Penguin
Review by Walter Cummins
Although Tana French has won awards for crime fiction and mystery/thrillers, including an Edgar, The Keeper is little like our expectation of a mystery novel. While its plot does include a number of major unknowns, they are only tangentially whodunit. Before the who becomes an issue of the what and the why. Was there even a crime? If so, why did it take place? Then the matter of what was done and by whom can be addressed. Although one of the central characters is a retired police officer, he does not apply his procedural skills to a solution. He functions as a member of a community, with developing involvement in seeking answers.
French’s detective story reputation comes from her Dublin Murder Squad series, which is representative of that genre. She uses a very different approach in The Keeper, the third novel of her Cal Hooper trilogy. It can be considered literary fiction with an embedded mystery.
More than focusing on murder and mystery, the novel explores the dynamics of a community, in this case the farming village of Ardnakelty in the Irish countryside. The many pages before a body is discovered establish the people of the village, primarily through their apparently playful banter that covers a troubling innuendo. That’s much more than establishing local color: “rumor is one of Ardnakelty’s primary weapons, the glinting flip side of its dark silences …” When there is an unknown, those interactions and the shifting relationships become French’s real concern The death that starts the chain of events is much more a catalyst than the center of formal detection. In fact, The Keeper is essentially a novel about the tensions among groups of people than it is about a committed crime.
The two central characters whom the story is told through are Cal Hooper, a former Chicago policeman who emigrated to Ireland, and Lena Dunne, born in the village with which she has a distant relationship. Cal is divorced and Lena widowed, and the locals assume they are engaged although they live apart. As the questions of what happened deepen, the novel separates the search for answers, Cal associating with the men and Lena with the women, developing connections with people she went to school with but never felt close to. A third group consists of the teenage friends of Trey Reddy, a once feral sixteen-year-old that Cal and Lena are nurturing. The young people serve as sources of information as they make things happen.
Each group explores their version of suspicions, assumptions, and accusations, occasionally sharing information but with differing immediate goals and strategies.
The novel has two primary flaws that would be more substantial if its real interest were detection rather than the development of personal relationships. The reason for Rachel Holohan’s death stretches credibility. Revealing it here would be a spoiler. But she is the girlfriend of the browbeaten son of Tommy Moynihan, a more significant character than Rachel and the story’s villain. Tommy, an affluent bully, runs a factory that provides the livelihood for many of the village’s residents, and as a result he has their loyalty. His connections give him power, and he is greedy for more money and control. The problem is that he is one-dimensional, cartoonish, and too easy to dislike. French is subtle in exploring the complexities of the other, much more complex characters. The unknowns around Rachel and Tommy seem devices to provide a problem that roils the villagers, sets off their conflicts, and tests fragile allegiances.
Those are the reasons why the novel is effectively troubling, as defined by this realization about their searching after Rachel’s death: “Lena drives out into the countryside and keeps driving for a long time. This is not, by a long shot, what she thought she was getting herself into. She knows the shapes secrets take, around here. They’re dark and jagged, dense enough to wear a hole right through you, but they’re small, confined things; they lack scale. This has scale.”
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