The Hunter by
It's a long hot summer in the small Irish town of Ardnakelty.
Everything is edgy. Then who should turn up but Johnny Reddy, notorious local
bad boy, who had abandoned his wife, Sheila, and children for the bright lights
of London. He has a money-making scheme to put to the untrusting locals…
‘Something that’d be good for
this place, he said. What the hell would that guy reckon would be good for a
place? A casino? An escort agency? A monorail?’
It’s obvious that no good will come of all this, and that
there are layers in the con trick, but it is very much up to the reader to try
to predict and enjoy the slow unpicking of the story.
The Hunter and its predecessor, The
Searcher, make more sense when you know that author Tana
French sees them as cowboy stories, set in the equivalent of the Wild West.
A frontier town with its own rules and sense of justice. Cal Hooper (an American)
is the outsider trying to make a home there, and make sense of the situation.
***It is not essential to have read the first book – here
on the blog - to enjoy this one, but the 2nd
one does spoiler some aspects of the first, so bear that in mind if you are
considering them.***
The first book showed his friendship with Trey, a young
local girl, now 15 – who is the daughter of Johnny Reddy, and not at all
delighted that he is home. Her mother and siblings live in poverty, out on the
mountain, out of favour with the town. The first book (in which Johnny didn’t
appear) dealt with Trey’s attempts to find out what happened to her older
brother Brendan. What she found out, with Cal’s help, was incomplete, and made
her very angry with the townspeople.
Johnny, his plan – which involves the possibility of gold
in local land – and the bad-for-farmers weather unsettle everyone. Johnny introduces
a London friend, Cillian Rushborough, who says his forebears came from the town,
and that he has passed-down information of interest.
So these layers of good and bad, who knows what, who trusts
whom, are very complex and make for very compelling reading and quite a few
surprises. Cal has a low-key partner, Lena, a local woman who tries to stay
aloof from the town, but whose sister runs the local shop and is at the centre
of all gossip.
Cal, Lena and Trey are all following their own hearts and
minds in this, sometimes with misunderstandings. The jeopardy is very clear and
quite concerning. The book seems to move
slowly at first, it’s a long time before anything major happens: exactly
half-way through someone is found dead. But the plot is twisting and turning
along throughout, and the picture of life in the town is entrancing.
Tana French excels in dialogue, which sings with
conviction, and it gets even better when she has multiple-person conversations,
especially in the shop or, even more so, Sean Og’s bar, hilarious, pointed,
conveying information, and making you feel you are there in the pub with them.
I said about the first book in this series ‘She describes a hard evening’s drinking almost in real time
and you feel you lived through it with them’.
Mart Lavin, Cal’s neighbour, is a tremendous character:
funny and delightful, but with a hard centre, not to be underestimated, and up
with modern ways:
‘Are you one of them
influencers on the side? Are you on the TikTok shaking yourself to Rihanna? I’d
watch that.’
‘I’ll get right on it,’ Cal
says. ‘Soon as I can find a black leather dress that fits.’
Mart represents the town to Cal: dripping information and news
of attitudes and suggestions when he thinks the time is right.
And the townspeople know what they are up to with the new visitor:
He’s seen these guys
leprechaun up before, at innocent tourists who were proud of themselves for
finding a quaint authentic Irish pub that wasn’t in any of the guidebooks.
- - but Cal wonders who is fooling whom.
It IS like a Western,
a John Ford one (note the name of the first book), or Shane.
(there is also a fake engagement in it, which pops up twice in
Margery Allingham books –
which French’s do not otherwise resemble)
I preferred French’s urban books, particularly ones set in
Dublin, and in general am fairly immune to writing about nature and landscapes,
but French breaks through that:
They lean on the wall,
watching, as the rain flecks their skin more thickly and the bright outline of
the mountains hangs in the night sky.
One thing that has to be faced is the relationship between
Cal and Trey. It is quite clear that the author (and it is her sayso) makes it
completely innocent with no hint of anything wrong: he is something of a
surrogate father. But even Cal says that if his own, now grown-up, daughter ‘was
hanging around some middle-aged guy when she was that age, I wouldn’t’ve been
nice to him. I’d a punched his lights out.’
I discussed this with another keen reader of French, who
felt it was done perfectly convincingly: she had no qualms, and thought it was
good to have such a well-drawn, unusual teenager in a book. Whereas it gives me
a slight discomfort, because you would have to take a very cool view of the
relationship in real life. (French insists that Trey has friends her own age,
but they are only mentioned in a distant sort of way, they never appear or are
named.)
One of the few things that I don’t like in the book is a
macho romantic tweeness: Cal calls Trey ‘Kid’ all the time, and is teaching her
his code of manners and morals (‘when it comes to his code, Cal is inflexible’).
Cal insists that Trey calls his friend ‘Miss Lena’, and it is a given that Cal,
an ex-cop, is a perfect judge of people, he has seen everything, he has the
measure of everyone, he’s seen it all before. French is not shy about telling
you what to think. So we’ll take it that this is all part of the Western ethos,
and let it go by, along with the unlikely friendship.
In the end, French is an exceptional writer and plotter, with wonderul characters and dialogue, and this book is well worth reading – I have read it twice.
Enthusiastic posts on most of her other books are all over
the blog – click the Tana French tag below.
All the photographs were taken in Ireland by
my favourite photographer, Denise Perry. The best way in
to her work is via her Instagram feed Denise Perry
(@dhellphotography) • Instagram photos and videos
(I used her photos of Italian life to illustrate Amanda
Craig’s The Three Graces, here)
Rich characters, layered plot, strong sense of place - yup, that's Tana French. This story sounds quite rich, as her stories tend to be, and I think it's interesting that she sees this as a sort of Western story. I see the resemblance, really.
ReplyDeletethanks Margot - it's such an interesting aspect isn't it? And she's an author we can believe in.
DeleteI think her Dublin books are much better than the others (especially the first three). The Searcher was disappointing to me because Cal did not seem remotely American. I think I assumed she did it so he would have no resources to investigate the locals but there surely were other ways she could have done that. I suppose the resemblance to a Western is Cal being the newcomer to a town that is entrenched in its ways and does not want interference. Now that I think of it, I've never actually read a Western! Also, it is mostly people from the south, not Chicago, who suggest the honorific "Miss" but I suppose it is plausible.
ReplyDeleteYes, in the end I just like urban settings on the whole, and I think French does them so well. But I love her writing so much I will go along with whatever she does.
DeleteThe Western ethos and unlikely friendship made me think of "True Grit" although Cal doesn't sound much like Rooster Cogburn.
ReplyDeleteYes, good comparison for that relationship, though you are right about Cal vs Cogburn!
Delete