Tana French: We're All Unreliable Narrators

Tana French is a literary luminary of the crime writing scene, standing next to such figures as Donna Tartt and Kate Atkinson, with a devoted fan base that includes both genre and literary fiction readers. She is the author of the New York Times bestsellers In the Woods, The Likeness, Faithful Place, Broken Harbor, The Secret Place and The Trespasser. Her books have won numerous awards including the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity and Barry Awards, the Los Angeles Times Award for Best Mystery/Thriller, and the Irish Book Award for Crime Fiction.

I first read In The Woods while working as a bookseller, and immediately flew through her Dublin Police Series, falling in love with the haunting atmosphere, psychological insights, and clear-sighted empathy that infuse each of her works. Her latest work is The Witch Elm, inspired by the unsolved murder of a young woman during WWII whose corpse was discovered in the base of a wych elm next to some mysterious graffiti. In The Witch Elm, French’s first standalone mystery, her protagonist tries to make sense of family secrets after sustaining a traumatic brain injury in the course of a break-in, and must confront the consequences of both his new vulnerability and his past actions. I interviewed French via email about astute psychological observations, atmospheric crime fiction, modern-day Ireland, and of course, her latest novel.

Molly Odintz: This is your first mystery to be a stand-alone (well, all of your books can be read as standalones, that’s part of the fun in them) but at least, your first to not be part of your Dublin Murder Squad series. How did the experience of writing the new book feel different? Why did you decide to step away from the police procedural lens?

Tana French: I never want to get caught in the trap of writing the same book over and over—and I think if you’re writing in the same genre, where the basic framework is fairly fixed, it’s dangerously easy to do. I wanted to try something different.

I’d looked at the process of a criminal investigation from a detective’s viewpoint six times, and I kept thinking about all the other people involved—witnesses, suspects, perpetrators, victims—and how different that process would look from their perspectives. A detective is completely at home with all the procedural stuff; he or she is the one driving it, controlling it; it’s a source of strength and power, a way of establishing order. But for all those other people involved, the investigation has to be something utterly alien, incomprehensible, and frightening; something that brings chaos rather than order, strips away agency and control rather than conferring it. I wanted to give a voice to those other perspectives, as well. Toby is, at various points in the book, all of them. My editor calls this ‘a murder mystery turned inside out’, and I think that’s a good description.

In a lot of ways this felt more like writing my first book, In the Woods, than like any of the others. With the ones in between, I was working in a setting—the Dublin Murder Squad—where I’d already laid down the boundaries and parameters; I went into each book already knowing something about its world, knowing there were certain things I could and couldn’t do. This one was uncharted territory; anything could happen. It was slightly scary and very exciting.

MO: Your latest is your most feminist crime novel yet! Although I feel like I say that about all of your books. We ran an article on the site by Liz Nugent where she drew a connection between the condition of women in Ireland growing up in the 1980s and the explosion of feminist crime writing coming out of Ireland right now. Where do you think the current wave of feminist crime writing stems from?

TF: I don’t actually think of this as a feminist book, or anyway not primarily. To a large extent it’s a book about how luck can stunt empathy—how, if you’ve drawn the high card in some area of life, it can be very hard to empathize with the experiences of people who’ve drawn lower cards, to accept that they’re living in a different world from yours and that their experience is as real as yours. Obviously that’s relevant from a gender angle, both in the book and in the real world (as the response to the MeToo movement showed, a lot of men have a very hard time taking in what a woman’s daily reality is like). But it’s relevant from an awful lot of other angles as well, and many of those—physical and mental health, social class, sexual orientation—play equally major roles in this book. I really don’t want to reduce the luck/empathy question to a feminist issue; that ignores the multiple interlaced ways in which it shapes our daily lives. Just about everyone has drawn a high card in some areas of life and a low card in others, and is dealing with this issue from both sides.

For much the same reasons, I’m kind of twitchy about discussing—or even defining—any book as feminist crime fiction. I agree with Liz Nugent that, for Irish women of my generation, the act of writing crime fiction has a feminist element of reclaiming our voices and illuminating the dark places, in the face of decades of being shamed and silenced—but I’m not convinced that makes the books themselves intrinsically feminist writing. A lot of the books I’ve seen described as ‘feminist’ seem to me to be about universal issues, dealt with through the experience of female characters. If I define that as intrinsically feminist, I’m defining the character as first and foremost a woman, rather than a human being, and I’m not comfortable doing that. If a book deals with a universal issue from a male character’s standpoint, we assume that it says something to and about all humanity; his gender only becomes a defining element of the discussion if he’s dealing with something that’s heavily male-specific. I’d like to reach the point where we approach female characters the same way.

