It’s a bold move to wait until nearly a third of the way into the book to deploy the body. Who does the skull belong to? And what does Toby have to do with whoever died in his backyard, or at least who was buried there? In typical French fashion, just when you think you’ve started to piece it all together, the picture shifts before your eyes.
When a human skull turns up in a hollow of a witch elm in the backyard of the Ivy House, the plot revs its engine. Toby moves in with him, both to keep him company and because he, too, needs a caretaker. While he’s in the hospital, his beloved Uncle Hugo, keeper of the Ivy House, a family property that’s rendered with French’s signature attention to real estate, is diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. His memory is newly riddled with gaps his frustration as he attempts to discern what’s real, what’s remembered, and what’s paranoia adds fuel to the plot.
Then robbers break into his apartment and beat him so badly that the physical damage permeates every aspect of his life, fundamentally altering his appearance, his gait, and his sense of self. A publicist for a Dublin art gallery, he has a girlfriend so saintly that it takes a while for her to register as a real character (or at least for him to see her that way). He’s attractive, clever, and universally liked. Instead of a world-weary detective, our narrator is Toby, an easygoing 20-something who has always taken his wild good fortune as a matter of course. Who might we become if the privileges we take for granted were suddenly ripped away? But in this latest work, privilege is French’s subject more specifically, the relationship between privilege and what we perceive as luck. In theme and atmosphere, it evokes her earliest two books, Into the Woods and The Likeness, using the driving mystery-of course, there’s a murder-as a vehicle for asking complex questions about identity and human nature. It’s as good as the best of those novels, if not better. Reviewed by Julie Buntin The Witch Elm is Tana French’s first standalone, following six Dublin Murder Squad mysteries.
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