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Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Book review: Faithful Place

10:28 AM / Reviews / No Comments

FAITHFUL PLACE by Tana French; Hachette Ireland; 2010; 448 pages

Tana French is an author with an amazing ability to choose exactly the right words to conjure up a particular mood. Although I found certain plot developments a little hard to swallow, I was majorly impressed by her second novel, THE LIKENESS, and immediately sought out its predecessor, IN THE WOODS, which turned out to be even better.

She also manages to keep her material fresh by, although setting each in the same fictionalised representation of Dublin, focusing on a different protagonist in each book. In THE LIKENESS, IN THE WOODS' protagonist, Rob Ryan, stepped aside in order for his detective partner Cassie Maddox to assume centre stage; in FAITHFUL PLACE, the focus shifts to Cassie's former boss, undercover detective Frank Mackey, a man with a deeply troubled past.

Twenty years ago, he and his girlfriend Rosie Daly planned to run away from Faithful Place, the underprivileged Dublin street where they were born and grew up, and start a new life in England. Rosie never showed up to their arranged meeting place and, thinking he had been jilted, left on his own and had no contact with his neighbours or his belligerent family... until he gets a phone call, telling him that Rosie's suitcase has been unearthed in a derelict house in Faithful Place. The discovery of the suitcase leads to the discovery of a young woman's body, and Frank reluctantly returns to the place in which he grew up to face his family, his past, and the truth about what happened to Rosie...

In a recent interview, French spoke about her desire for crime fiction to be taken seriously as literature rather than a red-headed stepchild, and this is very much apparent in her writing. FAITHFUL PLACE, like its two predecessors, tackles complicated but universal themes, in this case notions of roots, family and the extent to which these govern who we are. The central mystery (who killed Rosie Daly and why?) is, perhaps understandably, marketed as the focus of the novel, but in reality French's interests seem to lie primarily in Frank and his relationships with his family, in particular his parents, his moody older brother Shay, and his young daughter Holly.

The presence of the latter is somewhat problematic, for Frank's interactions with Holly prove to be a little too sickly-sweet. Writing young children is tricky: if you don't get the register just right, they won't be remotely believable. Make them too mature and they'll sound like worldly-wise mini-adults; don't make them mature enough and it'll seem as if they have learning difficulties. French's characterisation of Holly seems to veer between the two: at times, she seems unnaturally perceptive, while on other occasions she comes across as improbably dim.

The biggest flaw, however, comes in the form of the murder-mystery element. While it's clear that writing a paint-by-numbers whodunit is the last thing on French's mind, that doesn't excuse the glaring obviousness of the killer's identity (and is something that a writer like Denise Mina, who skilfully juggles both the thriller element and her chosen theme, would never allow). There are only ever two (or at most three) plausible suspects, and Frank latches on to the perpetrator when there's still a good 40% of the novel to go. Right until the end, I was expecting (and hoping for) a last-minute twist in which it was revealed that the actual killer was someone completely unexpected, but it didn't happen. With a whodunit, I like to either have the rugged pulled out from under my feet completely or at least work out the solution at roughly the same time as the protagonist. Neither happens here, and it means that the novel ultimately fails as a mystery, which is rather problematic as that's at least partly how it's marketed.

As for Frank himself, he lacks Cassie Maddox's quirky individuality, but he's considerably less self-pitying than Rob Ryan. He also has a dry sense of humour, which is always a good thing. The lack of any characters from the first two novels (apart from Frank and a pathologist who has appeared in all three) leads to FAITHFUL PLACE feeling rather disconnected from its predecessors (Frank was very much a tertiary character in THE LIKENESS, whereas Cassie was IN THE WOODS' most significant character after Rob), but that's not necessarily a criticism - more an observation. As with Cassie in THE LIKENESS, French uses Frank's promotion to centre stage to give him more depth: he was very much a cipher in the previous novel, a colourful character whose primary purpose was to move the plot forward.

And of course French writes beautifully. Her skill with prose is utterly enviable, and her grasp of the written word does succeed in papering over some of the elements that feel a bit thin - such as the aforementioned whodunit aspect. FAITHFUL PLACE may not be up to the standard of the author's previous two novels, and when all said and done it lacks their sense of quirky originality, but I still highly recommend it, and I now find myself eagerly anticipating her next novel... and hoping I won't have too long to wait.

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