The Wych Elm

Prologue: Into The Tana-verse

If you’re outside Ireland or the UK, you may not recognize Tana French’s name. She’s a big deal here in her home country and well-known in the UK, but I don’t think she’s reached the same status in the US or elsewhere. Before I talk about her latest novel, The Wych Elm, I want to briefly look back at her past career and explain why I’ve avoided her books like the plague up until now.

The bulk of Tana French’s work has consisted of the Dublin Murder Squad novels, a series of loosely-connected crime stories about...well, guess. The novels reached a level of mainstream success as somewhat literary works that most pulpier detective yarns don’t tend to achieve, and the series’ stature was increased further by the BBC TV series adaptation Dublin Murders, which gave the first two books that modern True Detective treatment and garnered a fair bit of critical acclaim (it says a lot about the state of Irish media that the BBC were the ones behind the show).

I read the first Dublin Murder Squad book, In The Woods, after it came out in 2007 and to this day it’s one of the most frustrating reading experiences I’ve ever had. The book’s premise is immediately arresting: when the main character was a child he and two of his friends went missing in a local forest, and he was found that night traumatized into amnesia and covered in weird scratch marks while the other two kids were never found; now all grown up and a homicide detective, the protagonist takes on the murder of a young girl on the outskirts of the same forest when clues pop up suggesting her death might be related somehow to what happened to him all those years ago.

Let me tell you, I was all about this premise. The first half of the book kept me hooked with a series of tantalizing twists and clues: the main character starts to remember something creepy and possibly supernatural happening before the disappearance, other people come forward with stories of encountering a spooky giant bird in the woods, the present-day murder seems like it has ritualistic elements, there’s all sorts of local political intrigue involved…

And then it turns out the murder has nothing at all to do with what happened to the main character, which he never comes any closer to understanding except for someone finding a sharp metal thing in the woods that might explain the odd scratches.

At the time I was so annoyed by this that I seriously considered tearing the book up or setting it on fire or something. As I’ve gotten older, read more and taken up writing myself I’ve started to understand more what French was going for, especially in light of later entries in the series which apparently make a habit of dancing around supernatural elements to various degrees. But the one flaw I still can’t forgive is that the resolution of the present-day mystery, the thing that actually takes up the bulk of the novel, is incredibly uninteresting, the sort of bog-standard murder tale that would be underwhelming in an episode of CSI or Criminal Minds instead of a fairly chunky novel that takes multiple hours to get through. Long-time blog readers of mine will remember me saying that it’s okay for an author to promise one kind of story and then give their readers a different one as long as the story the reader actually gets is at least as interesting as the one they thought the were going to get; In The Woods is the source of that little adage.

So I avoided the later Dublin Murder Squad books even as their critical reception grew. But then French wrote a stand-alone novel, The Wych Elm, and in addition to having a really excellent cover design (I’m shallow, what can I say) the book ticked off several boxes for me: cool premise, similarities to my current real life circumstances, and it takes inspiration from a topic of interest. So I decided to take the plunge. Did The Wych Elm disappoint me again?

The Wych Elm

Our protagonist is Toby Hennessy, a hip, upper-middle class Dubliner in his twenties of the kind that I personally find utterly insufferable in real life. Toby has it all: good job, a swank Dublin apartment, and an amazing girlfriend. But all that changes after he goes out on the sesh with the lads (Sean and Dec, absolute legends) for a few jars. Instead of culminating in whatever the Irish equivalent of a cheeky Nandos is, Toby’s night of drunken revelry ends with him getting his skull bashed in by two burglars. The ensuing brain injury reduces him to a shadow of his former self, skulking around his apartment while his broken mind attempts to heal itself. 

 Toby is rescued from this lonely state when his uncle Hugo is diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and he agrees to move into the stately Ivy House where he and his cousins spent much of their childhoods and adolescents in order to help take care of Hugo in his last months of life. Being in the nostalgia-tinged environment of the Ivy House and having a purpose again starts him on the path to recovery, but all of that is thrown into disarray when someone finds a human skull inside the old wych elm at the bottom of the garden. The ensuing police investigation uncovers an entire human skeleton, and when it turns out to belong to someone from Toby and his cousins’ past some uncomfortable questions are raised: Who’s responsible for the murder, how did the body end up in the tree, and is it possible that the injury-induced gaps in Toby’s memories are hiding something that he’d rather not remember?

