The Witch Elm Made Me Distrust My Own Memory

A charmed life, a family tree, and a very bad piece of luck

Toby Hennessy starts this book as the guy every friend group has one of: charming, a little smug about it, lucky in the specific way that makes him think luck is a personality trait. Good job, good girlfriend, good family, never really been tested. Then he interrupts a burglary in his own apartment and gets beaten half to death, and the Toby who wakes up in the hospital cannot fully trust his own brain anymore. Gaps. Missing words. A blankness where confidence used to live.

He goes to recover at the Ivy House, his family’s ancestral pile in Dublin, to help take care of his dying uncle Hugo, alongside his cousins Susanna and Leon. It’s cozy, almost too cozy, big Sunday dinners and childhood bedrooms and a garden with an old wych elm tree in it. Then a kid finds a skull stuffed in a hollow of that tree, and it turns out to belong to someone Toby actually knew, back when he and his cousins were teenagers running around that same garden. The rest of the book is Toby, and by extension us, trying to figure out what happened, while slowly realizing his own memory of those years might be the least reliable witness in the room.

The slow burn is the whole point, and also sometimes the problem

Here’s the thing about French as a prose stylist: she is genuinely one of the best sentence-level writers working in crime fiction, full stop. The way she builds Toby’s voice, self-satisfied, a little oblivious, quietly cruel in ways he doesn’t register about himself, is so controlled that you don’t notice you’re being set up until you’re two hundred pages in and realize you’ve been trusting a narrator who is actively unreliable in a way that has nothing to do with lying and everything to do with the actual architecture of his brain post-injury. That’s a genuinely upsetting thing to do to a reader, and I mean that as the highest compliment. The scene where Toby tries to recall a specific afternoon and just cannot, the memory sliding away from him like wet soap, made me put the book down and go check that my own memory of, I don’t know, last Tuesday, was intact. It rattled me on a level most thrillers don’t bother trying to reach.

And Hugo, the dying uncle, is one of French’s best minor characters. Gentle, funny, quietly the moral center of the book without a single scene where he announces it.

But I have to be honest: this book is slow. Not slow like “atmospheric,” slow like I checked how many pages were left more than once during the middle third. French takes her sweet time getting to the skull, and then takes even more time letting the investigation breathe, and if you came to this expecting the propulsion of In the Woods or The Likeness you might feel a little cheated. I love a slow burn. I did not always love this slow burn, and there’s a stretch in the middle where Toby’s self-pity starts to curdle into something closer to tedious, where I found myself thinking, not for the first time with French’s work, that a ruthless editor could have found forty pages to cut without losing a single thing that matters. I say that as someone who otherwise thinks she’s one of the best crime novelists alive. Not every book has to justify every page just because the author is talented.

The twist itself, when it lands, is genuinely upsetting rather than clever for clever’s sake, and I respect that more than I can fully explain without spoiling it. It’s not a gotcha. It’s a slow, sick recontextualizing of everything you thought you knew about this family, this garden, this “golden” cousin at the center of it. I did not see the full shape of it coming, and I read a lot of this genre.

The scariest thing this book argues isn’t that people lie to you. It’s that the story you tell about your own good nature might just be the one lie you never bothered to check.

About Tana French

Tana French is an American-born, Dublin-based novelist and trained actor, which honestly explains a lot about how she builds voice, because her narrators don’t just have opinions, they have cadences, tics, blind spots you can hear. She broke through with In the Woods in 2007 and built the loosely connected Dublin Murder Squad series, where each book hands the narrative baton to a different detective, before stepping fully outside that structure with The Witch Elm. She’s the rare crime writer whose books get reviewed in the same breath as literary fiction, and whose fans will fight about which of her books is the best one, which tells you something about the quality of the argument.

If this wrecked you, read these next

• In the Woods by Tana French, her debut, for the same dread and an even more infamous ending that people are still angry about.
• The Likeness by Tana French, if you want the unreliable-identity thing pushed even further into strange, hypnotic territory.
• The Secret History by Donna Tartt, for the same golden-group-of-friends-with-a-body-in-their-past energy, minus the amnesia angle.
• We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver, if what got you was the slow psychological unraveling more than the mystery plot itself.

If you want to grab a copy and see for yourself, here’s The Witch Elm on Amazon.

For your book club

1. Toby’s brain injury makes him a literally unreliable narrator. How did that change the way you trusted, or didn’t trust, everything he told you?
2. Do you think Toby was ever really the “good guy” he believed himself to be, even before the attack? What evidence does French plant early that we probably explained away?
3. How does the Ivy House itself function as a character? Would this story work in a different setting?
4. Hugo’s illness runs parallel to the mystery the whole book. What do you think French was doing by pairing a slow physical death with a slow psychological reckoning?
5. Did the ending feel earned to you, or did the pacing in the middle make the payoff harder to fully feel?