The Witch Elm

By coincidence, I experienced a funny bit of synergy by reading this book and watching the show Bad Sisters at the same time. They’re both murder mysteries set in Ireland, and bled together slightly in my mind. I started to imagine the detective character in the book with the same appearance as the actor in the series. And because my ear had been hearing the spoken dialogue, I was able to mentally approximate the sound of the Irish accent while reading.

The novel is told from the perspective of Toby, and before the main mystery even kicks in, he gets assaulted by burglers breaking into his home, leaving him with a head injury. As he’s recovering at his fancy family home, his cousin’s kids accidentally discover a skeleton inside a tree in the yard. It shouldn’t be too much of a spoiler to say that the body belongs to someone from Toby’s high school days¹, and various members of his family—his uncle and his cousins—all become suspects. Including Toby himself.

I enjoyed the prose style of this book. Tana French does a good job getting into Toby’s head, as well as his family members. Despite the book’s length (500+ pages), it feels fast-paced. It’s probably a bit longer than it needs to be, if all you cared about was the mystery, but I don’t fault the author for fleshing out the characters.

Ultimately, though, the story didn’t fully work for me. My problems stem from the fact that Toby is the sole point-of-view character. As readers, we’re supposed to wonder whether or not he was the culprit, and since we’re in his head, the plot requires him to not remember the events surrounding the murder. His head injury becomes a convenient plot device, because it causes memory loss, making him unsure about his own guilt. But as more and more layers of truth are revealed and at every turn, Toby is surprised at learning about something that happened to him, his selective amnesia begins to feel too convenient and contrived.

One of the themes of the book is Toby’s privilege. He comes from a wealthy family, and was in with the popular crowd in high school, which made him oblivious to his cousins being bullied. It can’t be that bad is kind of his default attitude. I like the exploration of this theme, but again, the memory loss idea undercuts it somewhat. The point is supposed to be that his position in the social pecking order blinds him to the plights of others, but since his mental dysfunction hangs over everything, it’s like the book always gives him a (valid) excuse for his lack of empathy.

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