Tana French – The Trespasser

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Book Review, Crime Fiction, Dublin, Irish writer, Tana French, The Trespasser

Dark, twisty and immersive, just as the reader expects from Tana French!

Tana French’s eagerly waited for Dublin Murder Squad 6 did not disappoint.

For those unfamiliar with her writing, she is a literary fiction writer, subject or territory, crime fiction. Where her lit fic credentials are clear is not only in the excellence of her writing itself, but specifically because it is character and relationship, not to mention the fact that her books have larger themes than the particular story unfolding, rather than plot which is the driver. However, for sure she knows how to keep her readers turning pages, wanting as surely as her detectives do, to unravel the crime. However – if your wish is for a speedier whodunit, howdunit, whydunit, her books might be less grippingly pursued by crime fiction fans, as the dead ends and the solves going nowhere, not to mention the turning towards solutions and the ratchet of tension take their time.

For those who are already firm French fans, this is one to be hugely enjoyed, even if, for this reader, it does not quite touch the giddy heights of Broken Harbour and The Secret Place, books 4 and 5.

As in all her previous books, there is a crime, and that crime will be much more than it seems. Though it will be a murder which has happened to an individual or individuals, the crime will have echoes which happen wider, in the cultural time and place it arose within. French’s original approach is to follow a particular detective or pair of detectives in each book. It is as if the entire Dublin Force is like a chorus, out of which the leading player or players will emerge, and through their investigation, the reader, their colleague or colleagues and the central character themselves, will gain self-knowledge, often painfully

The Trespasser begins with the investigation of what appears to be a murder due to domestic violence. Aisleen Murray, a single woman, but with the table set for a candle-lit dinner a deux, appears to have been punched in the face and hit her head on the fireplace as she fell backwards. Identifying her projected dinner guest, easily done, would seem to nail the suspect. Except, of course, that there is a more tangled trail to follow.

The centre stage detectives in this one are the two from her previous book, The Secret Place. Antoinette Conway and Steve Moran, unwillingly working together for the first time in that book, are now an established professional pairing. Sort of. Both have their histories. Conway, the senior, is wrong, or has always been made to feel wrong, on several counts. Firstly, her gender. Secondly she is mixed race, possibly of Arabic, possibly South American origin – her birth certificate says ‘father unknown’. She is a fighter, bitter, angry, does not suffer fools and takes no prisoners. To say she has chips on her shoulders is an understatement, but the chips have arisen from experience – particularly from the misogyny, overt and covert, from others in the squad. Conway does not need people to like her, or that is what she projects.

Moran is very different, charming and a people pleaser, but there is a suspicion, and some background, which shows him to be hugely ambitious and possibly not above using charm to advance his career. That was certainly what Conway thought of him when they first started working together. The two are a natural for a hard cop soft cop pairing. The cynical, distrustful Conway – who is the first person narrator of this, and the much smoother, emollient seeming Moran, have formed a professional working friendship and respect for each other, unlikely though that might seem for both of them. It has partly formed from the excitement both feel, and the ambition both have, for being detectives in the murder squad. Or, in Conway’s narration:

Murder isn’t like other squads. When it’s working right, it would take your breath away: it’s precision-cut and savage, lithe and momentous, it’s a big cat leaping full-stretch or a beauty of a rifle so smooth it practically fires itself. When I was a floater in the General Unit, fresh out of uniform, a bunch of us got brought in to do the scut work on a murder case, typing and door-to-door. I took one look at the squad in action and I couldn’t stop looking. That’s the nearest I’ve ever been to falling in love

And, perhaps the trajectory of this book is a kind of love story going wrong, a devastation of love. Conway is well past seeing anything through rose-tinted spectacles. Her acerbic dismissive view of the world and most of those in it is clear, even in her first thoughts about the murder victim

She’s on her back, knock-kneed, like someone threw her there. One arm is by her side; the other is up over her head, bent at an awkward angle. She’s maybe five seven, skinny, wearing spike heels, plenty of fake tan, a tight-fitting cobalt-blue dress and a chunky fake-gold necklace. Her face is covered by blond hair, straightened and sprayed so ferociously that even murder hasn’t managed to mess it up. She looks like Dead Barbie

Something I’m beginning to see is a pattern in French’s very different books, is that the crime her particular detective is investigating will be something of a catalyst for them – there will be something which will push the investigator’s button big time, some kind of psychological resonance.

I just hope she is well along in writing book 7, and am wondering who will make their way out of the chorus in that one

I originally ‘found’ French thanks to a couple of bloggers, firstly Jane of Beyond Eden Rock, but who at the time alerted me to Broken Harbour on her earlier blog, Fleur In Her World and secondly, Cleopatra at Cleopatra Loves Books who seduced me into chasing down The Secret Place. Now I’m needing no urging and at the front of any queue baying for a new Tana French book!

