The New Yorker Radio Hour - Tana French on “The Witch Elm”

Episode Date: July 26, 2019

Tana French was an actor in her thirties when she sat down to write about a mystery that took the lives of two children, which became the global blockbuster “In the Woods.” With her subsequent books about the Dublin Murder Squad, French became known as “the queen of Irish crime fiction”—despite having been born in the United States. French’s latest book, “The Witch Elm,” departs from her line of police procedurals: the narrator is a civilian, a happy-go-lucky young man named Toby whose life is turned upside down when he is attacked during a burglary. Although the book involves a murder, “The core story arc is not the murder and the solution,” French tells Alexandra Schwartz. “The core story arc is Toby going from this golden boy [with] his happy life to somebody who’s had that shattered. . . . Where will this crisis take him?” Though known as a literary mystery writer, French acknowledges that some of her fans have found the plot frustrating. “If you’re coming to this book expecting a straight-up crime novel . . . you are going to be a hundred pages in [asking], ‘Where’s my murder?’ ”  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. If you want a tip on a great thriller, you could do a lot worse than follow the advice of Stephen King. In a New York Times review, he raved about a book called The Witch Elm, the most recent mystery novel by the writer Tana French. French has been called the Queen of Irish Crime Fiction, although she herself is originally American, and she's often called a mystery writer for people who don't really read mysteries. Maybe that sounds like some kind of faint praise,

but make no mistake, fans of Tana French are almost crazily devoted to her books, and that certainly describes the New Yorker's Alexander Schwartz. Tana, I need to begin with a confession. I have to ration your books, because once I start one, I am totally lost to the world. I have to be careful about when I choose to read one, because if I have anything else going on at that moment in my life,

I'm just not going to be able to do it. Thank you so much. I like being a bad influence. But you didn't start writing until you were in your 30s, which might seem to some readers relatively late. And before that, you were an actor. And I was wondering how that change came about. To be honest, it was sort of always on the cards.

I used to write when I was a kid, when I was a teenager, but, you know, we're talking short stories and your basic really terrible teenage poetry. But the acting sort of took over. I was doing theatre, and unless you're Judy Dent or somebody, the gigs don't line up right. So there's always a gap in between. And in one gap, I did a few weeks on an archaeological dig.

And there was a wood, not far from the dig. And I was looking at it and thinking, God, that would be a great place for kids to play. And then I thought, what if three kids ran in there and only one came out and he had no memory of what had happened to the other two

and then what if he became a detective and a case drew him back to that wood and I really wanted to know what would happen with that story and I didn't think I could write a whole book I'd never tried before but I figured I could probably write maybe a scene and then another scene

and then I had a whole chapter kind of the moment when I found myself turning down acting work I think that was when I realised that I was really, really serious about this book And from there on it sort of all followed. And that book was in the woods, which was published in 2007. Yeah.

But, you know, it's to write a thriller or a crime novel or mystery. And I wonder, actually, if there's a term that you prefer for your own books. It takes a lot of intricate plotting. You have to lead your reader on a bunch of twists and turns. How did you manage to figure out that plotting for that very first book? Oh, plotting is not my strong point. I'm pretty at home with characterization because, you know, acting is really good training for that. And I'm at home with the actual sentence to sentence writing.

But structure is the part that I have put a lot of work into getting right. It's not a part that comes naturally to me. But also I'm lucky my husband is an actor as well and he directs short films. And he has like a demon eye for structure, right? Because he's watched every old film in the universe. And so he's very good on structure. reads for me. And he'll go, okay, hang on a second. That is not fitting together structurally. That subplot has got lost or you're not moving that scene forward enough. But I think at some

way, mystery was actually a very good way to learn that because it's got such a built-in arc. You know, A kills B and then C finds out who done it. So that keeps you on track to some extent. I think if I've been writing something like straight literary fiction, it would have been much easier to just keep on writing forever and never stop, whereas at least mystery has a clean arc that you have to stick to. I'm wondering about the language and the psychology of detective work, because there's so, your books are dense, dense with that. The partner dynamic is to me such a satisfying part of reading one of your books, that

kind of back and forth that goes on between partners. And Rob and Cassie in the woods embody this to a tea. And I was wondering if you could read, you could read. you have a passage where Rob describes feeling this way, and I was wondering if you could read it. Yeah, absolutely. The girls I dream of are the gentle ones, wistful by high windows,

or singing sweet old songs at a piano, long hair drifting, tender as apple blossom. But a girl who goes into battle beside you and keeps your back is a different thing, a thing to make you shiver. Think of the first time you slept with someone, or the first time you fell in love, that blinding explosion that left you crackling to the fingertips with electricity initiated and transformed.