I’m well aware I could be missing elements of this issue, though. The whole thing is complicated enough that I’d have to think about it a lot more (and I’ve thought about it a lot already) before I could discuss it in any intelligent way.

MO: You are so fantastic at representing mental confusion, and the reveals in your crime novels seem just as dependent on moments of mental clarity as new, physical evidence. What do you want to explore in regards to mental confusion, and what makes confusion such an effective device for intensifying a psychological thriller?

TF: I write—and read—mystery books because I’m fascinated by mysteries, of all kinds. And the human mind is one of the greatest mysteries of all. I think a lot of crime readers are the same: they’re reading these books not just because they want to find out whodunit, but because they want to come closer to understanding that great mystery. Obviously, there are plenty of mystery books that are at heart satisfying puzzles (take Agatha Christie), but there are more and more where the real locus of the mystery isn’t the crime scene but the main character’s head. So when you dial up the character’s confusion, you dial up the intensity of that core mystery.

In a lot of books—including many of mine—the confusion is primarily from an external source: the character is in a situation that puts pressure on his or her weak spots. In Witch Elm, though, I wanted to explore how the narrator’s and the reader’s relationship to that core mystery changes when the main source of confusion is internal, not external. Toby’s external situation is pretty headwrecking, sure—a skeleton has turned up in the back garden of his family home, he’s in the middle of a murder investigation—but that’s not the source of his confusion. It comes from his traumatic brain injury. His memory, his concentration and his organizational skills are all in fairly bad shape, and he’s suffering from post-traumatic stress, but the real problem is even more fundamental than that: his mind isn’t the same place it was a few months ago. He’s become a terrifying mystery to himself. The danger is inescapable, because it’s him.

MO: Your new book is basically a primer on gaslighting. Without giving anything away, what did you want to explore this time around in terms of deceptions, both self-deception, and the twisting of others’ perceptions?

TF: I wanted to explore gaslighting as a form of power. A lot of this book is about reality: what constitutes reality, how each person’s reality can be different, how our realities can transform or be shattered, and how we cope in the aftermath of those breakages and transformations. One facet of this is the ways in which people can shift one another’s reality—and what damage that can do. It’s a way of being the definer, and making other people into the defined.

Because Toby’s sense of reality is so battered and fragile, he’s very much at the mercy of other characters, and some of them take advantage of that. They manipulate his perceptions for their own purposes: to deflect suspicion, or to put pressure on other characters, or to find answers, or to ensure everyone’s safety, or for revenge. Some of those characters have been gaslighted (gaslit?) themselves at points in their lives when they were powerless, and it left them both damaged and furiously angry—and now that they have some form of power, they do the same thing to Toby. They’ve become the definers, and they’re making him—for the first time in his life—into the defined.

MO: You’re a master at the slow reveal and paradigm shift (especially in this latest!). What’s your writing trick? Are you a heavy outliner, or do you write scenes beginning from the end?

TF: Ha, I wish. I’m nowhere near organized enough for either of those. I start off each book with a strong sense of the narrator, a very basic premise, and a core location, and then dive in and hope there’s a book in there somewhere. I start roughly from the beginning, but I’ll also write scenes from later on in the book if they occur to me. I have no idea whodunit or how the book’s going to end. I think it’s because I come from an acting background, so for me, it’s all about character: plot comes out of character, not the other way around, and I have to write the characters for a while to figure out who would do what and why.

With this one, I had a strong sense of Toby as a cheerful, easy-going, happy-go-lucky guy, kind-hearted but oblivious. I had the basic premise: there’s a guy who’s been lucky all his life, in every way, until all of a sudden he isn’t any more—and then, when he’s reeling from the transformation in his reality, he finds himself in the middle of a murder investigation that makes him re-evaluate what the old reality actually was. And I had the core location, the Ivy House, a dilapidated, comfortable haven full of memories. All the rest, the paradigm shifts and the reveals, I discovered as I went along. This has its disadvantages—it makes for a lot of rewriting—but I hope it’s got its advantages too: those twists and shifts are startling and revelatory to me, so I hope some of that reaches the readers.

MO: Let’s talk about the witch elm itself. What a beautiful evocation of a haunted landscape, and what a truly weird looking tree. Which came first, the plot, or the tree, and is there a pagan imagery resonance that you wanted to bring up through its use?

TF: They are great-looking trees, aren’t they? The tree—and that element of the plot—came seventy-five years before the book. In 1943, four kids found the skeletonized remains of a woman in a wych elm in Hagley Wood, in England. In the years since, bits of graffiti asking ‘Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?’ have appeared sporadically in the area. The woman in the tree is still unidentified.

