It's a Family Thing

Just finished reading Tana French's Faithful Place. It is one of the most riveting novels I have read in a long time. Yes, it's a whodunnit, but it's also a story about life, about family, about relationships in general, and about how little mistakes made long ago can ripple down through generations. Young Frank Mackey and his girlfriend Rosie Daly are set to leave Faithful Place, a dead end street in one of Dublin's shabbier areas. They're going to go to London, going to get married, going to have a real life far away from the poverty, far away from their families and the chronic angers of Faithful Place. But Rosie never keeps their rendezvous, so Frank leaves on his own. With little else to do, he joins the Guards, becomes an undercover cop, and never returns to Faithful Place again. Twenty years later, workmen demolishing a derelict house on Faithful Place discover a suitcase stuffed behind a fireplace. It belongs to Rosie. And Frank is sucked back to the home he never wanted to see again and the family who hate him for leaving. With his now finely honed detective skills, it doesn't take Frank long to figure out what happened. Seems Rosie never made it to London after all. Never even made it out of Faithful Place. Her body is discovered in the basement of the demolished house. Now Frank must come to terms with not only his agonizingly hateful family, but also the fact that someone on the street where he once lived probably murdered the woman he once loved on the very night that they were to run away together. Before long, Frank's brother Kevin also ends up dead, and his 9-year-old daughter, Holly, is also sucked into the middle of this hideous crime, which has its roots in his family's twisted history.

I love cold case mysteries - the colder the better - and this is one of the best I've read since French's In the Woods. But while that earlier story left me unsatisfied - the central mystery is never resolved - Faithful Place delivers. Central to the mystery of who killed Rosie Daly and why is the story of Frank's and Rosie's own parents and the class prejudice that exists even within a class. The Dalys are poor, that's true, but the MacKeys are even poorer. I suppose in America we would call them "white trash." The Dalys look down on the MacKeys and always have, and the actions of these two families long before Rosie and Frank are born lead directly to Rosie's death, and - twenty years later - Kevin's as well. In the end, the murder involves sibling rivalry and resentment, the kind that is fostered in a dysfunctional, alcoholic family. And that's what Faithful Place is really all about in the end - family. Rosie's family. Frank's family. His struggle to get away from his family and all of its ugliness and anger. His family's struggle to pull him back into it. Because, while frank needs to escape in order to lead a normal life, the family needs him there in order to complete its perverse dynamic. It's a struggle that anyone who grew up in a dysfunctional family knows all too well. And it runs all through Faithful Place, from the dirty basement where Rosie lay hidden for twenty years to the pretty pink bedroom where Holly sleeps surrounded by the nightmare of it all.