I tell you that was nothing, nothing at all, beside the power of putting your lives simply and daily into each other's hands. How did you learn the vernacular of detective work in order to write these books? Well, I'm lucky. I know a retired detective who is a really lovely guy and he's also a serious talker, right? So all you have to do is press play, buy him a nice cup of coffee, say, talk to me. And he'll just keep talking until the coffee runs out. He has been so generous with his time. And that's where I'm getting the flavour of these little things, the dynamics. To an extent the partner relationship, that's something that's always fascinated me as well.

Because I love, which is going to sound weird for a writer who works alone, but I love working with people. One of the things I miss most from acting is the teamwork of it. When you're doing a scene with somebody and it's a difficult scene and it's one that you know can be amazing if you get it right and you're working with somebody where you're really attuned to each other and you can throw anything at them and know they'll bounce it back to you with something more added, it's an amazing feeling. It's one of the real joys of acting. And I was thinking about detectives and going, what would it be like to have that relationship where you were so tuned into each other that you're working practically as one and have it be life and death and truth and justice on the line? I think that must be when it works, an incredible thing. Your books are set in Dublin and you are not originally from Dublin. When did you come to Dublin?

What was it about the city that fascinated you or that drew you in? Yeah, I'm an international broad. I think the official term is third culture kid, isn't it? but I grew up moving around. My parents are from several continents between them. And when I went to college, it just seemed like the natural place to go. It was a place I knew best. So, yeah, this seems like the natural place to be. I'm here since 1990. Since 1990. So you were here or there, rather, during the Celtic Tiger, which is something that comes through in all of your books, the period of astonishing growth in Ireland that transformed Ireland from a relatively poor country into a rich one and then came crashing down with the international crash in 2008. What was that like to live through? That was very strange to live through. And in particular, from the point of view of a broke actor who wasn't actually participating in the Celtic Tiger. in any way. We were constantly being told by the government, by the media, by everyone around us during the Celtic Tiger, that what was happening was wonderful. But from our perspective,

this just meant, I have no chance of ever buying a house and my rent is skyrocketing. And then when it all came crashing down, the people who suffered the most psychologically weren't the people like me who had been outside it anywhere. I mean, I couldn't have afforded a shed in the middle of nowhere during the Celtic Tiger. But the people who were hurt worst were the people who had believed in this narrative implicitly and thrown themselves into it, who had bought those apartments off the plans, bought the houses built on floodplains because they believe that in five years you'll be able to sell it for triple the price to another sucker and you'll all live happily ever after. And I think that for those of us who hadn't been playing by the rules anyway, it was less devastating,

but we still saw that devastation. And my generation is the one that got kicked particularly hard. So yeah, it seeps through into the books. It really does. Yeah, and you're basically describing a victimization narrative where on mass people are led to, they're given a bait and switch. They're led to believe one thing. And it turns out that the truth is something very different. And that's something that comes back in such a fascinating and rich way in novel after novel of viewers. And, you know, I think we should say, especially for people who haven't read these books, the detectives are all pretty damaged. people. They are not the most reliable narrators, even when they believe themselves to be. Often, there are memory issues, which you use to, you know, manipulate the information around them. They

either remember things that didn't happen or have memory problems. Why are you drawn to that kind of detective? Because, you know, many mystery writers like to create a sort of figure of authority who is going through a twisted, shadowy world, but is ultimately going to bring truth to light. And even when the truth comes to light in your books, it may not be the whole truth and it may not matter for practical purposes whether the truth is outed at all. Yeah, it doesn't always reimpose order. I am. I'm fascinated by unreliable narrators because, okay, I think that one of the core points of the arts is to give us an insight into a glimpse of what it's like to be someone else, to see the world for a little while.

through someone else's eyes and to realize that other people have viewpoints that are completely different from our own and that those are just as real and intense and vivid and valid. And this is going to sound odd, but I think an unreliable narrator does that best, because we are all unreliable narrators of our own lives. We all do reshape our own narratives to make them fit what we want to believe or what we need or just what interests us most. Like if you've got siblings, right? And the two of you tell a story about some argument that happened in your childhood, you're going to get two completely different versions of that argument because both of you have shaped the narrative to fits what suits your thoughts best. And if you're reading

an unreliable narrator, that's what brings you closest to the person. Because you're not seeing their experience objectively. You're seeing it the way they see it, which is through their thoughts through their biases, through their needs and their fears and their desires. So I think an unreliable narrator is the one you know most intimately, ironically, and the one who comes closest to fulfilling what the arts are really for. Well, it's funny what you say about siblings. I'm an only child, so I'm sitting here thinking, yeah, yeah, but I know what really happened. You know, I have the only story. And it occurs to me that Toby, the narrator of the witch elm, is also an only child and has definitely a touch of that same narrative arrogance. So how did you decide,

