Book Review - Tana French's The Witch Elm
The Witch Elm by Tana French
Published by: Penguin Books
Publication Date: October 9th, 2018
Format: Paperback, 528 Pages
Rating: ★★★
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Toby Hennessy is a golden child. Favored not just by his family but by the world. Nothing has ever stood in his way. Coddled in his privilege, that is what Toby is and assumes he will always be. But that is all about to change. There was a contretemps at work. He threw a colleague at the art gallery he does PR for under a bus in order to keep his job. Even though he himself was complicit. Such a victory deserves a celebration, a night out with the lads. A night that ends up with him being brutalized by burglars in a home invasion. He could have stayed in his room and called the cops. But he didn't. Because situations like this don't happen to people like him. People like him scare the burglars off, they don't end up forever changed, they don't end up with brain damage. His luck has finally run out. What's more, his family has been keeping secrets from him. The first of which is his beloved Uncle Hugo is dying of Cancer. Though this gives Toby an opportunity, to heal and help at the same time. Hugo has always lived in Ivy House. The home is the heart of the Hennessy family. Toby and his two cousins, Susanna and Leon, spent every summer there. There were perfect days and wonderful nights spent in the glorious garden out back under Hugo's benevolent eye. If anywhere can heal Toby it's Ivy House. He moves in with his girlfriend Melissa and for a short while it's perfect. Hugo spends his days working on genealogy with Toby's help and when Melissa get's home from work they spend the evening having a delicious meal in contented splendor. It almost seems as if this little bubble of calm and happiness with never burst. The attack is in the past and Hugo still seems his old self. But Susanna's son discovers a human skull in the wych elm and things start to fall apart. Ivy House is now a crime scene and the victim is Dominic Ganly. He was a classmate and friend of Toby's who supposedly committed suicide the summer before college. This is no suicide. This is murder. As Toby and Hugo both start to deteriorate, Toby is convinced that it was one his cousins who committed this crime. But obviously he would have helped them to take care of a bully and a pest, wouldn't he? He wishes he could remember. He wishes he knew the secrets. He should be careful what you wish for.
So far this is my favorite Tana French book after The Likeness. And I strongly suspect it's because of their similarities. They both are mysteries contained and concerning a home that is at once a safe haven and a crime scene. There's that bubble, that golden glow, that takes the characters out of time and they just live a small, circumscribed, but wonderfully content life. It's the day to day details, the joy taken in wandering from room to room and preparing a meal in the kitchen and strolling out into the garden that I just love. It's too bad that the story didn't stick to this cozy contained little world. And it's oddly not the murder or the secrets that implode this world, it's the fact that Toby is a privileged asshole. Yes he's an unreliable narrator, but you can love an unreliable narrator, you can't love Toby. What's the problem with Toby? Well, everything. He views that he's a good guy. He thinks he's always been a good guy. But, you know as well as I do, that golden boys aren't the good guys they appear to be. They have secrets, and if the worst of them is that they are oblivious to the plight of those around them, well, consider yourself lucky. So Toby could be worse, he just turned a blind eye to the torture of his cousins at the hands of Dominic, because Dominic was like him, he was his friend, and what his cousins said couldn't possibly be true. Here's the thing Toby. It's not how people treat their equals that matters but how they treat those who they view as their inferiors that does. And Dominic made Susanna and Leon's lives a living hell. And that's on you because you could have stopped it. And in your deluded PTSD brain you imagine that perhaps you did. Perhaps you helped them. You didn't. Your type never does. But that's not the main reason why I hate Toby. I hate Toby because he thinks doing a radical action will somehow free him, return him to his previous self. When Susanna and Leon did what they did to Dominic it released them from the horrors of their lives up until that point. Therefore Toby thinks that by doing a suitably grand gesture he too will be freed. There is no logic in Toby's thinking. He kills a cop who was simply doing his job, not a bully who was destroying lives, and he thinks, this will, what? Free him? That this will restore him? While I could just say two wrongs don't make a right, that's too trite. Too tidy. Instead I will say that Toby is a deluded narcissist who couldn't handle an imperfect life so decided to make it worse because there was no making it better or even sustainable. And this, this is why I hate him. You play the cards you are dealt, you don't shoot the dealer.
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