Reading, lost and found
Liz Tascio
The Hunter, by Tana French, Viking, 2024.
There was a time in my life when I stopped reading books. Blame motherhood and work, blame smartphone apps and podcasts, blame me for letting my habits change. I was too busy and I just stopped. Then one day a friend of mine who loves books said, “You have to read Tana French.”
Murder mysteries, but not exactly, she said, and the sentences are so good. I decided I still didn’t have time to sit down with a book, but I could pop in some earbuds and listen while I did everything else. I bought her first book.
From the first chapter of In the Woods I was swept into the story, and into the sheer pleasure of a gorgeous sentence. By the last chapter, I was devastated—in the best way. I immediately bought her second book, The Likeness.
Part of the joy is that she is an undeniably lyrical, beautiful writer. She is also deeply interested in people, not just in the puzzle of a plot, though she’s excellent at that, too. She draws her main characters richly, surrounds them with complicated people to love and to lose, gives them a moral compass they might not follow, painful memories and blind spots. They test the limits of their morals, they sacrifice careers and relationships, and sometimes they turn their backs on what they believe about themselves when there is too much at stake to be good.
French’s first six novels are linked: They are all set in a fictional police department in Dublin, a department known as the
Murder Squad. Each book is told from the point of view of the investigators, and a minor character in one novel can become the main character in another. Her single standalone novel, The Witch Elm, is written from the point-of-view of someone on the other side of a murder investigation: a suspect. I loved them all.
(Well, all except The Witch Elm—far too dark for me—but Stephen King loved that one and you should feel free to take his assessment over mine.)
At the end of French’s eighth novel, 2020’s The Searcher, she leaves her three main characters at a beginning of sorts in Ardnakelty, their isolated village in rural Ireland. Trey, a young teen from a poor family the town barely tolerates; retired Chicago detective Cal, who moved to Ireland for some peace and became like a father to Trey; and Lena, a middle-aged widow who is both very much of the town and determined to hold herself apart from it, are settling delicately into what could become a kind of family.
And despite the heavy secret that French gives Cal to keep at the end of the novel, I closed the book with a silent wish that those characters would grow closer and be happy.
So when the sequel, 2024’s The Hunter, was announced, I was almost afraid to read it. What was French going to do to these three people I grew to love so much? I decided I needed to find out what happens, at least, to Trey.
In The Hunter, French picks up three years later. Trey, Cal, and Lena are, indeed, happy. Cal is teaching 15-year-old Trey to refinish and sell old furniture, in the hopes that she’ll use the trade to make a better life. Trey, reticent and standoffish in the first book, is a little more comfortable now, a bit more trusting. Lena and Cal have settled into a quiet, satisfying, midlife love.
But a hard summer is underway, and French lets the weather infuse the book from the start:
The heat has thickened. The early-afternoon sun grips the village into immobility; the main street is empty, only the old men sitting slumped on the grotto wall, too hot to move indoors, one of them fanning himself with sluggish flaps of his newspaper.
The fields need rain, and old farmers are annoyed at TV newscasters suddenly talking about climate change: “They coulda asked any farmer, any time these last twenty year; the summers aren’t the same as what they were,” one farmer complains to Cal. “They turned tricky on us, and they’ve only got trickier.”
Then Trey’s dad, Johnny, who abandoned his family for London years ago, comes back to town, handsome and charming as ever, a little desperate, and with a stranger in tow. The stranger’s grandmother told him stories about gold buried generations ago under the fields of Ardnakelty, and Johnny wants the villagers to vouch for the story and get paid for the right to dig on their land. And who knows? If the grandmother’s story is true, he says, they’ll all be rich. A little gold has been found there before.
Trey wakes up early one morning to secretly follow her father, and French’s textured language even in this simple scene is an example of the pleasure of her writing:
In the dark before dawn, the men don’t look like men. They’re only snatches of disturbance at the edges of Trey’s sense; smudges of thicker shadow shifting on the riverbank, flickers of muttering through the rush and gabble of the water, which is raucous in the silence. The stars are faint enough that the surface of the river barely shimmers; the moon is a bare cold spot, low on the horizon, giving no light.
French doesn’t use the typical structure of the murder mystery genre in her books. Here, there isn’t even a murder to investigate until far later in the novel than you would expect. In the meantime, there is the mystery of people. They layer their
conversation with double or triple meanings. Relationships are stretched and twisted by the pressure created by Johnny’s return and the question of the gold. Cal gets himself invited into Johnny’s scheme in an attempt to protect Trey from whatever trouble he might cause. And Trey sees in the chaos an opportunity to get revenge against the people in town who have hurt her and her family, and starts quietly planning.
Lena, sensing that Trey might try something, goes reluctantly to see Mrs. Duggan. The woman is a terrifying living archive of the town’s stories and secrets, an embodiment of all the things about a small town that constrict and suffocate. Lena is hoping to learn anything that might prove or disprove the myth of the gold. The scene is a tense back-and-forth under the studied veneer of a casual visit; Lena metes out to Mrs. Duggan a few secrets of her own in hopes of learning something in exchange. You can feel how unsettling Lena finds all of this:
Mrs. Duggan is settled deep into her armchair, overflowing into the arms. She’s wearing a purple dress and battered fleece slippers; her hair, dyed a shiny black, is pulled back in a tight bun. She has the air of something geological, like the house was built around her because no one was willing to move her. . . . [She is] a dense, ripe fermentation of all the things about Ardnakelty that Lena wanted to leave behind. . . . This woman and this place are both so obdurately, monumentally what they are, down to bedrock, that it feels insane to go trying to outwit them.
When the murder happens, the fallout shoots all of these tensions to breathtaking heights and rearranges the risks and dangers for everyone. Even as she builds the rest of the tale, French holds us tightly to the near-breaking heart of everything— Cal and Trey and Lena—with every gorgeous sentence.
You can read The Hunter without reading any of the other novels. But I think you should start at the beginning. Pick up In
LIZ TASCIO
the Woods. Even if you don’t typically read murder mysteries. Even if you have a stack of other books waiting at your bedside. Even if you have fallen out of the reading habit altogether. I think you have to read Tana French.