Tana French’s seventh novel is her first standalone: the first-person narrative of a young man who always considered himself lucky, till a vicious attack partly changed his mind.

The Wych Elm (2018) is Tana French’s first (and so far only) standalone crime novel, following the six books that make up her Dublin Murder Squad series (each of which has a different first-person narrator). The book that came after The Wych Elm, 2020’s The Searcher, probably looked like another standalone till it was followed in 2024 by The Hunter. I’ve written about all the books in the Dublin Murder Squad series in Talk about books.

The Wych Elm revolves around the discovery of a human skeleton inside a hollow elm tree in the garden of a large, old Dublin suburban house which Toby Hennessy’s great-grandparents bought in the 1920s. The tree is 200 years old and at first nobody is quite sure how long the skeleton might have been there. It’s soon established, however, that the remains are those of a school-friend of Toby’s — but they “weren’t friends friends” (p. 206) — who had been presumed to have jumped to his death off Howth Head ten years previously, when his Leaving Cert results were insufficient to get him into any university course.

The body hidden in the elm tree has featured before in French’s fiction. In her first novel, In the Woods, the detective who originally investigated the disappearance of two children twenty years earlier recalled:

“After a few weeks, some smart floater remembered an old case where a kid climbed a hollow tree and fell into a hole in the trunk; he wasn’t found till forty years later. Kiernan and McCabe had people checking every tree, shining torches into hollows …” (In the Woods, p. 222)

Here, French was drawing on an actual case in Worcestershire during the Second World War. The passage from In the Woods raises the horrific possibility that the trapped victim had slowly starved to death inside the tree. Toby eventually learns that this is not what happened in the present case. Dominic Ganly was already dead when he was lowered into the hollow trunk as a means of concealing the body. For various reasons it had been impractical to dig a grave and bury him.

A few months before the discovery of Ganly’s skeleton, Toby had disturbed two burglars in his ground-floor apartment. They left him with broken ribs and coccyx and a serious head injury that permanently damaged his intellectual and motor functions. Toby, as he tells the reader in the first sentence of the novel, always thought of himself as lucky. He was certainly lucky on the occasion of the burglary: if he hadn’t regained consciousness long enough to attract the attention of his neighbours, he would almost certainly have died at the scene. But blessings are rarely unmixed.

Most of the reviews of the novel that I’ve read say, in effect, “for ‘luck’ read ‘privilege’”: Toby sees himself as the beneficiary of good fortune. To someone eyeing his situation more dispassionately, he enjoys the advantages that appertain to his class (upper middle?), sex (male), sexuality (straight) and family background (happy and loving, for the most part). To some extent, it’s undeniable that he’s more fortunate than most, but it’s also true that this is a bit of a red herring.

When the story opens, Toby is 28 years old and a university graduate. His parents have paid the deposit on his apartment (where he doesn’t feel at ease, even before the burglary) and he can afford the mortgage payments though his job is not particularly well paid. His father is a solicitor and his mother a university lecturer in History. They’re comfortably off, though it’s not clear to the reader exactly how comfortably. Toby aspires to owning, one day, a large Georgian house with a sea view but knows perfectly well that he’ll need to find a better paid and less congenial job if he’s to make that happen.

Toby has two cousins, each the sole child of one of Toby’s uncles. Though they share his social background, the cousins are less privileged than he in that Leon is gay and Susanna female. One of his two best friends from school, Dec, was on a scholarship, and has to remind Toby that, because of his social background, his position was always less secure than Toby’s. When the two of them were caught in a cruel but silly prank, Dec believed he was in real danger of expulsion, while it never crossed Toby’s mind that he wouldn’t be able to talk his way out of trouble. Typically, Toby has a vague recollection of the prank itself but has forgotten what followed:

“You don’t even remember.”

“I don’t care.”

“I got suspended. Three days. You got detention. One day.” (p. 25)

As Dec sees it, the difference is that Toby feels confident — can afford to feel confident — that he isn’t in any danger, and because of that, he actually isn’t.

“I’m not saying Armitage did that out of badness. I’m saying I went in there petrified that I was going to get kicked out, wind up down the shithole community school. You went in there knowing that even if you were expelled, your ma and da would just find you another lovely school. That’s the difference.” (p. 25)

When Dec adds that Toby is “just a lucky little prick”, Toby is pleased rather than offended. He is lucky, and glad to be so.

