The Witch Elm

August - The Witch Elm by Tana French

I picked up The Witch Elm while browsing in my local book store. Sometimes I choose a book by scanning prize winners or best book lists or the hundreds of books recommended for me by an algorithm or a wily publisher. Sometimes a friend recommended it, or it's a book club read, and sometimes the book finds me.

The Witch Elm found me. I was scanning the shelves over at the Village Bookseller in Mt. Pleasant, picking up books, and reading the blurbs. I'd heard of The Witch Elm and Tana French. Nothing except that they rang a bell, meaning the names were vaguely familiar, but I had no actual knowledge of Tana French's writing or the plot of The Witch Elm. There was a lot that appealed to me. The book was a notable book of 2018. French was a "master of her craft." And the book is set in Ireland.

So I didn't look any further. (FYI, this book has nothing to do with witches.)

I loved this book, but part of me felt it should have come with a warning label. I'm a little squeamish. Maybe I should have paid more attention to the fact that one of the blurbs was from Stephen King. However, if it had a big warning label, then I might not have read it, and that would also have been a mistake.

My coping mechanism for getting through the book was to take breaks. I cover my eyes if there is a gory scene in a movie. I've walked out if it gets unbearable. Sometimes I come back. Sometimes I have my friends tell me how it ends. Reading The Witch Elm took me a few weeks, but I had to know how it ended, and I didn't want a summary. I wanted to know all the twists and turns.

But I needed breaks in reading The Witch Elm because Tana French is a vivid, talented, realistic writer. Early in the novel, Toby (our Main Character and narrator) is attacked in his home. The brutality described on the page not only painted a picture in my mind, it hurt. I found myself wincing, flinching, and recoiling. Toby was lucky to be alive, but he didn't come out of it unscathed. He's not the same physically or mentally.

It wasn't just the violence or just this scene that forced me to set the book down for a little while before I could continue. French writes suspense in a way that was almost equally challenging for me. She sets up situations that are so uncomfortable. Toby is clearly about to make a bad choice, and I can't bear it. It's excruciating to let it unfold. And waiting to find out just how badly the consequences will be is agonizing.

After all that, it is well worth the ride. The novel hands you are bizarre but realistic. Toby is charming and disturbing. She has you in her grip until the very end, where you struggle to see who was good? Who was bad?

The whole terrible fiasco was a combination of bad luck, bad decisions, and desperate choices. Maybe, we are all capable of terrible things. Maybe, it's just what Toby's cousin Susanna suggests. We are only as virtuous as our circumstances allow. Unless we are pushed, unless we are forced into a corner, we may never discover what darkness lies at our core.

The Witch Elm delivers a complex mystery that is satisfying in its myriad of details, but also because it raises questions about the nature of reality. Many mystery novels leave us wondering how well we can know someone we are close to, but French makes you wonder how well you might know yourself. How reliable is your memory? And how much do your memories contribute to who you are?

Pick up your copy and see what else Tana French has written at www.tanafrench.com.