Tana French – Faithful Place

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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

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Tana French – The Likeness

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Book Review, Crime Fiction, Ireland, Irish writer, Police Procedural, Psychological Thriller, Tana French, The Likeness

“Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat. I’d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that” Lyrics, ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream

I’ve been working my way pretty compulsively through Tana French, Irish literary crime fiction writer’s books, since coming to her fourth book Broken Harbour, on the strength of two book reviewers blogs. Stand forth Fleur In Her World and Cleopatra Loves Books

Having just finished The Likeness, her second book, I’m reeling, punch drunk, from the emotional journey of this, which for sure must take part of its inspiration from Donna Tartt’s first explosive novel, The Secret History, but is nonetheless in no way derivative, and is all imbued with French’s own intelligence, style, and intricate character and plotting.

Cassie Maddox, the central detective of her gripping first novel, In The Woods, is still feeling the after-shocks of the crime she investigated. No longer in the Murder Squad, she has relocated to the quieter shores of the Domestic Violence Unit, and has begun a relationship with one of the detectives from the murder squad.

The Likeness does read as a stand-alone, for anyone who has not read In The Woods, and anything which the reader needs to know as background does get dripped into the story of this, as Cassie herself continues to come to terms with the events of In The Woods.

We learn something about her professional back-story, too – unfortunately, this is a major spoiler which I think the publishers chose to reveal, and it represents my major criticism of this book (not French’s fault) Cassie worked for a time a few years ago in Undercover Ops, infiltrating a drug ring. Her invented identity was that of a woman called Alexandra (Lexie) Madison. And then a body is found, in a derelict cottage, clearly a very recent murder victim. The wallet on the body shows the victim is called Lexie Madison. Running the identity through the police computer brings in the big gun of Undercover ops, Frank Mackey, who ran Cassie as Lexie. The shock is that this Lexie Madison is a double for the very much alive Cassie Maddox.

The dead Lexie was part of an elite group of 5 post-graduate students, close friends, living in a beautiful, decaying mansion, Whitethorn House, on the outskirts of Glenskehy, a small backwater in the Wicklow Mountains. Inevitably police interest centres initially on the others in the group, but their stories all stack up, and the group are united in their grief that one of theirs is dead. And there are other suspects, which link in to Ireland’s deep history going back through generations, and the tensions arising out of class and nationality – the working class and the peasantry of old Ireland, and the wealthy Anglo Irish landowners.

Irish history is firmly woven into all French’s novels.

So, an audacious plan is set in place (and I’m afraid it is the spoiler of the blurb itself) Cassie could go undercover again as Lexie. The pathology report shows that the woman in the derelict cottage died from a single stab wound which did not happen in the cottage itself, the woman had run from somewhere to the cottage, and bled to death there. Had she been discovered earlier, she might have survived.

The group (including the dead Lexie) were very much the golden, charismatic, bound together elite (and odd, skeletons in their backgrounds) of The Secret History. French adds something else into this however – there is very much a sense of the yearning, soulmate romance of deep friendship, above and beyond sexuality, the kind of friendship that arises in youth, and at the time seems as if it could last a lifetime. And in this book, it is centred as much on place as time. Even whilst within that place there is a kind of looking back to it, a ‘Lost Domaine/Grand Meaulnes’ quality. Cassie herself and Cassie taking on this second ‘Lexie Madison’ identity and the 4 others, is someone who longs for the powerful sense of belonging, of friendships as a more powerful bond than bloodkin, and a more powerful bond than the one-to-one of sexual partnership.

In the sitting room the piano is open, wood glowing chestnut and almost too bright to look at in the bars of sun, the breeze stirring the yellowed sheet music like a finger. The table is laid ready for us, five settings – the bone-china plates and the long-stemmed wineglasses, fresh-cut honeysuckle trailing from a crystal bowl – but the silverware has gone dim with tarnish and the heavy damask napkins are frilled with dust……Somewhere in the house, faint as a fingernail-flick at the edge of my hearing, there are sounds: a scuffle, whispers. It almost stops my heart. The others aren’t gone, I got it all wrong, somehow. They’re only hiding; they’re still here, for ever and ever

And that quote is as powerful a paean to memory, and the sense of our pasts almost within reach, as any I’ve read

This is indeed a long book (she shares that too, with Tartt!) – at nearly 700 pages, but the unravelling of the story, the careful and believable psychology of all the major characters, the tangles and twists of all the relationships, and, for Cassie herself, the weirdness of being herself-and-not-herself, the whole question of identity, arising when anyone is leading any kind of double life, is superlative. And there is also the fascination of the police procedural itself, and how individual police can marry their work functions, with who each of them is, individually.

