The Witch Elm

It's been awhile since I've hated a protagonist this much.

First Review - 3 Stars Tana French's 2018 standalone novel, The Witch Elm, is a crime thriller that follows the unlikable Toby Hennessy who was brutally attacked in his Dublin apartment after a night out with workmates. He is left for dead and suffering from TBI/PTSD. Toby eventually seeks refuge at his ancestral home, Ivy House, to care for his dying uncle. While there, a skull is discovered in the garden's elm tree, forcing Toby to confront the possibility that his past and who he is, is not what he thought.

I missed seeing this dealt with TBI as well as murder. Just a heads up if you love a TBI survivor. I almost stopped reading this book in the beginning. However, it was written by Tana French who has written several books I really enjoyed so I hung in there. I was glad I did. There were some twists and turns you may not anticipate, and who doesn’t love that?! This is not the first Tana French book I would recommend though.

Second Reading - 4 stars. While I still found some of the characters in this extremely unappealing, I gained new appreciation for some of the others, including Toby. In my second reading, I discovered the delicious way with words that the author always has. I also discovered more depth in the main characters and a linking of stories, lies and consequences than I saw before. While not a favorite Tana French book, it is a heartbreakingly compelling one. Everyone has a story, an inner life, that none of us knows about. That includes even our family and intimate friends. Glad I read it again. I will note that in addition to TBI, PTSD and sexual aggression there is also a particularly vicious murder.

Toby was always a happy go lucky kind of person. But turns out things may not be just like he remembers them.

He ends up going to stay with his ailing Uncle Hugo( I love Hugo) after several events in Toby's life. Hugo has terminal brain cancer and needs someone to look after him.

While staying with Hugo something happens that test relationships with family and will test Toby's memory all over again.

I really enjoyed this one. Tana French is great at writing mystery.

Where do I begin? I hated this book, to put it plainly. I had the murderer figured out before I knew who was murdered, which is understandable as this book is about 250 pages longer than necessary. I always know I'm going to dislike a book if Stephen King has given it any sort of accolade. (His plots are decent, but his writing is wack. Fight me.) The main character had no depth, he was just a self-involved asshole, and his girlfriend was the typical delicate waif that reacts perfectly to everything main character douche-lord says or does for their 3 year relationship. The murder reveal and burglar reveal was as anti-climactic as it could be, not to mention the information dump that was the last chapter. I'm just woefully unimpressed with this book. Seemingly endless tedium.

I liked this book more and more as it went on. The setting of the Ivy House is rich, nostalgic and beautifully described, which becomes a contrast to the dark things that happened there beyond Toby's privileged ignorance. Though the pacing was a bit slow, it ended up developing beyond a straightforward mystery into a nuanced piece about the harm that comes from complacency in those with power.

Just so underwhelming. I don't even understand why this book was written. Periods of graphic violence with boring, predictable mystery. Disappointing.

Happy go lucky Toby comes home from the bar late at night and is attacked by burglars who are rifling through his apartment. They leave him with a traumatic brain injury, which turns his life upside down. After some months of trying to recover, Toby agrees to move in with and look after his uncle Hugo, who is dying of brain cancer. Hugo lives in the Ivy House, a house that Toby and his two cousins Susanna and Leon have known and loved all their lives. When a human skull is found in the hollow of an old elm tree in the yard, old secrets start to surface as well.

This was a creepy novel. French makes the most of Toby's uncertainty, so that I didn't know how much to believe his telling of the story, even though he is the narrator. Also, throughout the story Toby reveals himself to be oblivious to other people's feelings and problems, self absorbed, and mean, and as the story goes on, Toby begins to understand a little bit of this himself. The murder is solved ambiguously, and by that time Toby has lost his assurance that he knows himself. I didn't like Toby, but I liked the book.

This one seems to be picking up some negative reviews from fans of Tana French's previous work. I haven't read any of that, but I did (mostly) enjoy this one. I had to stick with it, as I was initially put off by the slow pace, and the unlikeability of the main character, who is one of the braying overprivileged Ballsbridge wankers I tried my hardest to avoid when I was living in Dublin. Once you get past that though, it's a gripping read of a crime and its consequences echoing down the years, with the additional enjoyment of an unreliable narrator who knows he's unreliable. His descent from golden boy to...something else is the thematic heart of the book. It's well executed, if easier to admire than to like. Overall, I enjoyed this one. It put me very much in mind of Iain Banks' The Crow Road, a tale of a young man's life against a background of generational skullduggery and murder. I didn't like it as much as that book (but then again, the Crow Road is one of my very favourite novels), but it's still a good involving read.

I despair over Goodreads' blunt rating system. I want to give this a 3.8/5; it feels like an crucial distinction to me.

I benefitted from having read some reviews of the book prior to reading, which in effect warned me that the mystery of this novel was much less compelling than those of previous French books, and I think that appropriately adjusted my expectations. But I also knew that Tana French is a writer whose works I would appreciate having read regardless of how compelling I found the plot lines, because they are secondary to her writing style and her characterizations and her deep understanding of human nature. (Off the top of my head, Jane Austen, Ian McEwan, Roxane Gay, and Donna Tartt fall in this category. The Tartt-French comparison feels particularly apt to me. Secret History vs. The Likeness, anyone?)

Mystery aside, I think this book is at its best when it illustrates the discomfiting fact that random events can so thoroughly shape a life, and how privilege and circumstance of birth can impede a narrator's ability to understand half of what's going on around him at any given time.

My expectations were high going into this book and in the end, it didn't wow me. The story felt long and meandering and the main character, Toby, never really grabbed my interest. There were elements of the mystery that I enjoyed and the reveal was satisfying, but much of the book felt like a slog to get through.

Reading Challenge category: a book you've been meaning to read

If this book was half as long and had maybe one less ending it might have been at least decent.

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.)