the witch elm is the only one of your books thus far not to be narrated by a detective or not to take place from that point of view. How did you decide to flip that framework? Well, for one thing, I wanted to move away to the Dublin Murder Squad a bit because I don't ever want to get caught in the trap of writing the same book over and over. And I think if you're writing in a specific procedural subgenre where it is, A kills B, and the detective finds out through investigation who done it, it's quite easy to fall into that trap. So I thought I wanted to take a step back. And I looked at the process of investigation from a detective's viewpoint six times. And I kept thinking about the other viewpoints involved. Like in that same investigation, you've got witnesses, you've got victims, you've got suspects, you've got perpetrators. And all of them have to see that investigation entirely differently. But for all those other people, it's a totally different thing. It's this force that just barrels into your life, turns everything upside down. You have no idea where you stand in it. Are you a witness? Are you a suspect? What are you? You have no idea why the detectives are doing what you do.

You have no idea where it's going to go, how much destruction it's going to cause, where it's going to stop. And I thought all of those viewpoints deserve to look in as well, deserved a voice too. And at different points in the book, Toby's all of those. He's victim, witness, suspect, perpetrator, and to an extent, detective as well. So he kind of covers all the bases. I wanted to try out those different viewpoints. This novel is quite capacious. And a lot of critics have noticed this about, to me, that's a good thing, by the way.

There's a lot of it, I know. And you do this in a lot of your books, in all of your books. But in this one in particular, there's a lot of time spent with your character where nothing seems to be happening from the perspective of figures. figuring out who did the crime or even what the crime is, you know, what kind of purpose does that serve for you? Another way to put it is, you're often referred to as a literary crime writer, which is, you know, I don't know how you take that term if it's flattering or condescending or what. But I think people mean the writing is beautiful. There's this kind of exquisite characterization. What do you make of that literary, quote unquote, side of things?

It's hard because I don't, I think the boundaries in fiction are breaking down all the time, which is a great thing. You know, they bleed over from what used to be considered, this is what literary fiction should be like, this is what crime fiction should be like. More and more there's a lot of crossover. See, for me, I don't know what I'm writing. I'm just writing this book. And the core story arc is not the murder and the solution. The core story arc is Toby. Is Toby going from this golden, boy in his happy life to somebody who's had that shattered and what he does about it. How will he put the pieces back together? Will he be able to? Where will this crisis take him? That's the story arc. I think, yeah, it's going to be frustrating for some people because if you're coming to the book expecting a straight up crime novel that abides by the genre conventions in which, yeah, the core of the book is the murder investigation, then you are going to be going about 100 pages in. Where's my murder? Where's this investigation? So yeah, I can see where if there's a clash between the expectations and the actual book, that always gets frustrating.

But I like the fact that those expectations are no longer the be all and end all, that for more and more crime writers, you don't have to stick to the conventions. You can use them as a starting point rather than a finishing point. I have to ask you, there are two mysteries in the woods. There's the mystery of what happened to Rob when he was a child. He was one of those three children who you originally imagined who go into the woods and only one comes out. That one is him and he has no memory of what happened. And then there's the actual murder that he's trying to solve, which takes place in a similar wood. And I won't say which on radio, of course, but we find out the answer to one of those mysteries and not both.

Do you know what happened in the other mystery? Is that something in your mind or are you just leaving it open for yourself as well? No, I know more or less. I don't know every specific, but I know the general, yeah, what happened. But there was kind of no way with integrity to work it into the book. So I kind of went, okay, there are going to be some readers who aren't happy. And fair enough, I can see why. But I'm going to have to stick with the one that makes it as good a book as possible. Keep my fingers crossed that there are enough people who think like me. So I went with that. Yeah, I mean, I completely respect your decision and appreciated. And at the same time, I'm so desperate to know what happened and went on, you know, various message boards without landish theories. Oh, seriously, are there? Yeah, they're out there. They're out there for sure.

I just wanted to know. But I also know I will have to live with my own state of ignorance. It's just part of life. Tana French, thank you so much. Thank you. That was great. Tana French's most recent novel is The Witches. which is just coming out in paperback. And Alexandra Schwartz is a staff writer at The New Yorker,

and she covers books and theater and a lot more. I'm David Remnick, and that's The New Yorker Radio Hour for right now. We've got a new episode of the podcast up every Friday and Tuesday at New YorkerRadio.org or wherever you get your podcasts. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. Our team includes Alex Barron,

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