It eventually emerges that Dominic Ganly had been viciously bullying Leon at school and later pressured Susanna to have sex with him, at one point indecently assaulting her. Each of the cousins had approached Toby, believing that he could make Ganly stop, but he hadn’t taken their predicaments seriously. After the burglary, he barely remembered having known about the bullying and harassment. As Susanna chides him in a different context:

“Oh you. I swear by the next week you’d forgotten it ever happened. Typical: anything you feel bad about just falls straight out of your head …” (p. 237)

So, yes, you certainly can group the various ways in which Toby is fortunate together under the umbrella term “privilege”. But it’s as well to keep in mind that they don’t ordinarily come as a package: they don’t necessarily all go together, and they’re not all equally useful. They coincide in Toby, but not in any other character in the novel, not even, it would seem, in other members of his well off, upper middle class family. Though “privilege” is a theme in the novel, French seems to me to be more concerned with the workings of memory.

Toby’s memory had been less than comprehensive even before the brain damage he suffered in the burglary. The conversation in which Dec called him “lucky little prick” had occurred earlier on the night of the attack, before Toby was injured. The argument between their uncle Hugo and Juliana Dunne which, according to Susanna, had fallen straight out of Toby’s head within a week took place years before. So Toby’s recollections were already untrustworthy before his head was battered. Afterwards he can’t be sure that he didn’t kill Ganly, or that he wasn’t involved in some way.

As a teenager trying to figure out what was going on in Waiting for Godot I read something to the effect that our selfhood is closely tied up with memory: in simple terms, that we know who we are because we remember what we’ve done, how we’ve interacted, and those memories are essential to our perception of a continuing, persistent self. I found this idea fascinating but unpersuasive. I was still very young and more than half of my life up to that point — my entire childhood — was hidden from me in impenetrable murk, yet I had no doubt that I had a self, and a distinct personality, even if I couldn’t describe it. It would be almost 45 years before I would come to understand that my memory of earlier life is not at all typical. In the meantime, though, I remained sceptical of the notion that the self is in any sense dependent on memory.

Toby of the mental glitches does not look for his sense of self in his elusive memories but in what he sees as his luck. At the end, he still thinks of himself as lucky, in spite of the things that have happened to him. The novel’s final paragraph concludes:

I think my luck was built into me, the keystone that cohered my bones, the golden thread that stitched together the secret tapestries of my DNA. I think it was the gem glittering at the fount of me, colouring everything I did and every word I said. And if somehow that has been excised from me, and if in fact I am still here without it, then what am I? (p. 511)

Throughout the story, Toby is reminded of several things he’s not particularly keen to remember. When Susanna tells him that Ganly groped her he’s shocked and asks her why she didn’t tell him at the time. But she had told him, admittedly in less explicit terms, and he had assumed that she was being oversensitive. Later Rafferty, one of the detectives who investigated Ganly’s murder, reminds him that he hadn’t been a “holy innocent” (p. 478) where Ganly’s behaviour towards Susanna was concerned:

“… There were a handful of emails in Dominic’s account that were never traced. Anonymous emails, sent over the summer before he died. From a girl he’d been chasing, apparently. She was well into him, but she didn’t want to let on in public in case he was just winding her up, so she’d been shooting him down — are you following this? But at the same time, right, she wanted him to know that actually she fancied the arse off him.” (p. 473)

The emails had, of course, been sent by Toby: another prank, this one with serious consequences that he was happily oblivious to till ten years later.

For a while, Rafferty had let Toby believe that he suspected Toby of being Ganly’s killer (and, as we’ve seen, Toby wasn’t at all sure that he wasn’t). This led Toby’s uncle Hugo, the owner and in normal circumstances sole occupant of the Ivy house, to confess. Hugo had an inoperable brain tumour and at most months to live, so Toby assumed that his confession was no more than an unconvincing attempt to draw suspicion away from the nephew. However, after Hugo’s death, Rafferty told Toby that the evidence had always pointed towards Hugo. His confession had included supporting details that had been withheld by the investigators. Hugo had evidently known about the body in the elm tree for years and had even engineered its discovery, knowing that he would soon die and the house would be sold. He had thought it better to manage the discovery, rather than let it happen after new owners had taken possession. He had planned his confession; it wasn’t an impulsive act.

But Hugo hadn’t been the killer, any more than Toby had.

