The Witch Elm

Previously on Rebecca Reads Tana French: I was a mystery book junkie for all of my childhood, but I fell out of the habit as an adult -- I found the plot twists too obvious and the characters too derivative. So when Tana French was first recommended to me, I figured I'd read one and move on. Instead, I became completely entranced with her approach to mystery. Murders tear at the fabric of what we believe makes us human. French uses this tear the same way that speculative fiction writers use magic or giant robots: to explore what makes us human and where the borders of humanity are.

Although Witch Elm departs from French's previous formula by not including the detectives as protagonists, it's otherwise true to form. The book centers on two main themes: first, the warmth of families, and on the obverse the distance that can grow in relationships by pretending that everything is normal and second, who well one can ever really know themselves. French excels at evoking visceral feelings -- both positive and then rapidly cooling as things go wrong -- and here the set up of friends, romantic relationships and family all feel very real. The new format really gives her space for thematic development and she uses it to approach these questions from multiple angles even before the central crime comes to light (over 100 pages in -- a corpse in the witch elm, details borrowed almost completely from the "Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm" case)

I really loved the exploration of self and how well one knows oneself. Although not the protagonist, the most vivid character is the spiritual patriarch of the family, Hugo, slowly losing his personality to a brain tumor, and his response to why he never had children of his own: "one gets used to being oneself" sets the tone for the whole book. What does it mean to be oneself? Who are we? Do we ever really know how we will react to events that unsettle us. It's a very 2018 book: in the face of rising white nationalism does one resist or cling to routine? (I'm turning out to be the latter, much to my own dismay. If that's you, too, this is your book.)

Much like other French books, the whodunnit of the murder is not the point, although I found the plot twists more satisfying than usual perhaps because they all happened from the lens of a pretty unreliable narrator. Also, I love unreliable narrators and this was a very satisfying instantiation -- ostensibly, the narration is simply unreliable because the protagonist is recovering from a concussion; however, even before the head injury, the narration reminded me of [b:The Farm|17557913|The Farm|Tom Rob Smith|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1391017911s/17557913.jpg|24485092] -- the narrator would report out his happy-go-luckiness and how fine everything was, while clearly panicking. I enjoyed the exploration of what it's like inside the psyche of someone who's invested in being OK -- it's a common personality trope in real life and pretty alien to me.

It's clear that without the detectives, French had even more room to blend into "literary fiction" and develop her themes. On the other hand, I thought it also resulted in a loss of the internal skeleton of the narrative. Without it, some parts seemed bloated, while others seemed overly condensed. Particularly the last plot twist, which was given so little space within the narrative, suffered from this.

Nonetheless, French is the only mystery writer whose books are appointment-reading for me and this didn't disappoint.

(I received a free copy in exchange for my unbiased review. But also I'd already bought a pre-order copy before I won the giveaway.)