Most of all – it is the wonderful, seductive quality of French’s writing, and a first person narrator who grabs the reader and makes them as desperate to want the golden lads and lasses to be real, and unsullied as Cassie would like, because of her own yearning for lifelong soulmates, whilst at the same time, making us as needy of her fierce professional desire to solve that crime as she is. She (and we) know that there are two drives going on here, which may not be compatible

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Tana French – The Secret Place

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Crime Fiction, Ireland, Irish writer, Psychological Thriller, Tana French, The Secret Place

WTF, OMG, like, WOW!

I’m rarely reduced to both incoherence AND speechlessness by a book. Incoherence, yes, but generally accompanied by loquaciousness,; incoherence because of loquaciousness, perhaps.

This compelling, satisfying, dark, twisty, evocative thriller by French, set in an elite girls’ boarding school outside Dublin, did though, leave me thinking for once that perhaps the operatic over the top incoherence of stylised ‘youth-speak’ was the only possible response, after all. Not because Tana French is in any way incoherent or over the top, though she certainly deals with huge issues which are the stuff of opera and classical drama – the individual and the domestic opening out into much wider, mythic, universal themes. The gobsmacked reaction is really one of awestruck admiration, is all.

Continuing with her ‘Irish Chorus’ of leading characters from the Dublin Murder Squad (she highlights and focuses on a different detective each time) this time her investigating duo are both, in different ways, outsiders. Antoinette Conway is outside because she is a woman, and, moreover, a fierce one who lashes back at evidence of misogyny, patronisation and exploitation. This has made her unpopular with her male colleagues. Stephen Moran wants to be liked, sure, and has charm, but is not prepared to be one of the laddish lads. There is a sense that perhaps he is a little better than the rest, and knows himself to be so. This means he too is a slightly dubious, slightly marked card, by virtue of this aloofness behind the affable. The dynamic between the two, and the building of a professional working relationship, is fascinating – both gender and class are subtexts.

A year earlier, a dead body had been discovered in the grounds of St. Kilda’s girls’ school. It belonged to a popular and lusted after catch of a boy from the neighbouring elite boys’ boarding school. Conway, with another professional partner had attempted to solve the murder, and failed to do so, and the failure left a stain on her. So when some compelling evidence comes Moran’s way, re-opening the investigation offers a way-out, the prospects of advancement, but also the danger of ultimate professional failure, for both. Stakes are high

The fervid, hothouse, intense setting of adolescent girlhood (plus the allure of the neighbouring testosterone) is magnificently done. The reader, like the detectives, is drawn into a world which is both terrifying and sparkling with energy, dreams, passions and possibilities.

Any comparisons to Donna Tartt’s first novel, The Secret History, which French clearly nods at in her own title, are neither audacious nor undeserved. Once again, we have an elite (albeit a crucial few years younger) and issues of class and privilege, cliquery which is both full of possibility and full of poison.

Cypress, featuring heavily in this novel, mythically is connected to death, transformation, times of transition and symbolises everlasting, enduring bonds, that might exist between people

What I particularly liked about French’s superb mastery of relationships, characterisation and dialogue amongst the charged teens is that she does not fall into relentless cliché – though there are the ubiquitous rhythms and language of the group, portrayed with accuracy – she does not cut each individual girl and boy from an identikit cloth – the reader can hear individual rhythms.

There is a substrate to French’s writing which seems to have a particular sensitivity to ‘atmosphere and preternatural energetics’ I suspect she is someone who feels the indefinable, that which, for want of a better term, gets tarred dismissively as ‘supernatural’. So this is certainly a strong element running through this book. But, for those who absolutely dismiss such things, there is certainly much evidence throughout history of the effects of a kind of group hysteria, group hyper-arousal to ‘mysterious comings and goings’ and activities involving poltergeists which cluster around adolescence. So, take a group of highly charged young girls within a cloistered setting, and the explosion of a dark, brilliant energy out of which mysterious things happen does not, in any way, feel like a novelist copping out by invoking the supernatural. It just adds to the shiver and the tension.

