Faithful Place

The Irish are just more dramatic than the rest of us. Whether fighting for survival against the English, or blighted potatoes, or judges sending them to Van Dieman’s Land, they always seem to retain their lyrical, almost whimsical take on life. Music, words, and drink epitomize the Irish approach, as U2, James Joyce, and Yeats have shown us.

“Faithful Place: A Novel”, by Tana French, is unapologetically Irish. A detective novel, set in near-contemporary Dublin, “Faithful Place” mixes all the key Irish ingredients into a grand and tightly woven little story which nonetheless strikes an epic pose.

Ms. French has been chronicling Irish life through the work of the Guards, or Dublin police. Unlike many writers in this genre, she moves from one detective to another, instead of following one gumshoe over multiple books. Francis Mackey, an undercover cop who has outlived his ability to move within the criminal underworld, carries the  mantle in this edition.

But Mackey is not the investigator, seeking whodunit and whyhedunit. The murders start falling all around him, amongst his closest kith and kin. He grew up in the “Liberties” a section of town not noted for its high achievers or love for police. His Pa is a violent drinking man, more than willing to lay a fist on his five children and wife. The two oldest, Shane and Carmel tried to protect the younger Frank, Kevin and Jackie.

Frank felt ashamed by his family, to the point where he had to sneak around as a teen to meet with his true love, Rosie Daly. Together, they had planned to elope to England, and enter the music business there. But on the night they chose to leave, Rosie never showed, and Frank never went back home, choosing to start his life anew elsewhere in the lower dregs of town.

Eventually, he became a respectable police detective, married a prosecuting attorney, had a daughter, and divorced. For 22 years, his only contact with the old Place has been his youngest sibling, his sister Jackie. One day she calls, and says that Rose’s suitcase, packed still with the ferry tickets to England, has been found.

The action all takes place within less than two weeks before Christmas, and is interspersed with vivid flashbacks of Mackey’s life just before he had Rose appeared to pass each other in the dark.

The appeal of this novel is not in the detective story itself, although there are the requisite twists, red herrings, and building denouement. Rather, this is truly a novel, which carries one forward on the strength of French’s writing talent.

I was mesmerized by the stellar skill she brings to a number of elements ancillary to her story. We learn in great depth and heart-rending realism how the Mackey’s both hurt and loved each other, with great tragedy lurking behind what seems to be powerful filial love.

The language of the characters is uncompromisingly Irish – at times, I wish I had sub-titles, as one might use for one of those truly British films, where the actors can’t be understood not so much for their accent, but for their use of a foreign idiom. The words are the same, but carry different meanings: “only”, “fair play” “gone” “eejit” and others all befuddled me for more than half the book, but gradually, I learned the lingo, and could inhabit their world.

Family, character, language, and place are where Tana French shows her skill, wrapping these key elements of a novel with a gripping and page-turning tale of murder, both cold-case and immediate. Dublin, in all its rain, fog, and concrete rolling hills, abandoned mills, and feebly gentrifying cul-de-sacs, plays a key role in setting the atmosphere, just as early U2 songs are so clearly from the same time and place as Rosie Daly and Francis Mackey.

Just a taste of this: the book starts as Mackey waits for Rose “in the shadows outside the foggy yellow circle of lamplight. The air was cold as glass, with a savory burnt edge from the hops up at Guinness’s…I heard the bells of the city chime for midnight, Christchurch, St. Pat’s, St. Michan’s, huge round notes tumbling down from the sky like a celebration …”

And finishes with Mackey remembering the first time he and Rose were alone together: “The summer stretch had come into the evenings: it was gone seven, but the sky was a soft clear blue and the light flooding through the open windows was pale gold. All around us the Place was humming like a beehive, shimmering with a hundred different stories unfolding.”

Tana French brings those shimmering stories to life, in a very specific place and time, with a careful attention to the quality of people being human, not caricatures, just trying to live the life they’re given.