And then, two thieves break into his apartment, beat him up, and leave him nearly dead. We learn he’s well-liked, good looking, and easy going. We get situated to his job (PR for an art gallery). Set in and around Dublin, Ireland, the story starts slow: we meet Toby, his buddies, his girlfriend. The story beings ominously: “I’ve always considered myself to be, basically, a lucky person.” Well, I guess you don’t necessarily need to read this ominously - but it foreshadows that the luck of Toby (our protagonist) is going to turn. (I kinda thought there were going to be witches, to be honest.) I knew it was a crime/mystery novel, I knew my mom was reading it for her book club, and that was about it.
Both frustrating and brilliant, its strength hits after the ending rather like the giant wych elm, you only realise the magnitude and scale of the ideas after stepping away and regarding it from a distance.I didn’t know what to expect when I started reading Tana French’s The Witch Elm. It won’t please fans of a rapid page-turner, although sections of the novel - especially the build up to the ending - are gripping. The plot is slow moving and character led. A macabre discovery in a tree in the garden, the wych elm of the title, forces Toby to dig back into their shared and unshared past experiences. He discovers the true meaning of ‘luck’.Ī departure from her Dublin Murder Squad series, Tana French once again offers a work of literary fiction that happens to feature a murder. The cousins inhabit the same world - literally the same house - but different realities. No-one (except uncle Hugo) is especially sympathetic and some of these sections feel directionless.īut French has an important point to make, symbolised by the Ivy House. At times, The Witch Elm takes on the air of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, as the three cousins meander through the pages, drinking good wine, slagging less-fortunate ‘skangers’ and philosophising at length. The story is set in the elegantly dilapidated surroundings of the Ivy House, a mansion belonging to uncle Hugo, where Toby spent childhood summers with his cousins, Susanna and Leon. Luck? Is it really ‘luck’ that gave young, white, male, middle-class, able-bodied, straight, handsome Toby Hennessy a leg-up in life? Just dumb luck? This is a novel about power and privilege.
It confronts Toby with the fact that - despite feeling that his life changed beyond recognition after being beaten to oblivion in the early chapters - he has always been, basically, oblivious. The unfolding story deconstructs that statement. This is the first line of the novel, in fact, and proves to be the key to its dark heart. At the start of The Witch Elm, Toby Hennessy introduces himself by saying, “I’ve always considered myself to be, basically, a lucky person”.
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