The Witch Elm
by Tana French.
Viking/Penguin, 2018,
$28.00 cloth, $17.00 paper.
At the gates of the Underworld, wrote Virgil, rises an elm “of vast extent,” spreading its “branches and aged arms, around which false dreams cling and attach themselves beneath each leaf.” Here Aeneas plucks the golden bough and wins access to the shadowy realm, where those who have been lost stand in judgment of those who have survived.
For a dream to be revealed as false, there must be a rupture. It’s the discovery of a secret within the deep clench of an elm tree, and the elm’s subsequent destruction, that mark the point of no return in Tana French’s latest mystery, The Witch Elm.
Celebrating a narrowly missed disaster at work, Toby Hennessy— twenty-eight years old, white, middle-class, and smugly normative— stumbles home after a boozy night, only to intercept a pair of burglars making off with his Xbox. They take his car, his TV, and, following a punch to the ribs and a few booted kicks to the head, most of his memory as well. Bruised, befuddled, and no longer protected by his own belief in a world that has his best interests at heart, Toby retreats to the family estate, ostensibly to look after his ailing Uncle Hugo, but also to recuperate. When a full skeleton—not as ancient as it should be—is discovered in the centuries-old elm at the back of the yard, his last vestiges of stability are shattered.
As detectives excavate the garden, Toby must confront the ghost of his formerly golden self. That sense of social grace—that everything was as it should be; that he was well-liked and charming—disintegrates under the scrutiny of his cousins: Susanna, now a mother espousing feminist critiques, and Leon, now an openly gay producer living in Berlin. The two cousins puncture Toby’s vision of his own goodness, revealing the ways in which his privilege was built on the exclusion and even violence enacted on those who lived at its margins. Is Toby a monster, his bruised face only the surface manifestation of unreflected and possibly unforgivable cruelty? As both detective and prime suspect, Toby limps through the novel trying to reconstruct his own story, desperate to understand not just what happened, but who he himself may be—victim or perpetrator?
“Elms are so patient,” says the English nature writer Richard Jefferies, “that they will wait sixty or seventy years to do somebody an injury.” The greatest injury enacted in The Witch Elm may be, not the physical crimes that come to light, but the forced confrontation with the most terrible mystery of all: the horror of the fragmented self, and the death of the dream of innocence.
From Sherlock Holmes onward, the detective story sits in comfortable kinship with its counterpart, the gothic novel. The overdetermined symbolism, the self-consciously imitative debt to literary predecessors, and the all-too-human evil lurking at every corner, from modern, overcrowded streets to secluded country mansions, are common to both, making them perhaps less separate genres than fraternal twins. Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series has made its name on masterfully inhabiting the overlap between the police drama and the gothic. As in the best whodunnits, French propels the narrative with finely suspended urgency. Yet on this murder squad, every case becomes a template for the most intriguing and slippery investigation of all, that into the self.
French’s first novel, In the Woods, enlaced the present-day case of a murdered girl with detective Rob Ryan’s own backstory. At twelve years old, Rob wandered into the forest with two friends and returned hours later, bloodied and alone, with no memory of what had happened, his companions vanished forever. Flash forward twenty years, and Rob can’t say no to an eerily similar case, though he knows he shouldn’t be on it. Nor can he continue to repress his own trauma as the past emerges, wreaking havoc on the solve, on Rob’s career, and on his friendship with partner Cassie Maddox. In the move that either made you love French or hate her, the present-day killer was ferreted out, but the violence of Rob’s childhood was never resolved.
The five subsequent novels have riffed on the theme of detective-as-implicated-witness. Each is written from the point of view of a different member of Dublin’s most elite police team, and detectives who appear as side characters in one novel resurface later in the series, often revealing themselves to be quite different from the person they’d been perceived to be. Cassie Maddox, for example, reappears as the narrator of French’s second novel, The Likeness. A young woman’s body is found, and in her pocket is an ID card traced to a name Cassie once used on an undercover drug operation. In a flagrantly unethical and utterly compelling maneuver, Cassie takes on the girl’s identity, becoming ever more entwined in the other’s life till she can barely find herself.
In her quest to uncover the hows and whys of a crime, thereby repairing some horrific breach of the social contract, a detective has license to lie, threaten, manipulate, and even indulge in violence. And because her ultimate goal is the restoration of psychic and civil order, we both watch in horror and cheer on her moral lapses. The permeable boundary between self and other is uncanny not because it is strange, but because it is so familiar. This pattern is borne out across the remaining four novels in the series: the inciting incident plucks at threads woven so deeply into the detective’s life that as the plot proceeds, it’s often her own carefully constructed sense of self that unravels.
In what is perhaps not so much of a detour as it seems, The Witch Elm eschews the detective as protagonist yet retains many of French’s familiar tropes. As verbally dense, gothic, and compelling as the best of the Dublin Murder Squad, The Witch Elm turns its gaze instead on the drama of the victim, who of course, is anything but innocent.
French, who trained for the theater, writes like a method actor, plunging herself headlong into a maelstrom of scents, smells, tics and turns of phrase. In French’s world, stories are living, breathing things, embodied in real people and hiding in Dublin’s derelict alleyways and near-abandoned estates. They go underground, wait, and then, when it suits them, they call out. They want to be told.
And all stories are connected. When one reads the whole series back to back, another character emerges: Dublin itself, and French’s awareness of the city’s wobbly relationship between gentrification and decay. Suddenly the longwindedness, the constant jibing, the circuitous ways of coming at a plot make more sense. Storytelling, like fashion or food choices, has a reciprocal relationship with culture, forming it and being formed by the places and histories of the person who tells the tale. French has an ear for the particularly Irish gift of gab, but she uses it to tap into the universal compulsion to tell and retell. Aren’t we all desperately seeking the story of how we got here? At which moment did the damage become irrevocable?
As the wych elm comes down, Uncle Hugo recalls that Virgil’s Stygian elm was said to have appeared at the very spot where Orpheus stood to lament his failure to rescue Eurydice, the tree springing forth as though conjured by the bard’s song. Orpheus is a fitting double for Toby, whose hero’s journey takes him through the valley of the shadow of death and abandons him on the other side, leaving him to grapple with his own impotence. Hugo, in his account, neglects to mention the ultimate fate of Orpheus, who was rent into pieces at the hands of the raving Maenads, the vengeful female followers of Dionysos.
French has said that in the character of Toby, she was interested in exploring what might happen to someone who was too lucky in life, and how that surfeit of luck might leave one ill-equipped to deal with reality. Perhaps heavy-handed at times, The Witch Elm is very much an investigation of the highly politicized traumas emerging in contemporary discourse, from the physical trauma of injury and disability to the generational traumas of sexual violence and class inequality. The excavation and destruction of the beloved elm, stand-in for a century of money and family privilege, opens the gaping maw from which the repressed furies fly forth. As Toby struggles to reconstruct the narrative of his own past, he is finally able to hear what his cousins have been trying to tell him, in one way or another, for some twenty years. It is only when Toby confronts the falsity of his own dreams that he becomes able to consider the evil implicated in his own good fortune.
Author Note, as in: Bert Keizer is a doctor and philosopher who works with geriatric patients in Amsterdam. The author of Dancing with Mister D, he is currently at work on a philosophically tinged account of neurosurgery.