A couple of years back, when I was bouncing around ideas for a new book and thinking about that idea of a guy who had always been lucky and what that would do to his capacity for empathy, my brother sent me a link to the story of Bella in the Wych Elm, with a note that said ‘This sounds like a Tana French novel.’ For some reason, the two things clicked together in my head—maybe because I’m not really sure how to write a book without throwing a dead body in there to focus and drive the action. And you’re right, the pagan resonance worked for me. The wych elm—as Hugo mentions in the book—shows up in Greek mythology, growing at the entrance to the underworld. In a book where the narrator spends a fair amount of his time in a netherworld between life and death, either physically or psychologically or both, the wych elm felt like it fit right in.

MO: You frequently write from a male perspective, and craft your male protagonists in ways to immediately establish vulnerability, a choice which lets the reader’s empathy for the circumstances of the character keep them from tuning in to clues about the character’s bad behavior. What did you want to explore in your latest when it comes to male self-perception of vulnerability, and how it can blind readers to the character’s level of complicity?

TF: I make all my protagonists vulnerable, because that’s when the deepest and most intricate truths about people are laid bare. For Toby, though—unlike for most of my protagonists—vulnerability is a new and utterly shocking experience. Not only because he’s male, but because in every facet of his life so far, he’s been playing the game on the easiest difficulty setting: he’s white, straight, cis, physically and mentally healthy, from a well-off, stable, loving family, intelligent, good-looking, the whole lot. The idea of being vulnerable, not because of an external situation but because of who he is, feels horrifying and unnatural to him. We’ve all had that moment, the devastation and outrage when we realize that someone who has power over us is treating us as less than human simply because of what we are—but for people who haven’t been as lucky as Toby, there’s been some kind of preparation, there have been warnings that you’re innately in a vulnerable position in the world. I wanted to explore what happens in the wake of that moment, how we respond and rebuild when we can no longer see ourselves on the same footing with the world—and how Toby in particular responds, when nothing in his life or in the world around him has prepared him for this.

When it comes to the readers, what’s interesting to me isn’t so much how vulnerability can blind the reader to complicity as how vulnerability can allow the reader to see the intricacies around guilt and innocence. I’m a big believer in the immense importance of empathy. If we empathize with a character’s—or a person’s—vulnerabilities, it’s much harder for us to write him or her off as some two-dimensional bad guy, less than human on some level.

MO: And part two of that question: It seems like the mystery world is getting tired of the female-coded unreliable narrator, and I’ve been seeing more unreliable male narrators popping up this year. I want to attribute this at least partially to your influence: you frequently write from a male perspective and feature unreliable narrators in your works. What do you think about the rise of the unreliable narrator? Is there a need for more male-coded instability in crime fiction? What do we lose as a genre when we focus mostly on the stories of so-called “difficult women” at the expense of telling the narratives of difficult men?

I love unreliable narrators, and I would absolutely love to think I have even a tiny part in there being more of them around. They go to the heart of why the arts are so vitally important: a good book or play or painting or song lets us see the world, briefly, through someone else’s eyes. It brings home to us both that we’re not alone, that other people share our most intense and difficult emotions—and, paradoxically, that our reality isn’t the only one, that everyone else out there is real and experiencing the world in his or her unique way. And nothing does that with quite the same intensity as an unreliable narrator. We’re all unreliable narrators: we all unavoidably see only a certain amount of what’s going on, and then we filter it through our own interests and desires and fears and biases. So when a really well-written narrator is showing us only the skewed version of the truth that he or she is able to see, that’s when we’re most deeply immersed in him or her, and that’s when we reach the deepest understanding of that truth that other people are real too. We need unreliable narrators of every demographic, so we can experience that connection with a wide variety of realities.

I don’t think the unreliable male crime narrator is new, though. The original unreliable crime narrator—Dr Sheppard in Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd—is male. So is one of the all-time greats, Donna Tartt’s Richard Papen in The Secret History—supremely unstable, unreliable, vulnerable and difficult. I agree with you that they’re getting more common, but I think what’s changing isn’t so much the narrators as the genre parameters. Until recently, the story of a ‘difficult man’ was generally assumed to be literature, while the story of a ‘difficult woman’ was generally assumed to be genre or niche, and lesser. Now the boundaries between literature and genre are becoming more permeable; the assumption that genre is lesser is eroding—and so is the assumption that a woman’s story is lesser than a man’s. So there’s a lot more room for interplay and variation, and that’s enriching for all the genres and all the readers.