I received this both as a review copy from Amazon Vine UK and as a digital review from NetGalley. This review will hopefully whet interest – the book is published on 22nd September in the UK and on the 4th October in the States

The Trespasser Amazon UK
The Trespasser Amazon USA

Tana French – Faithful Place

Tags

Book Review, Crime Fiction, Dublin, Faithful Place, Ireland, Irish Fiction, Psychological Thriller, Tana French

Tragedies of epic, archetypical themes.

So, with Faithful Place, the third book in Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series, I finally reach the end of a fairly concentrated immersion in matters murky, Dublin, French style. I started out of order, reading her two latest books, Broken Harbour and The Secret Place, following strong recommendations by a couple of savvy bloggers, Fleur In Her World and Cleopatra Loves Books, got immediately hooked, and then embarked on 1-3

I think the fact that I read my first Tana French, Broken Harbour, 6 weeks ago, and finished this one last week, probably says much more about French’s compulsive, interesting, quality writing than this particular review can. I did read other books as well in that period, mainly because, however brilliant a writer is, (in fact, particularly if they are brilliant!) I don’t think a solo immersion is useful – it can get a bit like only eating one kind of food. However delicious, the palate gets jaded, and other sustenance, other nutrients are required, both for variety and to sustain appreciation for that favourite.

Even so, as I started each new French, I was wondering ‘have I overdone it, will I be too immured into her style, her tricks, her vision, so that I get a ‘oh, here we go again’. Well, bravo, Tana French, because I didn’t.

Now that’s not to say I didn’t guess, fairly early on, the who-dunnit of Faithful Place – French has a clearly short list of potential perps, and drops some clues early on, so we know early on who both the herrings, and the do-er of dastardly-deeds might be. But the person who did it is never the major focus of French’s writing. She is a writer of time, of place, of society, and, above all, the close and frequently (in her novels at least) dysfunctional nature of family. Out of particular families, in the time and place of their culture, the happenings arise.

Reading all 5 books in a short time scale, what I got, increasingly, was a kind of Greek Tragedy, the chorus is given by the ‘Dublin Murder Squad’ – except, that in each book, a spotlight shifts, bringing different members of that chorus, different detectives and their side-kicks and team partners, out from the background, into centre stage, which they then share with the particular crime being investigated. And sometimes, as with this book, the detective and the particular crime have uncomfortably close associations.

Each of her books make one detective centre stage, but a central character in one will crop up as a not-quite-peripheral, or even as a major minor player in another.

But this book has a particularly challenging protagonist/instigator-and-victim of fate. We met Frank Mackey as a powerful, charismatic, dynamic figure in The Likeness. Mackey heads up Undercover Operations. We don’t know too much about his past, but he is hugely influential in The Likeness. And he will appear again as a slippery, influential player in The Secret Place, attractive and manipulative by turns. In those two novels, the reader sees pretty well only Mackey’s mask.

In this book, he is slap bang in the centre, and the source of his complex and damaged personality, and how that damage is used both positively and in a retrograde way, comes clear. He is like some kind of scorpion figure. Scorpions (well, female scorpions) are fiercely protective of their families – and the family, in this context, may spread far wider than blood family. But, as all know, their sting is deadly, and a wide berth should be kept!

Mackey is certainly not an attractive figure here. The book is told in his voice, and that voice is generally brutal, unforgiving, self serving. What redeems him is his love for his precocious daughter, Holly. And his love for his ex-wife, Olivia, though it is largely Mackey’s driven, controlling, self-protective angry personality which made Olivia end the marriage.

Mackey came from a very dysfunctional family indeed. Father an alcoholic, unskilled, though with a huge potential which was never realised, due to neighbourhood enmities going back a generation; mother a manipulating fearful and aggressive mammy martyr. And the 5 children, Carmel, Shay, Frank, Kevin, Jackie, the battleground on which the parental war was played out.

One of my da’s tragedies was always the fact that he was bright enough to understand just how comprehensively he had shat all over his life. He would have been a lot better off thick as a plank

Frank Mackey, back in his teenage years, had a secret first love, Rosie Daly. Theirs was a Romeo and Juliet affair as the Daly and Mackey fathers were sworn enemies. Frank and Rosie were deep in the planning of elopement and escape to England, but the night they had set for this to happen, Rosie didn’t show, and left a note for Frank, saying that she was going to England and was sorry to hurt him. This devastating blow to his idealistic dreams not only damaged, for life, his ability to trust, be intimate and open with anyone, but also meant that he also ran away from his own home, that night. He had after all, planned to do this with Rosie, now he did it alone. Twenty two years later he is  still estranged from his family who never forgave him for leaving. The enmity between the Mackeys and the Dalys has also grown, as the Daly family had been convinced, given that both Frank and Rosie vanished on the same night, that they had gone together, and that somehow Frank must have abandoned Rosie in England, and returned to build a better life for himself as a member of the Garda. The community don’t have much liking for the Garda.

But now, twenty two years later, events happen which fling open all the doors revealing community cupboards full to bursting with skeletons.

