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Friday
In recent months I have been riveted by the mystery novels of Ireland’s Tana French, so much so that I scrutinized my responses to figure out why. I’ve concluded that it has to do with my anxieties over Trumpism.
Allow me to explain. The best mystery novels are much more than whodunits. Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes stories, for instance, tapped into the anxieties that Londoners were feeling about the chaos of urban living. Holmes descends from his cozy apartment into the streets, encounters a murder and a number of seemingly unrelated clues, and then returns to that apartment to explain to Watson the pattern connecting the clues. The new world may initially seem to defy our attempts to make sense of it but we are reassured by the end.
The Tana French novels have their own pattern. In all the ones I have read (spoilers ahead), the killer comes from a tight-knit community that he or she is afraid of losing. This fear is the motive for the violence that ensues. Although the outside forces that threaten the community may be bad, they are not as corrupt as those within.
Trump, of course, has risen to political prominence by playing on White America’s fear that “invaders” are desecrating its idealized vision of itself as Mayfield in the 1957-63 sitcom Leave it to Beaver. These invaders are variously seen as people of color, Muslims, Jews, LGBTQ+ folk, and even Democrats. Trump’s favorite poem—maybe the only poem he knows—captures the danger he sees:
On her way to work one morning
Down the path alongside the lake
A tender-hearted woman saw a poor half-frozen snake
His pretty colored skin had been all frosted with the dew
“Oh well,” she cried, “I’ll take you in and I’ll take care of you”
Now she clutched him to her bosom, “You’re so beautiful,” she cried
“But if I hadn’t brought you in by now you might have died”
Now she stroked his pretty skin and then she kissed and held him tight
But instead of saying thanks, that snake gave her a vicious bite
“I saved you,” cried that woman
“And you’ve bitten me, even why?
And you know your bite is poisonous and now I’m gonna die”
“Oh, shut up, silly woman,” said that reptile with a grin
“Now you knew darn well I was a snake before you brought me in.”
With Trump, of course, every attack is an inadvertent confession. While he and his fans think the poem is about brown-skinned people that we have allowed into the country, the real snake has been Trump himself. The nation took him into its highest office and he responded with a vicious bite.
Now look at the pattern in French’s novels.
In The Likeness, a tightly knit group of college friends—they’re almost incestuous–is infiltrated by an impostor, who wins their trust but whom they then kill when it turns out that she plans to betray them.
In The Faithful Place, the narrator seeks to escape his suffocating family and his suffocating community with his girlfriend, only to have her disappear on him. Years later he learns that she was killed by his brother, who resented how the narrator was leaving him to take care of the family.
In The Secret Place, a girl who is in love with her friendship group kills a boy that she sees threatening their unity.
In The Trespasser, the killer turns out to be in the police unit that is investigating a murder. In this instance, the tight community is the police force, and the rookie cops investigating it must confront the corruption of their superiors.
In The Hunter, a former Chicago police detective thinks he has found, in a seemingly idyllic Irish community, respite from a life of chasing murderers. Against his will, however, he is persuaded to investigate a disappearance and learns that his folksy neighbors—fearful that one of their own is bringing in a big city drug gang—have killed the man. The detective discovers who the killers are but decides not to expose them in order to preserve the community.
The Searcher, which involves the same detective, has a version of the same plot. Once again one of the community’s own brings in a crook, with whose aid he hopes to scam everyone out of their savings. The crook ends up dead and the local who brought him in is suspected of the murder and flees. The real murderer, another of the townspeople, is again allowed to escape justice.
I haven’t yet read In the Woods, Broken Harbor, or The Witch Elm.
In some ways, Tana French reminds me of Faulkner, describing a tight knit world that appears increasingly corrupt the deeper you look. That is how many of us were feeling about an America that could elect and possibly reelect Trump. As long as Americans seemed likely to propel this snake to the White House, French’s ambiance fit my prevailing mood.
Things don’t seem so dark at the moment. But, like French’s courageous and honest detectives, we need to keep fighting if we want a different ending.
