Written by Tom Carrao
“I’ve always considered myself to be, basically, a lucky person” reads the opening line of this explosive novel—a bold, boasting statement. Immodestly intentioned or not, author Tana French works swiftly and severely to disabuse protagonist Toby Hennessy of this privileged notion with an unfolding clamorous series of catastrophic events that work in concert to tectonically shift any sure sense of self and circumstance. Superficially, Toby leads a charmed life—he has a supportive and sensible girlfriend, Melissa, an aspirational job in PR for a trendy gallery, easy evenings spent in the company of two long-term chums (Sean and Dec) in a pleasant blur of drinks and good cheer.
However, from the start, small pulses of unease manifest, mostly in the form of gestating adult responsibilities, the siren calls of marriage and careers, but French is also masterful at exposing the ways in which allegedly affectionate teasing amongst close-knit individuals may scratch aggressively at long-standing resentments and insecurities. Most troublingly, Toby becomes embroiled in a fraudulent situation at work that anticipates the novel’s preeminent exploration of identity crisis.
Upon returning home from an evening out, lapsing into inebriated sleep, Toby is awoken by the presence of two thieves in his home, whom he initially confronts with furious indignation (“outrage slammed through my body like rocket fuel”), only to be quickly overcome by violent retribution. French writes this section with an almost unbearable visceral candour-every bruise, every punch, every kick, every sick crunch of bone is relayed with punishing physical clarity. Sentences convey, in their clipped, accelerated, tumbling structural force the fragmented moments of savagery, Toby desperately attempting to keep hold of a coherent trajectory of events. Mind and senses reeling, barely alive, Toby is left with nothing but pieces, spiralling into a vortex of fear and anxiety (“I’d never known anything like it: all consuming, ravenous…misshapen, taloned”). All assurance and confidence, all that is thought safely known, is now reduced to pulverised matter—French communicates with terrifying immediacy the ways in which a vicious assault can break a person apart.
Left with a pronounced limp, a speech impediment, and vastly compromised powers of concentration, as well as feeling generally one step aside from ordinary existence, Toby seeks a convalescence at Ivy House, his ancestral home, revealed in all its ramshackle splendour by French—a reader senses every mote of dust, peel of paint, soil mark of water, every mossy overgrowth of garden. As Uncle Hugo, the bachelor caretaker of the property, has recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer, the perfect opportunity for Toby to spend an indefinite period of time presents itself (Melissa accompanies him). His stay also offers him the time to reconnect with his cousins Susanna and Leon, with whom he shared many an idyllic summer and escapade. Susanna, once a socially conscientious firebrand, is now a harried mother married to a sweet, if dull man, and Leon, bullied in youth for his sexuality, has become a restless and reckless hedonist, unable to commit long-term.
The discovery of a human skull in a crevasse of the gothic arboreal majesty of the titular tree occasions a dread in the family, dredging up dark secrets, stirring the muck and mire of hidden history. The victim is determined to be a figure known to all assembled, a difficult, domineering classmate prone to tyranny and false entitlement. Through the ensuing investigation, conducted by the cunningly efficient yet unnervingly menacing Detective Martin, Toby is forced to continually reassess his perspective in regards to his past. Already on unsteady ground, his conversations with his cousins are cause for further destabilisation, as their more grievous memories conflict with his oblivious remembrances. Worse yet, adverse speculation forces Toby to consider he harbours traits and capabilities of dire incivility, impossible to imagine—“what made me so sure what type of person I was, what I could and couldn’t have done?…a monstrous imposter burgeoning with incomprehensible, unstoppable transformations”.
Yet it is not only that Toby must recalibrate his presuppositions of self, revelations in regards to the behaviour and actions of his sibling-like cousins also come to a boil in the hothouse environment of the murder inquiry. Like the tangled, dilapidated, derelict grounds of the estate, long gone to ruinous neglect, so grow the roots of the cousins’ knotted, gnarled personal history. Just as the ancient tree is felled, pulling up earth and dirt buried for ages, exposing to the light what has long dwelt in the dark, conversation spikes to new levels of unlacquered frankness as the cousins scrutinise their teenage years. One such thrilling twilight confessional drives a lengthy good segment of the final third of the novel, but the steady, alarming spill of disclosures does lead into the startling, climactic action brimming with the buzz of exhaustion, despair, a soul rubbed raw, a rush back to self at a terrible cost—“I felt it: the impossible rush of it…me standing tall…gasping air like a man rising from some purifying river”. Some may quibble that French slightly overstretches the material in this culminating section, although the epic temporal and philosophical canvas she is crafting mostly justifies the extensiveness.
In the end, Toby is no further along in resolving his central questions. The concept of luck remains elusive—a thing granted, earned, or absolutely arbitrary? More so than the fading physical ailments, psychological unease has lodged indeterminably, a consequence of excavated secrets, a permanent claim or stain upon the soul. The struggle will continue long past the closing paragraph. “Only the lines on the monitor scribbling out of control…give us a glimpse of what was going on in secret, in the dark inside him”, Toby observes from his dying uncle’s bedside.
Tana French’s finely detailed, fiercely lyrical scribbles reveal tantalising glimpses into such cavernous internal mysteries. She, like the wych elm itself, as the Greeks believed, stands at the gateway of an underworld—French bravely peers in the chasm, illuminating darkness.
The Wych Elm is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
For me it all goes back to that night, the dark corroded hinge between before and after, the slipped-in sheet of trick glass that tints everything on one side in its own murky colours and leaves everything on the other luminous and untouchable.
One night changes everything for Toby. A brutal attack leaves him traumatised, unsure even of the person he used to be. He seeks refuge at the family’s ancestral home, the Ivy House, filled with cherished memories of wild-strawberry summers and teenage parties with his cousins.
But not long after Toby’s arrival, a discovery is made. A skull, tucked neatly inside the old wych elm in the garden.
As detectives begin to close in, Toby is forced to examine everything he thought he knew about his family, his past, and himself.
A spellbinding standalone from a literary writer who turns the crime genre inside out, The Wych Elm asks what we become, and what we’re capable of, if we no longer know who we are.
