in the middle of what might be a murder investigation. Toby's
memory is muddled, but he remembers liking Dominic, though they weren't "friend friends," as he relates to
investigator Mike Rafferty. He was just another spirited guy in the pack of young
adults who hung out at Hugo's house. Except Toby's benign view of Dominic
doesn't match that of Su, Leon, Toby's friends, or others who all say he was an
absolute monster. How can Toby's memory be so different? Was he oblivious? Is
his concussion rearranging reality? Or is it PTSD for his own misdeeds?
Rafferty regards Toby as a suspect, but he's pretty sure he could never do
anything like this. But there are those memory gaps…. Maybe he should consider
that he is a murderer.
The Witch Elm is loosely
based on a real (unsolved) case from England in 1944, but it's really a mind
game novel. What it does well is precisely what Poe did: put us inside the
terrified mind of a suspect. It is not, however, up to the quality of Ms.
French's prior novels. In my view, she tried too hard to write a book relevant
to #MeToo sensibilities. It may even be a backdoor slam on men. I don't know
about Irish law, but in the United States, the any charges secured by of her
hawkshaw Rafferty would be tossed as entrapment. Rafferty comes off as a Machiavellian
bully who force-fits his inferences, but most of her male characters are
loutish and crude.
The last quarter of the book seems a parallel force-fit. Melissa
seems too to be true, as if French was using her as an archetype for female
goodness. I give French credit for tossing a curve that I did not anticipate,
but that twist ultimately rests upon acceptance of gender essentialism that I
found more troubling than a skeleton in a tree.
The good news is that even a lackluster Tana French novel is
smart, lively, provocative, and well paced. Like several of her other books,
French probes the darker side of privilege to remind us that the label
"lucky" is one too cavalierly applied. Nonetheless, The Witch Elm is a bit like its namesake
tree–a rarity. In this case, it's a novel that's merely okay rather than
spectacular.
Rob Weir
* The witch elm–also called a Scots elm–has nothing to do with
black magic. The Old English word wych
or wice means flexible in a springy
sort of way. French uses it to suggest memory is elastic.
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