Fellow true crime heads will immediately realize that the book’s premise is based on the real-life “Who put Bella in the wych elm?” case, a 1940s mystery that I think is as famous as it is largely because “wych elm” is a spooky name for a tree species. This is kind of odd because the book’s premise has a number of really specific similarities to the Bella case beyond just the idea of a skeleton being found in a tree: both scenarios involve a young boy finding a skull inside a hollow space in a wych elm trunk, the description of the skull in the book strongly resembles the most widely-distributed photo of “Bella’s” skull, and in both the novel and in real life one of the skeleton’s hands was found some distance away. But at the same time the rest of the novel’s plot has nothing to do with the Bella case, it’s not set anywhere near where that happened and none of the characters comment on the similarity which makes it seem like the Bella skeleton doesn’t exist in the book’s world. I kind of wonder if this started out as a historical mystery novel based directly on the Bella case, and the details about the skeleton were kept in for some reason after French changed her mind.

But that’s a nit-pick that’s only going to bother other extremely cool people who spend a lot of time reading about murders on the internet. For all you general mystery/crime fans out there, the most important thing you need to know about The Wych Elm is that it’s...not a mystery/crime story. Not really.

Yes, there’s an unsolved mystery at the heart of it, and a police investigation drives a lot of the story, but at its core this is much more of a family drama. This is most evident in how the mystery is resolved not by careful investigation or even really anything the police do, but via big melodramatic arguments where people pull their hair and beat their chests, and Startling Truths and Shocking Revelations come to light. It’s all a bit soap opera, although that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The book is overall less concerned with the murder mystery (the resolution of which ends up being a bit of a let down) and more concerned with engaging with its core themes of identity and personhood: the ways that our self-image can differ drastically from how others see us, and the existential terror that comes from confronting the fact that you’ve become a different person (or were never actually the person you thought you were). In this context, the murder element exists less for its own sake and more to push the characters into acting in ways that reveal their true selves.

This plot requires Tana French to write from the opposite perspective, focusing on murders and murder suspects and casting the police in a more or less antagonistic role. Crime authors (much like true crime fans, come to think of it) tend to develop a pro-police mindset almost by accident, simply because that’s the viewpoint they’re used to writing from, but French manages to flip the script thoroughly in order to dig into what it would actually feel like to be be suspected of murder. The police aren’t exactly out and out bad guys, and there’s a fair bit of romanticization of detectives as cool, ruthless hunters, but they do come across as giant assholes willing to callously mess with vulnerable people in order to get what they want. Granted, I don’t think the Dublin Murder Squad books always cast police in a super positive light either (this might be a cultural thing; lionization of the Gardai isn’t as common in Irish society as cop worship is in the US or even the UK).

You might have noticed that I’ve gotten quite far into the review without complaining too much. That’s because overall The Wych Elm did in fact cure my Tanaphobia, but there were some hurdles to get past on the way.

One of the most common complaints about the book is that it’s overly padded, and I felt the same way. The skull in the tree isn’t discovered until around a third of the way through, which isn’t necessarily a problem since a lot of the pre-skull material focuses on Toby grappling with brain damage and the initial investigation into his assault, both of which are interesting enough that they could have carried a novel in their own right. But then Toby goes to the Ivy House and there’s a long, long stretch where the book spins its wheels so people can have annoying, repetitive arguments that serve no purpose. In addition to all the other reasons I hated that book, In The Woods had a recurring problem where a lot of the drama was driven by the characters exploding at each other for really stupid reasons that the book didn’t do enough to explain or justify, and I guess that’s a bad habit of Tana French’s because exactly the same issue is present here. In particular, there’s a bit about a quarter of the way through where Toby and his cousins sit around digging up old grievances and sniping at each other that feels like it goes on for five chapters.

But despite these problems, I had a grand old time with The Wych Elm’s slightly gothic, melodramatic family intrigue. Go into it with the proper mindset, and you might as well