In the wake of the attack, Toby finds himself fundamentally changed. (The second “that night” comes much later, and part of its fairy tale spookiness will be spoiled for anyone who Googles the “wych elm” that gives the novel its title.) The first “that night” opens the novel, and it’s the night on which Toby’s apartment is burgled, and Toby himself is viciously beaten into unconsciousness. Or he does until the first of two traumatic inflection points, two “that night”s that come in ponderous succession, each so horrifying that Toby can only speak vaguely about them. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark He has the privilege of not caring about such things. Toby is the golden boy of his family, a rising star whose effortless charm has landed him an angelic girlfriend and made him a PR force to be reckoned with at just 27 years old.
By lucky, Toby mostly means privileged, but he doesn’t use that word because Toby doesn’t deign to use such “self-flagellating middle-class” language. “I’ve always considered myself to be, basically, a lucky person,” says protagonist Toby at the opening of The Witch Elm. The hero of The Witch Elm has everything going for him, until he doesn’t It looks at what it’s like to live in the world as a white, middle-class, non-disabled straight man, and all the easy, unthinking power that can accrue to a person who gets to live like that - then it takes that power away. But her new book The Witch Elm - a richly engrossing mystery, and her first novel that doesn’t take place within the Dublin Murder Squad series - is about systemic social power more broadly, about privilege. And to solve a crime is to take that power back for yourself, regardless of whether the world wants you to have it or not.įrench’s last book, The Trespasser, was about gendered power, and the options available to women when they need to find a way to be more powerful than a man. In a Tana French book, to commit a crime is to scrabble desperately for power in a system designed to render you weak and helpless, and to keep you that way. It’s her understanding that when she’s writing about crime, she’s writing about power. But what sets her apart from her peers isn’t only her formidable gifts as both a prose style and a storyteller. Tana French - she of the lusciously complex sentences, she of the dense and eerie atmospheres - is one of the greatest crime novelists writing today.
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