the place of secrets

She came looking for me. Most people stay arm's length away. A patchy murmur on the tip-line, Back in ’95 I saw, no name, click if you ask. A letter printed out and posted from the wrong town, paper and envelope dusted clean. If we want them, we have to go hunting. But her: she was the one who came for me.

Awww yeah that's good old French right into the vein, slide it in nice and slow....suddenly my day is brighter than ten thousand fucking suns. SMELL YOU LATER.

10% in: Moran: aww! Bit of a cautious lad. I like him. (But not like RICHIE, OMG, RICHIE, WHERE DID YOU GO. Broken Harbour fucken BROKE me.) And Holly! what a tough cookie. Daddy's girl indeed.

ANTOINETTE CONWAY JE T'ADORE. YOU BETTER NOT FUCK HER OVER, TANA.

....omg who am I kidding, it's a Tana French novel, everyone is going to get fucked over.

ETA: 35% in: Tana, if you partner up Moran and Antoinette the way you did Scorcher and Richie, and then shatter them apart the way you did Scorcher and Richie, I will never ever forgive you, I don't care how much of a kickarse writer you are. MY HEART CAN'T TAKE THAT AGAIN.

//reads on with enjoyable dread

40% in: all you people bitching about the "supernatural" element and how it's not supposed to be in a police procedural (including the "top" reviewer at GoodReads, who is a fucking idiot): you don't know how to read. It's always been there. It was there most strongly in the first book, In the Woods, yes, but, yes, it was also just there, in the last book, Broken Harbour. It's part of what French does. So if you're slagging off her for including that because it seems so unbelievable or uncharacteristic or out of key -- you're missing a lot.

(I had several paragraphs about Tana French on Goodreads and how she uses the supernatural -- I thought it was in a review of In the Woods -- but apparently not. argh. I really need to cut and paste all my GR reviews over here. And delete them there.)

I've got a pen, I've got a notebook, I'm good to go.

This also struck me, from the same interview (French was an actress before writing -- maybe that's why she can inhabit her characters with such scary completeness):

I love writing. I feel ridiculously lucky that this is what I get to do all day. I love acting, too, but this is the one that was working out. This is the one that not only pays the mortgage but also lets me work every day. With acting, you have to depend on somebody else to decide if you are allowed to work. You can spend weeks and months when you are not acting at all. With this, not only, my God, do I get paid to work every day, but even when I was not, I could still work every day. No one could stop me. I've got a pen, I've got a notebook, I'm good to go. That's a marvelous thing.

 I have to remember that. Nobody else gets to decide. Not Amazon, not Hachette, not Sonny Mehta, not David Remnick, not anyone. No one can really stop you.

(Except yourself. But that's a whole other battle. That's the important one -- Zelda Fitzgerald: "....when I can get the tranquility of spirit necessary to write the story of myself versus myself. That is the book I really want to write.")

empathy

I thought, I can't write these characters with the author's judgment being implied. I can't be going, "Who do you think you are?" or "I think this is shallow" or "I think this is superficial" or "You've got no morals." All of that is irrelevant because for these characters, that's not who they are. No one thinks they are shallow, superficial people with no moral center. They are doing these things for excellent reasons. It's my job to get to that reason and give that reason with all the power and punch I could.

The same applies to Scorcher. In his own mind, Scorcher is desperately killing himself to do things right. I thought, if I can get that, that he's not just this pompous git, that he has a reason for being what he is, and he puts passion into it, just as the Spains put passion into being who they are. Even though it may look as if they are just this wad of fake tan and Hugo Boss, they are putting the same passion and determination into that that Fiona is putting into the struggle of living on small wages and desperately trying to get a photography exhibition up and running. It just comes out differently.

If you are going to be on the artist's side of the fence, your job is to place a bit token in the jar of empathy. You don't get to abdicate that purely because you are dealing with people who in real life you find completely uninteresting. If I was going to write this book -- and the idea was there; it's not like I had another one -- it's my job to make sure that these characters had the space to make their argument. And I figured, if they did, if I did that with the respect that it deserves, that with any luck -- please God and touch wood! -- Scorcher would not turn out to be an obnoxious person to spend several hundred pages with and the Spains would not turn out to be unsympathetic victims. I have to say I have no clue if it worked.

- Tana French

And she succeeded brilliantly. It's a beautiful, heartbreaking book.

'they want to leave their stories behind'

But this is what I know about people getting ready to walk of the edge of their own lives: they want someone to know how they got there. Maybe they want to know that when they dissolve into earth and water, that last fragment will be saved, held in some corner of someone's mind; or maybe all they want is a chance to dump it pulsing and bloody into someone else's hands, so it won't weigh them down on the journey. They want to leave their stories behind. No one in all the world knows that better than I do.

― Tana French, Broken Harbor