The Searcher by Tana French
Author of the Dublin Murder Squad novels, Tana French, is now, in last few years, getting the wider attention she deserves. And not just from crime fiction devotees. I would suggest, for instance, that Sally Rooney fans would find a great deal to enjoy in French’s 2018 novel, The Wych Elm. The protagonist in that, Toby Hennessy, would fit quite comfortably (or perhaps, uncomfortably for them) in the social milieu of Normal People’s Connell and Marianne. Or, the many who thought Donna Tartt’s The Secret History a great read would find a lot to like in 2010’s The Likeness. For those who might be concerned that her work sounds more ‘literary’ than ‘genre’ will be re-assured by The Trespasser, a police procedural with a complex female protagonist, along the lines of Lynda La Plante’s Jane Tennison. In this 2016 Dublin Murder Squad story, the focus is on Detective Antoinette Conway and the plot is propelled, masterfully, by a series of set-piece police interviews.
The Searcher is her eighth novel and her second one away from the Dublin Murder Squad series. It is also her first one situated outside Dublin.
I was only a few pages into The Searcher when I thought, ‘Aha! The Quiet Man’, the 1952 film directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. There are a number of parallels between The Searcher and that film to be found here. A bit of, unavoidable, lateral thinking leads to the American Western, also directed by John Ford, 1956’s The Searchers, again starring John Wayne. Unlike The Quiet Man there isn’t much correspondence, excepting the title, with French’s novel. The Searchers being a western, however, does have some bearing. In an afterward in the edition of the novel I read, French goes into how much the genre of American Westerns, and its heroes, influenced her. And, something I will touch upon later, the persona of John Wayne has resonance here.
Cal Hooper is looking for a new life. His old life has come apart at the seams. He’s gone through a divorce; the breakdown of his marriage has taken him by surprise and he still hasn’t come to terms with it. His long distant relationship with his adult daughter is, at best, awkward. And after a twenty-five year career in the Chicago police force, he has retired. A career in which he had risen to the position of detective and that he was good at and, importantly to the story, had stayed, relatively, clean and un-corrupted. The decision to leave is precipitated by an incident involving another detective, something that has brought on an existential crisis. This, along with the failure of his marriage and the estrangement with his daughter, has shaken his understanding of himself and the ‘code’ he has heretofore relied on.
Like a wounded animal, he has dragged himself off to a secluded spot to recover or perish.
Cal stays put. They look out the window, side by side. ‘It’s beautiful,’ he says.
‘It’s small,’ Lena says, ‘Awful small.’
…
‘That’s what I came looking for,’ he says. ‘A small place. A small town in a small country. It seemed like that would be easier to make sense of. Guess I might’ve had that wrong.’
That secluded spot, chosen almost at random, is the small village of Ardnakelty in the West of Ireland, where Cal has acquired a somewhat dilapidated cottage on its outskirts. He is, initially, charmed by the beauty of the landscape and the charm of the local inhabitants. A charm that is right out of a tourist board pamphlet. There are the wry old bachelor farmers, epitomized by his near neighbour, Mart, full of ‘Arrah, you’ll be grand’s’, ‘Aul fellas’, ‘feckin’ this and that and ‘yoke’ as a general all-purpose noun for both the animate and inanimate. There’s Noreen, the proprietor of the local shop, who’s the beating gossip heart of village. There’s Ardnakelty’s one pub, Seán Óg’s, where the reader can practically smell the smoke from a badly drawing peat fire rising off the page.
Having spent a childhood in rural North Carolina, you wouldn’t credit Cal falling for all this folksy business. He himself is not above laying on the ‘Forrest Gump’ dumb hick from the sticks shtick when it suits his purposes. One gets the sense that while he might suspect that some of the locals are likely having him on for their own reasons, he so wants the simplicity all that ‘begorrah’ and ‘bejaysus’-ing implies, that he’s willing to suspend disbelief.
All is not as it first seems in Ardnakelty and Cal’s plan to find some kind of peace in his life fixing his house up and doing a bit of fishing, is soon interrupted by young Trey. The kid’s big brother, Brendan, has gone missing and nobody in the village, excepting Trey, is overly bothered by this turn of events. Word has got around that Cal was a cop in the States and Trey having seen enough American TV crime dramas, figures who better to find Brendan. Cal, against his better judgement, is drawn further and further into what is an increasingly mysterious disappearance.
This decision to get involved is driven by his personal code of conduct. The importance of this ‘moral code’ to Cal, and the grief it has caused him, brings us back to John Wayne.
Much has been made of late around the concept of ‘toxic masculinity’. Stoicism and the recourse to violence to mete out justice are posited as aspects of this syndrome.
This attitude can be summed up, if rather gnomic-ally, in the line, ‘A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.’ This bit of, supposed, film dialogue is attributed, erroneously it turns out, to John Wayne. It does, however, appear in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which is ironic given the degree of divergence that writer’s ethos has from John Ford and Wayne’s. Be that as it may, we can’t read that line without hearing Wayne’s laconic drawl, and he had dialogue in several of his films that ran pretty close to it.
To those people who subscribe to the sentiment, just what it is that ‘a man does when he has to do it’ would seem to be ‘crystal-clear’.
Except, when pressed, the comfortable heuristic reductivism of this ‘philosophy’ becomes a bit tricky to explicate. The notion that there is an innate knowledge of right and wrong, that a ‘good’ man instinctively knows evil when it appears and has the character and courage to see that it’s punished whatever to cost to himself, begins to break down when confronted, again and again, by life’s messy relativism.
Cal has lived all his life by this Manichean black and white outlook and is now being forced to count the damage. It’s beginning to dawn on him that perhaps he might want to reconsider his commitment to this ‘code’:
‘Over the last few years it’s been brought home to him that the boundaries between morals, manners and etiquette, which have always seemed crystal-clear to him, may not look the same to everyone else’
…
‘Well,’ Cal says, ‘I got my code.’
‘You don’t ever break it?’
‘If you don’t have your code,’ Cal says, ‘you’ve got nothing to hold you down. You just drift any way things blow you.’
‘What’s your code?’
‘Kid,’ Cal says, with a sudden surge of weariness, ‘you don’t want to listen to me about this stuff.’
‘How come?’
‘You don’t want to listen to anyone about this stuff. You gotta come up with your own code.’
‘But what’s yours?’
‘I just try to do right by people,’ Cal says. ‘Is all.’
Tana French writes crime fiction, mysteries, stories about murders solved and, perhaps, the murderer brought to justice. But at the heart of her novels, she has her protagonists confronting a bigger mystery than ‘who dunnit’ and that is the mystery of their own nature and motivations.
Fans of Tana French would also enjoy reading British author Belinda Bauer, whose ‘crime’ novels likewise come at the genre from a different angle.
The Searcher was published 6 October 2020 by Penguin and available hard cover in the UK for £14.99 and $27.00 in the USA.
The paperback edition’s publication date has not yet been announced but would expect it to be late summer or autumn 2021.