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Reading Wednesday
Mar. 13th, 2019 11:03 pmSo this week I read for pleasure something which was not Magicians fic, astoundingly: Tana French's new novel, The Wych Elm, which is just available. I like very high-quality detective fiction, but not in an omnivorous way, I generally find one author I enjoy every few years and then I read everything they write over and over again.
French is Irish and her books are the kind of dark and twisted detective fiction that reflects on the state of contemporary Ireland (I also really like Jane Harper, who isn't entirely dissimilar in relation to Australia). She writes detective fiction in which things go wrong, people break down, and endings are unresolved, and she's extremely sharp at writing convincing descents into paranoia and suspicion. All of her books have an edge of the supernatural or lean towards magical realism, partly because of her prose style and partly in terms of content, and one explicitly includes it. But she's also one of those detective fiction writers who is excellent at writing interactions within the police force, especially what it's like to be a woman or a working-class man in an elite team, and sometimes as part of this and sometimes separately, she can write outstandingly about male-female friendships and professional partnerships.
Apparently ranking Tana French's novels in order of preference is something that her fans like to do. This newest novel probably won't be in my top three. She has a set of interrelated novels in which the same Dublin detectives recur, and this one is, unusually, a standalone with a narrator who is not in the police. It takes up a highly familiar French theme in which things go horribly wrong for an outwardly happy and privileged person who is the first-person narrator - he is badly injured in a burglary, a skull then shows up in the garden of the family home - and consequently he begins to unravel mentally and physically. After the AMAZING first-person Antoinette Conway of her last book, The Trespasser, I was less sympathetic to this narrator (I miss Antoinette, though I could see and appreciate what French was doing with this particular narrator and themes of white male privilege). And though I'm always engaged by French's fascination for old houses and how this links into older and newer discourse about Irish housing, and into themes of the uncanny more generally, I did feel that finding a skull in the garden of one's ancestral home Has Been Done. That said, there were a couple of twists which were genuinely unexpected and once I got past the opening, I read until I finished the book without stopping for breath.
If you haven't read any French, I wouldn't start here, I'd start with her earlier Broken Harbour or Into the Woods. I definitely would start though.
French is Irish and her books are the kind of dark and twisted detective fiction that reflects on the state of contemporary Ireland (I also really like Jane Harper, who isn't entirely dissimilar in relation to Australia). She writes detective fiction in which things go wrong, people break down, and endings are unresolved, and she's extremely sharp at writing convincing descents into paranoia and suspicion. All of her books have an edge of the supernatural or lean towards magical realism, partly because of her prose style and partly in terms of content, and one explicitly includes it. But she's also one of those detective fiction writers who is excellent at writing interactions within the police force, especially what it's like to be a woman or a working-class man in an elite team, and sometimes as part of this and sometimes separately, she can write outstandingly about male-female friendships and professional partnerships.
Apparently ranking Tana French's novels in order of preference is something that her fans like to do. This newest novel probably won't be in my top three. She has a set of interrelated novels in which the same Dublin detectives recur, and this one is, unusually, a standalone with a narrator who is not in the police. It takes up a highly familiar French theme in which things go horribly wrong for an outwardly happy and privileged person who is the first-person narrator - he is badly injured in a burglary, a skull then shows up in the garden of the family home - and consequently he begins to unravel mentally and physically. After the AMAZING first-person Antoinette Conway of her last book, The Trespasser, I was less sympathetic to this narrator (I miss Antoinette, though I could see and appreciate what French was doing with this particular narrator and themes of white male privilege). And though I'm always engaged by French's fascination for old houses and how this links into older and newer discourse about Irish housing, and into themes of the uncanny more generally, I did feel that finding a skull in the garden of one's ancestral home Has Been Done. That said, there were a couple of twists which were genuinely unexpected and once I got past the opening, I read until I finished the book without stopping for breath.
If you haven't read any French, I wouldn't start here, I'd start with her earlier Broken Harbour or Into the Woods. I definitely would start though.
