My only worry on starting this one was reading it too quickly – her prose is so lyrical and rich that it’s nearly impossible to stop once I’ve started. I seriously wondered whether I’d be able to sip or if I’d be forced – again – to drink deeply until the cup ran dry. Turns out not much sipping went on.
I ended up enjoying this one at least as much as her others, which is strange to me since, as I was reading through the early chapters, I remember thinking to myself that her prose wasn’t quite so lyrical, wasn’t prompting me to capture all the quotes I usually grab from her – noticing all of this, by the way, without it diminishing my total submersion into the story.
Before too long, though, the magic started seeping in – so much so that (like all good writing) I forgot I was reading, and forgot to collect those dark and shiny quotes as often as I’d done before; they were too good, too perfect for me to pause and clip them away from the whole pattern. It would have taken me out of the story.
With “The Secret Place,” Tana French mines some familiar territory, and handles it as deftly as she has before. The dynamics between friends – real, true, forever friends – was definitely the main reason I was so utterly captured by “The Likeness,” her second novel but the first of hers that I read. (After that I immediately went back and read the first, “In the Woods,” and was then forced to wait the several years between those and each of the next three.) The effortless closeness of the college students in “Likeness” reminded me of the few close fiends I’d had during that time, how bonds like that are forged, and sometimes broken.
In “The Secret Place,” French goes back even further, to a group of early teenaged girls boarding at an elite Irish school in the heart of Dublin. She focuses on two distinct groups, each with their tidal pulls and pushes, each their reasons for attracting and repelling others. The obnoxious group, not-so-fondly referred to by the main four as The Daleks, are all of the worst stereotypes of teenage girls rolled into four distinct personalities: the ringleader is someone you would cheerfully smack in the face every time she crossed your path; her minions are, for the most part, simpering hangers-on who put up with her awfulness mainly for fear of not being one of her inner circle. Despicable, all.
The main group, though, represents everything I remember as being strong, magical, impermeable about true friendship, while painting a much more relatable picture of what teenage girls can be and do and represent. Fierce loyalty, innate intelligence, soaring imaginations, insular senses of shared humor, profound empathy – all described beautifully and believably, as French so often does. Having had a hand in raising two teenaged girls, still witnessing their own growth and that of their friends, I’m glad to say that although I recognized some Dalek behavior in some of their acquaintances, if any were lucky enough to make it to true friendship status they were always more like the “good four” seen here than the bad ones. Still are, like attracting like the way it does.
I won’t spoil the discovery by rehashing the blurb – the short description and my familiarity with the author’s canon were more than enough to tease me into starting it – except to say that The Secret Place, like most of her titles, represents more than just one spot, and that – like all secrets – they bond the knowers together, like it or not.
I like the way she alternates between the girls’ perspective and the investigating officers from the Dublin Murder Squad. (All of French’s novels have so far featured different members of the Squad, usually with little overlap. All can be read as standalone stories and out of order, if necessary, without loss. This is the fifth in the series.) That back and forth in time and perspective, as well as a very creepy countdown that occurs in one of the two paths, reminded me of Stephen King’s totally effective use of a similar device in “It.” Like that one, as the novel gains momentum and suspense I found myself hating to leave one of the threads to return to the other only to feel the same way when that chapter ended and I was back on the first track. Continuing that model past what most may see as the “traditional” denouement was a bold and brilliant choice, and provided me with one of the most evocative and emotional scenes (of many) in the book, one that not only tied up and retstated some of the main themes, but which delivered its various epiphanies in such a gorgeous way that I had to pause and appreciate and remember how that had felt in my own story.
The juxtaposition of the deep friendship of the main girls with the unfamiliarity of the main two cops was also executed beautifully. Their differences in style and behavior were legion, but seeing them begin to develop some of the same signals and marks of friendship exhibited by the girls was beautiful, and masterfully done.
I also loved hearing the lilting pronunciations and flip-flopped sentence structure of the very Irish dialog as I read it. That and the just-right dashes of local slang thrown into the mix made the characters all the more believable, yeah?
Having said that I missed out on some of the better quotes at the beginning, in looking I found that I saved more than I remembered. Here are a few of my favorite lines, to give you just a taste of the power of Tana French’s paintbrush pen:
“… a sudden blond smiling afternoon that popped its head up in the middle of a string of hovering wet days.”
“The moon catches flashes of light and snippets of color strewn through the bushes, like a crop of sweets in a witch’s garden.”
“She’s sitting up with her arms clasped round her knees and her face tilted up to the sky. The moonlight hits her full on, burning her out to something you can only half see, a ghost or a saint. She looks like she’s praying. Maybe she is.”
“None of them say anything. They keep their eyes closed. They lie still and feel the world change shape around them and inside them, feel the boundaries set solid; feel the wild left outside, to prowl perimeters till it thins into something imagined, something forgotten.”
I won’t spoil any more – there are a couple of surprises that are simply too good to reveal, even elliptically.
Well worth your time if you appreciate strong tales well told, and if your heart may need a jump start to remind it of how you once saw the world and all of its possibilities.
Sound and Vision 