The air was so still that I could hear Rafferty’s small sigh. “A lot of the time, in this job,” he said, “you can tell what kind of mind you’re up against. You can feel them, out there.” A nod to the garden. “I could feel it strong, this time. Mostly it’s just some clown, you know? Some halfwit scumbag taking out a rival dealer, some arsehole who got drunk again and hit her too hard this time. This was different, from the start. Someone cool as ice, thinking twenty moves ahead. Someone who was never going to get spooked, or confused, or strong-armed. It never felt like Hugo.” (p. 477)

The novel is quite as impressive as any of Tana French’s earlier books. It’s not exactly a whodunnit: what happened to Dominic Ganly turns out to be plausible or credible rather than unpredictable, but there are plenty of surprising details around the edges, including the revelatiion of the state of Hugo’s knowledge. I’m not sure, then, why the book left me with a sour aftertaste on first reading, and why that sourness only partly dissipated as I reread it.

I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that two of the principal characters show a surprising antipathy towards medical professionals. Susanna tells her cousins that the birth of her first child, Zach, was difficult for her.

Her voice was very level, but there was a tightly controlled undercurrent to it. “The consultant did some stuff to me — I mean, I’ll spare you the details, but basically there were a few options and I really didn’t agree with the one he wanted to go with. So I said no. And he told me, quote, “If you try to get feisty with me, I’ll get a court order and send the police to your door to bring you in.” (p. 145)

To Toby’s expression of incredulity that she hadn’t made a complaint against the consultant, she replied that she hadn’t had any ground for doing so.

“… If you’re pregnant, you don’t have the right to any say about your health care. He could do whatever he wanted to me, whether I agreed to it or not, and it would be totally legal. Did you seriously not know that?” (p. 145)

While I’ll admit that I can imagine some senior consultants behaving in such a high-handed way, and even believing that they were entitled to do so, the law in Ireland was never as Susanna describes it. Indeed, Susanna effectively admits as much when, later, she says that during her second pregnancy she learned that the consultant’s overbearing behaviour had not been standard practice. She had gone back and threatened the consultant with exposure. He died a few days later; whether from heart attack, suicide, or some other cause, she never found out. But if what he had been doing had been perfectly legal, there’s no reason why the threat of exposure should have caused him any concern.

When Hugo is dying in hospital, Susanna, in contrast to Hugo’s brothers, takes a confrontational attitude towards the doctor who is treating him:

Susanna said, “He’s old and he’s dying anyway and he came in from police custody, so he wasn’t worth the hassle and resources of surgery.”

The doctor’s eyes slid away like she bored him. (p. 381)

Later still, she asks Toby to imagine how he’d feel taking revenge on somebody “who treated you like you weren’t a person? Not because of anything you’d done; just because of what you were. Someone who did whatever they wanted to you …” (p. 453). Toby immediately thinks, not of the burglars who caused his injuries, but of the neurologist who had seen him in hospital following the attack. The neurologist had ignored Toby’s request for an explanation of what had been done to him and what he could expect in terms of recovery, clearly believing that Toby was too brain-damaged to be able to follow a complicated account.

The near-concealed pity and distaste sliding across his eyes, the moment when he demoted me to something not worthy of explanations, branded and filed away, no appeal possible. (p. 453)

Toby ecstatically imagines kicking and beating the neurologist “until finally: stillness; nothing left but obliterated gobbets of pulp at my feet and me standing tall, streaming blood and gasping air like a man rising from some purifying river into a world that was mine again. (p. 454)

I find it unusual that that these upper middle-class, reasonably well educated, “privileged” characters should feel such animosity towards the medical profession. In fact, Hugo had been inevitably close to death, and Toby had been too confused to make sense of an elaboration of the “multiple factors” which might determine his future. Really, only Susanna’s first consultant had been behaving unjustifiably, though the others lacked tact and patience.

These passages undermine Toby’s long-established perception of Susanna as a cool, rational, far-sighted intellectual. We see Susanna, like the other characters, only from the point of view of the first-person narrator (Toby) and I think it becomes clear in the end that he has fundamentally misunderstood her. There’s another female character that Toby seems to get wrong: Melissa, the girlfriend who sticks with him after he’s been released from hospital but leaves when he persists in trying to unearth the truth about what happened to Ganly, though the detectives have made it clear that they suspect him, and he can’t be sure that they’re wrong.

I’d like to take a close look at what Toby’s narrative tells us (expressly and by implication) about Melissa, but that will have to wait for another occasion.

Edition: Penguin paperback, 2019; emphasis original, ellipsis added.