Review: The Wych Elm

The Witch Elm by Tana French
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A new Tana French novel is the highlight of my reading year. ‘The Wych Elm’ is a departure from her Dublin Murder Squad crime novels in the sense that the story is told from the perspective of the victim of the crime rather than the investigators but, like that series, is a character-driven story which really gets into the psyche of the protagonist.
When we meet Toby he is on a night out with his friends, middle-class Dublin rugby types, apparently fairly harmless, if slightly unlikeable, slightly full of themselves. But, when Toby confronts burglars at his apartment that night, he suffers head injuries and memory loss in a vicious assault. Returning to The Ivy House, his uncle’s home at which he spent a lot of his childhood, Toby’s convalescence is, at first, bolstered by helping his uncle cope with his own, terminal, illness. The two support each other and fall into an easy routine, aided by Toby’s girlfriend, and, through conversations with the cousins with whom he grew up, Toby tries to regain the memories he has lost.
Tana French is a master at these familial relationships, the small interactions, the petty jealousies and misunderstandings between people who ‘love’ each other. Toby is an unreliable narrator, all the more so because of his brain trauma, but there is a sense that each of the characters is hiding something or, at least, reframing their own narratives, editing their own stories. Then the discovery of human remains in the hollow trunk of the ancient Wych Elm tree in the back garden of The Ivy House starts Toby on a path of investigation, casting suspicion on his cousins, his uncle, even himself. As the police tear apart the garden so Toby’s questions open up old wounds, gradually unravelling first his relationships, then his self-image, his sense of who he is.
‘The Wych Elm’ is a story of psychological disintegration told with Tana French’s keen ear for dialogue and ability to get inside the minds of her characters. It is a slower novel than the Dublin Murder Squad books but no less compelling. I enjoyed it and thank Penguin Random House and NetGalley for the early access.

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