The book starts with Toby getting beaten up in a way that has serious consequences - brain damage, PTSD.

LM: In a lot of ways, The Witch Elm is about ableism. If we’ve been too lucky in one area of life, that can stunt our ability to empathize with people who haven’t been that lucky. I started thinking: What about somebody who’s been lucky in every possible way there is? Here’s a guy who’s white, male, straight, cisgender, from an affluent family, from a loving, stable family, physically and mentally healthy - what would that do with his ability to empathize with people who haven’t been that lucky, and to accept that they’re living in a completely different reality from his, and their experience is still real. That kind of inability to empathize with something outside our frame of reference spreads across a whole lot of categories. Of course, I grew up and copped onto myself, and realized that I needed to shut up and listen.

For example, I was lucky in that I had a pretty happy, loved childhood, and that meant that growing up, when I was a teenager, if somebody told me about having a terrible childhood, there was a part of me that was going, “Surely it can’t have been quite that bad! They’ve got to be exaggerating a bit.” It wasn’t that I didn’t believe the person, but it was so far outside my frame of reference that I couldn’t quite take it on as a reality. If we’ve been too lucky in one area of life, that can stunt our ability to empathize with people who haven’t been that lucky. Tana French: Mainly, I was thinking about the connection between luck and empathy. Lily Meyer: What was the first spark of The Witch Elm? Did it begin as a novel about privilege or luck? I spoke to French via Skype about people who are too lucky for their own good, how we can all learn to see our own privilege, and what happens when you find a skull in a tree. It’s as gripping as it is thought-provoking, as intelligent a novel as I’ve read in years. Tana French’s first stand-alone novel (her others have been part of a series about Dublin murder detectives), The Witch Elm combines questions of luck, privilege, guilt, and responsibility with a murder investigation, a big heap of family drama, and crystal-clear Irish prose.

He’s in the middle of a murder investigation, and he’s far from ready to cope. He expects the Ivy House to be idyllic, but in this way, too, his luck has run out. Toby goes to recuperate at the Ivy House, the family home where he spent summers with his uncle Hugo and cousins Leon and Susanna.

The wych elm book review