It took me a little longer to surrender to this book than most of the others – and in the main it is because of the challenges of an unlikeable central character. French manages this brilliantly, but Frank’s heat, and rage are uncomfortable to be with. But for sure you are made to fully understand and engage with why Frank’s aggression, despair and anger are as they are – and he is also a man who struggles and positively tries to engage with his shadows.

And it also has to be said that Mackey’s dark wit keeps the reader going. His is an unkind humour, but he is amusing

A handful of ten-year-olds with underprivileged hair and no eyebrows were slouched on a wall, scoping out the cars and thinking wire hangers. All I needed was to come back and find that suitcase gone. I leaned my arse on the boot, labelled my Fingerprint Fifi envelopes, had a smoke and stared our country’s future out of it until the situation was clear all round and they (expletive deleted meaning ‘went away’) …to vandalise someone who wouldn’t come looking for them

Gaby Gerster—Laif/Redux

Faithful Place Amazon UK Faithful Place Amazon USA

Michelle Lovric – The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters

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Book Review, Dublin, Michelle Lovric, The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters, Venice, Victorian set fiction

Story, character, setting and language as ebullient as those flowing tresses

Michelle Lovric’s ‘The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters’ is a book which almost appropriates the adjective ‘fecund’ to itself by way of description, so much does its language teem with rich, sappy, loamy, fruitfulness, even to a glorious abandon of excess.

Set in the mid 1860’s, starting in rural Southern Ireland, then moving mainly between Dublin and Venice, the Harristown seven Swiney sisters are impoverished young girls with a particular gift – each has a seductive, ostentatious, over-abundant cascade of twisty, tumbling, seductive Pre-Raphaelite tresses, reaching, when loose to between 4 and 5 feet long.

This is at a time when women’s hair was bound, confined, and kept private and well-controlled. But, unbound, that hair was the repository of lust and desire, fetishism and secret libido.

Lady Lilith. Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The sisters can also sing. Their lustrous hair and their performance skills are a potential exit from the world of poverty, And also a potential route for them to both exploit and, mainly, be the ones exploited. The sisters are wonderfully named, and wonderfully, richly, characterised. They are the raven haired, dark hearted Darcy, twins Berenice and Enda, violent enemies to each other, Pertilly who would have been happy to stay a homebody in the kitchen, limpid blonde Oona, Idolatry (Ida) the youngest, a little simple and disturbed, with a feel for the violin, and the lustrous, creative, flame haired Manticory, who narrates this rollicking tale and is the writer of the shows they are forced into performing.

This forcing comes initially from Darcy, who rules her sisters with cruel words, slaps and punches and has a fierce quest for riches and power, but also, there are a little cluster of men who find ways, both sexual and financial, to exploit the sisters.

This is a Gothic, operatic book by virtue of the intensity of feeling and opulence, sumptuousness of language, the reaching of heights of ecstasy, the plummeting the darkness of jealousy, violence, betrayal and murder. But the whole is delivered with such vivacity, such joyousness and juicy humour and playfulness of language that it becomes a wild, frolicsome read, despite the savage undercurrents.

And lest the term ‘Gothic’ should fret potential readers who might fear the pages may romp with werewolves vampires zombies and such other silly company – fear not, the ‘Gothic’ relates to the architecture of the language, full of delicious crenellations and furbelows. There ARE monsters within these pages, and they are all of a very human kind, with no need for the agency of magic.

It is (particularly in the earlier part of the book, before the sisters attempt to raise themselves – or Darcy whips them into raising themselves – into society) the richness of Irish rhythms and vernacular, the daily heightened delight in turn of phrase, the lovely wicked language which grabbed me into this book.

Here is the devilish (but caustically FUNNY) Darcy, in a typical insult for insult match with the archest of all her arch enemies, ‘the Eileen O’Reilly, the butcher’s runt’

May the fishes eat you, you dirty little spalpeen! And then the worms eat the fishes. And the worms wither their guts on the nastiness of your bits inside of them’
‘Here’s at you! A burning and a scorching on ye!’ was the runt’s retort
‘I will plant a tree in your dirty ear’ shouted Darcy’and slap you in its shade’
‘It is yerself that filthied me ear wid the great black tongue on ye, so it is.’
‘Stones on your meaty bones!’
Then the runt wished black sorrow of Darcy’s guardian angel ‘all red-eyed from shame at havin’ to do wid ye!’

I’m afraid I was snorting and chuckling out loud with periodic bouts of such inventive insulting

The book was inspired by an American group of fabulously haired sisters, at the tail end of the nineteeth century, who had a similar rags to riches and fall from grace journey, linked with exploitation, by men who saw they could be manipulated into being cash cows. They too were clearly eccentric, individual, fascinating, tragic, and lived operatically.

The Seven Sutherland Sisters

Lovric is a crafted storyteller to her bones, and I thoroughly enjoyed this effervescent read

I received this from the Amazon Vine UK programme, as an ARC. Sláinte , Vine!

This is released now in the UK, Statesiders have to wait till August, but it WILL be worth it!

The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters Amazon UK
The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters Amazon USA