Toby is a particularly fascinating unreliable narrator, not simply because the reader can’t trust him, but because he can’t trust himself. Despite the speed, none of the final revelations feel rushed or artificial. Get ready for the whiplash brought on by its final twists and turns. French’s pacing goes pedal-to-the-metal for the book’s last section.
But if you read her as carefully as you should, it’s a seductively detailed start in which every bit of dailiness is made to matter. French’s intense interest in identity and self-deception might make this a slow-building book for some. Death and mystery hover over the book, and French has some serious fun with twisting such conventions of the mystery genre as the locked-room puzzle. is in a class by herself as a superb psychological novelist for whom plot is secondary. It anchors a garden so lush that as you sink into this book, you can practically feel tendrils twisting around you.
Stately, 200 years old and burned into the collective memory of the Hennessys, this tree embodies the family’s idea of stability. The title tree in The Witch Elm, the Irish writer Tana French’s best and most intricately nuanced novel yet, is a mysterious character in its own right.
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.” Read Full Review >
Although they are of different sexes and nationalities, when I read Tana French I’m always reminded of David Goodis. Characters aside, the book is lifted by French’s nervy, almost obsessive prose. The Witch Elm is twice that length, and I’m relieved to report that those added pages aren’t just filler. But an Agatha Christie novel might run 250 pages or so. 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. 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’ … So far, so Agatha Christie (who is even name-checked in passing).
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