I had been wondering why my aunts had quit leaving me voicemails, why my cousin’s texts had dried up. I had figured, with a hot scraped soreness, that it was because they were sick of me not answering and had decided not to bother anymore. It came as a shock, cut with a bit of shame and a bit of outrage, to realise that it had been nothing to do with me.
Tana French, The Wych Elm.
Tana French is a compelling writer. Even when she appears to be casually laying out her characters, speaking in the aside, she is all too knowing about the human condition.
In this extract, the first-person narrator admits to a contradictory disappointment surrounding his perceived abandonment by ‘his aunts’ and ‘cousins’. The narrator admits that actually their preoccupation emanated from something ‘nothing to do with me.’ Human beings do tend to believe themselves the centre of their universe and the vivid metaphor involving a ‘hot scraped soreness’ captures the visceral reality of our own egotism. It feels as if the selfishness of the narrator has received a reprimand from the world beyond himself.
The revelation with its contradictory, ‘shame and a bit of outrage’ perfectly expresses the emotional competition between one human reaction and another. Interestingly the emotional options are polarised from each other. I love the way French perfectly captures our tendency to prioritise ourselves and believe everything is about ourselves.
It is also interesting that the narrator’s evocation of his feelings utilises adjectives like ‘scarped’ and verbs like ‘ cut’ that capture a sense of (latent) violence and disturbance consciously/unconsciously echoing the physically damaged predicament of the narrator/protagonist.
I also love the cadences of Tana French’s writing. We can hear the rhythm of the speaker’s thoughts and the bathos: disappointed, peeved yet ashamed, that he is not the most important character in his relatives’ world. In fact, as we read on, his Uncle Hugo with his terminal diagnosis has usurped him for compassion. and the narrator’s life is about to shift irrevocably in a new direction.
