Book Review: THE WYCH ELM by Tana French

Title: The Wych Elm

Author: Tana French
Read: January 2019

Expected publication: out now

My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟

Book Description:

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.

My musings:

It’s no secret that Tana French, creator of the Dublin Murder Squad series, is one of my all-time favourite authors. So I was really excited to finally get my hands on her latest, stand-alone novel THE WYCH ELM. And I’m happy to say that it fully delivered all I have come to expect from this talented author!

The Wych Elm is a very different book from French’s police procedurals, even though it contains some of the same elements I have loved in all her previous books: true-to life characters, vivid dialogue, an atmospheric setting and just a touch of a creepy vibe that creates an air of menace and danger that adds spice to the story. This time, the main protagonist is not a detective, but one of life’s “golden haired children”. Toby has always been one of the lucky ones: an only child, adored by his parents, respected by his peers for his good looks and easy charm, growing up in a well-to-do area surrounded by family and friends. There is nothing nasty in Toby’s reality, and he has always considered himself to be one of the “good guys”. Until the day someone breaks into his flat, leaving him badly beaten within an inch of his life. After regaining consciousness, Toby is still battling with the effects of a traumatic brain injury that has robbed him of much of his memory and life as he knew it. With this premise, French sets the scene for things to come – because Toby, with his shoddy memory, his slow though processes and volatile emotions, now makes the perfect unreliable narrator. If Toby cannot trust his own memories any longer, how can we, the readers, trust him? How do we know if he is telling the truth?

When a skeleton is found in the hollow trunk of a witch elm in the garden of Toby’s dying uncle, suspicion immediately falls on the family, who were the only ones with easy access to the garden. And here we have the second great premise of the novel – the skeletons in the family closet (quite literally). Who doesn’t love a mystery full of dark secrets and family dynamics?

Even though I initially thought that the book was off to a bit of a slow start, it soon became obvious why: French was setting the scene. By the time things start happening, I was well versed in the dynamics of the family and thoroughly intrigued. I loved the way French challenged the perception of reality in her novel. As Toby remembers his childhood and teenage years, he finds that his memories are very different to those of his cousins, and they accuse him of having filtered out all the stuff he didn’t like facing up to, instead creating his own reality. I thought this was an interesting concept. I have noticed how memories differ between people who have lived through the same event, which has always struck me as strange. So what exactly is reality? How do our own experiences shape the way we perceive the world around us? Seeing that all the characters (maybe apart from Hugo) seemed to be slightly unlikable to me, I was forever questioning whose story I could trust.

If this was not intriguing enough, French backs up her cast with a deliciously atmospheric setting, the Ivy House. The old house has been in the family since Toby’s grandparents bought it as a young couple, and most of Toby’s childhood memories feature the house and its enchanted garden. I love mysteries that feature interesting houses, so I could picture this one vividly. And once the skeleton turns up in the witch elm, my goosebumps were well and truly up!

Be prepared that The Wych Elm is a slow, character driven story rather than a fast paced whodunit. There is a long lead-up, which sets the scene and where not much happens, and throughout the book Toby spends a lot of time lamenting his situation and navel-gazing. However, the family dynamics and all characters’ interactions beautifully throw doubt on everything we take for granted, like the concept of reality and the differences of how we see ourselves compared to how others see us. There is of course a murder to solve, but this took a back step for me, as I enjoyed the dark family secrets much more than the actual resolution of the mystery. The one quibble I had with the book was the long drawn out resolution. At one point, there was a lot of explaining where a shorter version would have sufficed for me.

Summary:

All in all, French has again delivered a book full of all the things that have put her on my favourite authors list: an atmospheric setting, dark family secrets, interesting characters and vivid dialogue that drew me deeply into the story. So even though I (like many others) am still hoping to see further instalments of the Dublin Murder Squad series in future, I thoroughly enjoyed her latest stand-alone novel.