The Wych Elm
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Average rating3.5
For me it all goes back to that night, the dark corroded hinge between before and after, the slipped-in sheet of trick glass that tints everything on one side in its own murky colours and leaves everything on the other luminous and untouchable. One night changes everything for Toby. A brutal attack leaves him traumatised, unsure even of the person he used to be. He seeks refuge at the family's ancestral home, the Ivy House, filled with cherished memories of wild-strawberry summers and teenage parties with his cousins. But not long after Toby's arrival, a discovery is made. A skull, tucked neatly inside the old wych elm in the garden. As detectives begin to close in, Toby is forced to examine everything he thought he knew about his family, his past, and himself. A spellbinding standalone from a literary writer who turns the crime genre inside out, The Wych Elm asks what we become, and what we're capable of, if we no longer know who we are.
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The writing was terrible. In fact it was so terrible that it made me angry, and the only way I could keep going was by highlighting particularly poorly-written sections on my Kindle. Here are some excerpts:
- “I wasn't really in the state to describe incipient epiphanies to Sean - there was no way I could even have pronounced “incipient epiphanies” - but I did my best.
- “He even looked farther away, as if he had deliberately receded a few steps down some long passageway, although I was pretty sure that had to do with the booze.”
- “For some reason this is the mistake - hardly a mistake, really, what's wrong with having a few pints on a Friday night after a stressful week, what's wrong with wanting the girl you love to think the best of you? - this is the choice to which I return over and over...“
- “He was holding a sheaf of cryptic-looking paper that I assumed was my chart, whatever that meant.”
- ...“gossip about her flatmate's latest drama (Megan was a petulant, nitpicky girl who managed a chichi organic-raw-kale-type cafe and couldn't work out why everyone she met turned out to be an arsehole; only Melisa could have lived with her for any length of time):” ...
The final one that broke me involved a long and detailed aside about brochures. Here's the thing about asides: they take you out of the flow of the story, that is to say to the side of it, and there had better be a good fucking reason why an author is doing this to a reader. The payoff must be more than an extra dose of detail, and in every aside that the author makes in this book all we get is more pointless detail.
It is all tell, no show in this book, and that is an unpardonable sin. HARD PASS.
The Wych Elm by Tana French is a standalone thriller. Family secrets are uncovered when Toby goes to stay with his uncle Hugo, who is dying of terminal cancer. The book starts out in the art world of Dublin, moves on to a vicious attack and then settles in the family ancestral home where all the mystery takes place.
