By Kohinoor Dasgupta
(Published on July 2, 2010 in my weblog Draupadiarjun)
Thirty-seven-year-old Irish writer Tana French won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel for her 2007 novel In the Woods.
Her second novel was The Likeness, published in 2008.
Faithful Place, her third, comes out in this month (July 2010).
We met Detective Cassie Maddox in In the Woods. The Likeness is about an undercover job that Cassie takes on. The body of Lexie Madison, a young woman who was a deadringer for Cassie, is found in an isolated cottage in Wicklow outside Glenskehy village. Suspicion falls on Lexie’s housemates — who are also her Eng. Lit. post-graduate batchmates at Trinity College, Dublin — and Cassie inserts herself into the home Lexie had shared with them, pretending to be Lexie back from the dead.
Tana French trained as an actress at Trinity College, Dublin. She has lived in Dublin since 1990. The author note on her books says that she has also lived in Italy, USA and Malawi. Authors and actors get their ozone from role-play. Add to this French’s own nurture in different worlds and the characters of Cassie and Lexie tingle with the drama of real role-play. Most detective fiction writers would give an arm and a leg to test their skill at psychological fiction by creating such a locked-room situation.
Even the greatest fan of French would find something childish and contrived about how the undercover "operation” was worked in the novel. The treetop phone-ins, the medical angle of a person supposedly just out of a coma (after what she presumably thought was a random stabbing attack) acting so vigorously unjittery about her nightly rambles, even the fearless Lexie, do not entirely please. Equally, it is implausible that the gang has not discovered the diary in its rather obvious hiding place, even after the cops endlessly prodded or that Daniel or someone else did not succumb to suspicion or anxiety or survival instinct and take a harder look at Cassie and her behavior. It is possible, of course, that they really, really wanted to believe that it was Lexie come back. It would have been infinitely creepier had they nosed around or followed Cassie on her "walks”, but that would have deprived us of the rich fare of psychological unraveling that is instead served up.
The Likeness cannot be missed, however. French is one gorgeous weaver of words and the locked room she creates is fascinating. The characters on whom she trains her torch are caught skittering in the dark woods. They are real enough — and the unreal worlds of Lexie and Cassie, and also of Daniel’s utopia flirt dangerously with real threats and real temptations. Missed Rob, though. Hope he returns.
It is an interesting novel, in which the house is also a character. The fivesome constructed a somewhat-paradise, beautiful, fantastic and on a foundation of buried pasts. It was the question of the future that was the intruder. Cassie-Lexie lived for a while in the somewhat-paradise. How can a moonlit night and midnight revelry remind you of a tragic Midsummer Night’s Dream and Picnic at Hanging Rocks? But they do, they do.
Power there is in the writing, but you wish French would push the envelope more and more and not, like Cassie, fall in love with shadows. Murder is ugly.
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