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Broken Harbour by Tana French

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Proving that, along with everything else, French can bring the creepy. Investigation of a triple familial homicide reveals a house with holes knocked in the walls and cameras pointing into them, which is just the start.

This was, hm. I can't say I wasn't riveted, because I was. And I can't say it isn't a good book, because it is. It's more complicated than this sounds, but it's about the order that we keep to shut out the wild, and about where violence comes from. Our protagonist genuinely believes in victim-blaming – it's not that he won't pursue justice, he's just so very sure that anyone who gets dead did something to open up a crack in their life and let the violence in. And it doesn't take much, just the smallest slip will do it. The book is – I won't say sympathetic to him, but it is even-handed. We know why he thinks that – he has to think that – and French is very, very good at complicating the viewpoints of people with those kinds of self-serving blinders on.

But for all that, and I've said this before. I really wish she'd write a different book. Like around the 20% mark of this one, two characters began deliberately building a strong, healthy, functional emotional connection, and I knew instantly that it would be destroyed, and had a pretty good guess as to how. French writes that kind of destruction beautifully, but come on. We've seen this before. Maybe I've just read all of her books too close together, but there's a sameness to them which is frustrating given her obvious and ridiculous talent.




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The Likeness by Tana French

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Well.

Follows In the Woods. Cassie walks out of the wreckage and into a new case which sends her undercover to infiltrate the tight-knit household of a murdered girl. This is very much like In the Woods, and I'm not talking about the need to suspend one's disbelief on the premise. Both of these books are post facto first person memoirs of travail and inevitable destruction; they both examine the forging and breaking of human connections; they are both intricately written and occasionally overwritten, with a core of twisty psychological intensity.

This one didn't work on me as well as In the Woods. Partly because all the thematic underpinnings here on the creation of group identities and the struggle for happiness in the modern world just didn't interest me as much. And partly because I'm onto French now, and I was never all that impressed with her more gothic flourishings. I sighed tiredly when this book did an actual "When I dream of Whitethorne House…." Sequence.

But. All that said. There is so much to unpick from French's convolutions and turnings. And every few pages something would flash out at me, aimed just right. "I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack." Oh, Cassie, I know who you are thinking of.

At the bottom of it all, French is a tremendous craftsman, and my dissatisfaction with this book comes from my conviction that it retreads too much stylistic ground, that she has something more daring and different in her, and that I want it.




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