Structurally, a beautifully told tale : alternate chapters, the detectives, taking place over a little more than a day, the central groups of two rival groups of girls, moving slowly forward over eight months and two weeks towards the day the boy was murdered.

And as for the writing itself, gorgeous, authentic, and every now and again arising into something even finer, some kind of summing up :

Conway..spun the MG onto the main road and hit the pedal. Someone smacked his horn, she smacked hers back and gave him the finger, and the city fireworked alive all around us: flashing with neon signs and flaring with red and gold lights, buzzing with motorbikes and pumping with stereos, streaming warm wind through the open windows. The road unrolled in front of us, it sent its deep pulse up into the hearts of our bones, it flowed on long and strong enough to last us for ever.

So………..I have recovered loquaciousness, though I’m not so sure about coherence….read it, just read it!! A brilliant, highly recommended outing.

And I am indebted to Cleopatralovesbooks for her superb review of The Secret Place which sent me hot-footing to the library for a copy. It IS one which I know I’ll want to read again, so I know a Kindle purchase is on the cards!

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Tana French – Broken Harbour

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Book Review, Broken Harbour, Crime Fiction, Ireland, Irish Fiction, Police Procedural, Tana French

A crime novel about much more than dead bodies

Tana French is an author new to me. On finishing this, her fourth book I am unsurprised to find that she won the 2012 Irish Crime Fiction Award with it, as it is an extremely satisfying, thoughtful work, which stands easily as a book of literary fiction, subject matter, crime and detection.

Set after the Lehman Brother’s financial collapse of 2008, when the effects of world-wide recession hit what had been the booming, but now slowed-down ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy particularly hard, French examines Ireland, culturally, politically, economically, through the lens of the Dublin police force, and, particularly its murder squad.

She has taken a slightly different approach – rather than follow the fortunes of one particular detective, she follows the squad as a whole, and focuses on a different detective in each book. This gives a really detailed, rounded approach, as though of course different personalities will work procedures in their individual ways, the reader gets a sense of the whole process of investigation, in its day-to-day grind, the meshings and antagonisms of individuals, and the methods and the madness of solving a crime, and bringing perpetrators to justice and securing convictions

I hope this doesn’t make ‘the procedures’ sound dry – French is anything but dry in her writing – but she is meticulous, and creates believable detail, fascinating story and depth characters in time and place.

The central investigating detective, Mick ‘Scorcher’ Kennedy is a fiercely controlled, absolutely by-the-book policeman, with a rookie partner he is prepared to properly train. Kennedy is almost obsessively treading a thorough, correct path, and through the course of the book his own psychology and history shows why – there is indeed ‘background’ here, and every reason why he has not gone down the maverick, hard-drinking, law-unto-himself route.

Ghost estate, Wexford

The brutal crime which sets this story up is a savage attack on a middle class couple and their two children, living in a kind of new-development ghost town beyond Balbriggan, Fingal. Now called Brianstown, previously Broken Harbour, it had a connection to Kennedy’s boyhood, but has become both symbol and reality of when boom turns to bust.

French winds up a tight and twisting story as the solution seems to fall one way and then another, and, always, the story of individual lives is played out truthfully, but the wider cultural context has an equal weight.

This is a gripping police procedural, an extremely well written and chilling thriller, gritty and dark – but there is nothing gratuitous about the violence: – French does not present it as entertainment, but as an indictment of a system which created the means for it to happen

In every way there is, murder is chaos.

I remember the country back when I was growing up….There was plenty of bad there, I don’t forget that, but we all knew exactly where we stood and we didn’t break the rules lightly. If that sounds like small stuff to you, if it sounds boring or old-fashioned or uncool, think about this, people smiled at strangers, people said hello to neighbours, people left their doors unlocked and helped old women with their shopping bags, and the murder rate was scraping zero.

Sometime since then, we started turning feral. Wild got into the air like a virus and it’s spreading…..Everything that stops us being animals is eroding, washing away like sand, going and gone.

The final step into feral is murder. 

This found its way to my ‘must read’ on the back of a strong recommendation and an excellent review of this by Fleur In Her World, who has been hugely responsible for much of my book buying since I discovered her site  She hasn’t let me down yet!

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Nuala O’Faolain – Are You Somebody?

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Are You Somebody?, Autobiography, Book Review, Ireland, Irish writing, Nuala O'Faolain

I was just an accident. There was no reason for me.Yet my life burned inside me.

