Book notes: Faithful Place, Tana French
Notes on the first completed item on my 2012 book challenge list. One down, 29 to go.
Good news first. Faithful Place is a superb police procedural. Smart, suspenseful, well-plotted, humane, the novel does exactly what it’s supposed to. What’s that? Oh, delineate law and justice and map those junctures where it becomes necessary to sacrifice one for the other. (I’ve read a lot of these detective fiction things.) Tana French has a great ear for dialogue and an eye for the details that make a contemporary working class Dublin neighborhood vivid and believable. In the street known as Faithful Place, belonging to the community and being a cop are mutually exclusive, which becomes the central dilemma tearing protagonist Frank Mackey to shreds.
An undercover specialist inured to moral ambiguity, Mackey played a bit part in French’s last novel. And he’s appealing enough, though not really that different from the other rueful, divorced-dad, borderline alcoholic cops on the contemporary fictional crime beat. Still, any master of the complex, literary-leaning police procedural subgenre—Ian Rankin, Elizabeth George, Peter Robinson, say—would be proud to claim authorship.
Ok, the not-so-good news. Its strict formalism makes Faithful Place kind of a let down. French’s two previous Dublin-based crime novels—In the Woods and The Likeness—are weird, wired and hell-bent on breaking rules. Woods’ denouement is one of the more inexplicable in recent fiction. French withholds the standard crime fiction trope of restoration, a return from chaos to some semblance of order. But that’s my favorite part of that book. And Likeness offers a massive mind-fuck of a setup: What happens when you go undercover to impersonate a doppelganger who’s been impersonating you (and has been murdered for her troubles)? The question isn’t so much who killed who than who is who. Or, is anyone really who they think they are? (Grammar fiends, go away.)
So whatever its merits, Faithful Place is a deviation from French’s usual deviant ways. Having bent previous plots into pretzels, she maybe wanted to prove that she can draw a straight line.
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