All of a sudden he has that sensation he kept getting, back when Trey was an unknown quantity and Cal was deciding what to do about him: an intense awareness of the spread of the dark countryside all around his house; a sense of being surrounded by a vast invisible web, where one wrong touch could shake things so far distant he hasn’t even spotted them. [loc. 1436]
A stranger comes to town ... Cal Hooper was born in North Carolina and served for a quarter of a century in the Chicago police force before taking early retirement and emigrating to Ardnakelty, a small village in the west of Ireland. He wants peace and quiet, and the soft-focus loveliness promised by the Irish Tourist Board: instead, he encounters a complex and shuttered community, and Trey, a teenager who's desperate to learn the fate of beloved older brother Brendan.
Cal realises that if he doesn't help Trey, nobody will, and he starts asking questions about Brendan's disappearance. It quickly becomes apparent that the Irish Tourist Board has elided some key aspects of rural life in Ireland: feuds, poverty, criminal enterprise. The gardai are, in different ways, as corrupt and prejudiced as the police force from which Cal took early retirement: and his core belief, that truth and justice matter more than anything else -- a belief which contributed to estrangement from his family, though Cal is still not sure how that happened -- is profoundly shaken.
French is one of my favourite authors: this may be my least favourite of her books. That's at least partially because of my own expectations, based on prior novels. The Searcher is told in third person, not in first, which robs it of some (though not all) intimacy. The setting is rural, and the folk he encounters have long memories: little resemblance to the city bustle and shifting allegiances of the Dublin Murder Squad. And I kept waiting for the weirdness: and, unless you count one character's riff about sheep-mutilating aliens in UFOs, there was none.
Once I acknowledged and set aside my expectations, I could focus on the creeping sense of threat; the restraint with which French describes the unspoken undercurrents of a night at the pub; the descriptions of Cal's loving manual work on the decrepit house he's bought; the rich atmosphere of the Irish countryside, its air 'rich as fruitcake, like you should do more with it than just breathe it'; the ominous flocking of crows. It's fascinating to see Cal trying to conduct an investigation without either the tools of his trade or the status of the badge he resigned. And, though on the face of it Cal is more privileged than Trey, or Brendan, could ever aspire to become, he's very much an outsider. ... Perhaps that's where I felt the dissonance between this and previous works: French's other novels frequently feature an insider discovering secrets within their community, their family or even their own mind.
Vivid secondary characters (I especially liked Mart, the neighbour who somehow manipulates Cal into buying him biscuits, and whose ignorance is almost a caricature); marvellous prose; a powerful story about masculinity and community in fast-changing times, and about justice in its various forms. Yet I'm not sure I'll come back to this one, at least for a while.
Thanks to NetGalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this honest review. UK Publication Date: 05NOV20
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