What is it about Irish writers – particularly Irish women writers – this visceral ability to inhabit the lyrical place? There is such a strong sense of sensuality, vitality, depth of emotion, whether in writing about sex linked with sin – increasing the charge, or about writing itself, conversation, food. The ability to be at the same time intellectual – but not cerebral. The mind inhabits the body, the world of the senses is engaged in.

O’ Faolain has written a gorgeous book, passionate, sorrowful, electric, charting her own personal development and the development of Irish women, Irish intellectual women, colliding with the rise of feminism. Whether it’s the little vignettes about her first exposure to un-Irish food in Italy: `as I was to do for a long time, I ate just vegetable soup, because at least it had potatoes in it’ or accounts of the passionate schoolgirl world of crushes `the innocent sublimation of sexuality’, she brings her reader into a present, charged, felt sense of truth.

The rhythms of her writing are somehow, definably Irish, arising from mists, vivid, green, loamy, wild and plaintive both.

I’m not at all surprised that on initial publication of this book so many people contacted her to say ‘you told my story’ – no, not the personal story of encounters with the literati, but the understory of family bonds and tragedies, of the disappointments between women and men, between parents and children, of invisible women and visible addiction

Postscript. I was saddened to discover, on searching for a photo for this blog, that she has very recently died. Her voice was immediate, vibrant, lyrical

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Sebastian Barry – A Long Long Way

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A Long Long Way, Book Review, Easter Rising, Ireland, Irish writing, Sebastian Barry, World War I

Ireland Uprising and Down in the Trenches

For some reason I am drawn to read a lot of books, both factual and fictional, about the two major wars of the twentieth century. And each time I start one of those books, question why I am doing so ‘Have we not had enough of books about these wars?’ And the answer, sadly, seems to be ‘no’. Both conflicts created huge wounds both individually and collectively, and what those conflicts still have to teach us will probably not cease to be lessons needing learning, until all wars cease.

Barry is certainly one of the writers who is still able to reach out, meaningfully and in a new way, to the reader. There is something about Irish writers (and also, I think about some, though not as many, Scottish writers), whereby the rhythms of language, and the choice of words are very different from writers from England, and words therefore have a fresh power. Barry has that enviable ability to write about the particular and specific, in such a way that the particular transcends into the universal, and his well written central character, precise and particular, grows larger and larger into being Everyman, as Barry makes him more and more individual and known to us.

         Easter Uprising, Dublin, 1916

A Long Long Way starts with a Dublin family, with young Willie Dunne, one of a close-knit family, shortly before the start of World War 1, and takes him through the war, and also ties this up with the 1916 Easter Uprising. So it examines that war from the perspective of Irishmen, Irish Regiments, and the promise of Home Rule. Soldiers were enlisting to fight for Irish independence at the end, as much as for the freedom of poor little Belgium, or against ‘the Hun’. The conflict between Ulster and the South glimmers through.

At the start of the novel, Barry’s spare, cut back prose, his short sentences, shot through with surprising and memorable phrases and images, produced an effect on me as if I was reading a fairy-tale. Curiously reminded me of that wonderful Scottish writer of Faerie, George McDonald, The Princess and The Goblin,  The Princess and Curdie.(Puffin Classics)

I say this not to denigrate Barry, its actually the reverse, its about the ability to tell a story in such a way that the reader knows a more universal story is being told. His language is beautiful, images and phrases we may have come across a thousand times are put together in a startlingly new way. Who would ever have thought to describe the dropping of bombs in the trenches this way, for example:

There were bombs falling everywhere now, in an industrial generosity

This juxtaposition, this surprising and many layered choice of phrase ‘industrial generosity’ – this gives certainty to what I later found out – Barry is a poet. Of course, this is what poets do – they new mint the world for us

The sun lay along objects with indifferent and democratic grace, gun-barrel or ploughshare. The war was like a huge dream at the edge of this waking landscape, something far off and near that might ruin the lives of children and old alike, catastrophe to turn a soul to dry dust

He is not a self-consciously beautiful writer, he is a writer who makes you see clear, feel fresh, interpret the world anew. Before change, we must be able to interpret!

This is a book I know i will re-read – because of that poet’s vision, and the ability to tell the story, to weave. In many ways my response to Barry has been as profound as to another Celtic poet novelist, the Scot Andrew Greig. His novel about the second world war That Summer about the Battle of Britain and the Home Front, is a book which has stayed with me, even though i read it several years years ago, and for similar reasons as I think this one will.

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