The Witch Elm — Tana French (2018)
A bit of self-knowledge is a rare gift. Especially when it relates to differentiating the kinds of books I prefer.
With The Witch Elm, I did a very, very bad thing. See below.
For the past several years I’ve happily allowed the editors of the NY Times Book Review to vet books for me. My discovery, confirmed with the thud of Tana French’s The Witch Elm, is that, notwithstanding the endorsement of Book Review editors, I don’t take to psychological thrillers. This discovery is not a negative development, it is very positive.
Readers of my reviews know that I recently reviewed unfavorably The Girl on the Train. I didn’t know it at the time, but it is a psychological thriller, as opposed to an actual … thriller. I didn’t realize there is a difference.
In the case of both books there is little action, though there is plenty of internal dialogue and idle conversation between bored characters. This is literally true – the characters are bored with each other.
The Witch Elm is revered by the NYTimes staff. Pamela Paul, chief editor of the Book Review and podcast interviewer extraordinaire, interviewed Tana French when the book was released and then recently replayed the interview when the covid restrictions knocked the podcast off the air for a few weeks. Tana French is smart and engaging, and Pamela Paul clearly loved the book, so the book looked like a good bet.
In The Witch Elm, the narrator is badly beaten by burglars and suffers brain damage, and a skull is discovered in the hollow of a tree. These are not spoilers, given that these events are mentioned on the back book cover and were discussed in the podcast. These crimes suggest action! But, by page 145 of 500, only one of those actions had yet occurred. For my first time, I appealed to the wider world of Twitter by tweeting that I was 145 pages into the book and there had been no action yet other than the burglary. Was it, I asked, worth continuing and when would it turn into a page-turner? One of my favorite editors of the NY Times was kind enough to respond by saying that it is not so much a page-turner as it is a psychological study of different characters. Good to know.
The skull appeared soon after the 145th page, so I continued to read. However – and, full disclosure, this is the very bad thing – I gave up at page 294 and skipped ahead to page 455, so that I could read the final 50 pages. That’s a 150 page skip. I knew from another kind twitter responder that there is a final twist, so I wanted to know how it ends. In fact, I deserved to know, because 294 pages represents a fair number of hours and constitutes a sufficient investment to warrant a payoff.
It was the best reading decision I’ve made in a long time. I missed little of consequence in the 150 skipped pages, and I was able to get the gist of the intervening conversations. In fact, I had already figured out much of whodunit before I skipped ahead.
Does this make me a bad person?
Back to the theme of this review, self-discovery. At the same time I was reading The Witch Elm, I was also reading aloud Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials to my wife. What a contrast! His Dark Materials is such a page-turner that if I skip a day or two while reading to my wife, then we often have to go back and re-read a few pages just to remember which world we are in!
Perhaps the proof of my interests is that I’ve read His Dark Materials at least three times.
If The Witch Elm had characters who were fascinating or intriguing or impossible to forget, then all the pages may have been worth it. But, the characters are shallow, inarticulate, middle class bourgeoisie. They may be described accurately and may remind us all too well of people we know, but it doesn’t make them interesting. In fact, the only remarkable characters were the detectives. They knew how to elicit fear and how to wind tension in the ebb and flow of conversation.
I remain indebted to the NY Times Book Review and will continue to rely on the editors to cull worthy books. But, I have just saved myself time in years to come by learning that I shouldn’t read psychological thrillers. I now have a spring in my step!
Bob Fall 