‘The Hunter’ defies rules of suspense writing
A glance, a grimace, a tightening of shoulders: Suspense is in the details — small details — scattered throughout Tana French’s new novel, “The Hunter.” These moments pile up until, in the novel’s stunning climax, the veneer of the mundane collapses, revealing the unthinkable that lies beneath.
“The Hunter” is the extraordinary sequel to “The Searcher” (2020), a novel that blindsided some of French’s longtime fans who were accustomed to the action of her Dublin Murder Squad police procedural series. (You need not have read “The Searcher” to appreciate “The Hunter,” though it helps.) Cal Hooper, the quiet hero French introduced in “The Searcher,” is a retired Chicago police detective who bought a derelict cottage in the west of Ireland precisely so he would never again have to chase down criminals or use his service weapon. He longed for what W.B. Yeats called “the peace (that) comes dropping slow” in the Irish countryside. What Cal should have known, however, is that evil doesn’t read the tourist brochures. The only thing that came “dropping slow” in “The Searcher” was Cal’s romantic illusion of rural life in Ireland.
The pacing of “The Searcher” was restrained, but the payoff was its slowly intensifying sinister atmosphere: Cal was always on alert, trying to decipher the meanings behind his new neighbors’ pleasantries that shaded into warnings. “The Hunter” takes place some three years later, and Cal has grown more deft at deciphering his neighbors’ doublespeak dialect. But nothing he’s learned can shield him from the pandemonium that breaks loose upon the return of Johnny Reddy, the absentee father of Trey, Cal’s now-15-year-old protégée and de facto child.
Trey has matured (somewhat) into a responsible teenager, though her resistance to the traditional gender roles that prevail in the village leaves her feeling isolated. In “The Searcher,” she approached Cal about finding her missing brother; the two forged a relationship and, these days, spend after-school hours together mending and reselling old furniture. Cal hopes that Trey’s burgeoning carpentry skills will offer her a shot at a better life, given that her mother and siblings live hand-to-mouth in a remote farmhouse. These hopes are threatened in the very first pages of “The Hunter” by the surprise reappearance of Johnny, a grifter whose ignorance of his own daughter is telegraphed by the fact that he insistently calls her Theresa.
Cal can’t figure out why Johnny, who has a history of backing up his boasts with nothing but hot air, would return home to Ardnakelty, “the one place where he can’t announce himself as anything other than what he is.” Soon enough, though, the outlines of a long con start to take shape: A rich man named Cillian Rushborough, whom Johnny met in a London pub, arrives in Ardnakelty, determined to find out if his Irish grandmother’s tales of gold buried in a riverbed are true.
Cal observes Johnny egging on the villagers to “leprechaun up” and cater to Rushborough’s Celtic fantasies. But the ultimate target of Johnny’s machinations remains murky to Cal, who must tread lightly lest he make an enemy of the man who still has parental rights over Trey. By the time he catches on, Cal realizes that justice may be trumped by tribal feeling.
“The Hunter” is a singularly tense and moody thriller, but it’s also an exceptional novel because of its structure. For most of its substantial length, the plot unfolds through conversations; conversations in which those “small details” I alluded to earlier hint at what’s going on, as well as what’s being covered up. Throughout the story, French’s omniscient narrator keeps up an aloof commentary on those conversations. The effect is somewhat akin to having the Stage Manager in “Our Town” transplanted to a picturesque village in Ireland, one that’s plagued by a preponderance of drug use, murders and the dry-tinder threat of long-suppressed rage.
In “The Hunter,” French violates more than her share of hallowed rules about writing in general (“show don’t tell”) and suspense writing in particular (“too much talk bogs down the plot”). By now, any reader who still thinks French should follow the rules doesn’t deserve her remarkable novels.