Fables of Foreclosure: Tana French's Police Procedurals of Recessionary Ireland
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Jean Gregorek
Canisius College
Much has changed in popular crime fiction of the British isles since its Golden Age. Class, traditionally a guide to moral worth and the capacity for higher reason in this quintessentially bourgeois literary form, is no longer simplistically linked to detective prowess or criminal proclivities. If in Golden Age crime fiction, assumptions of working-class criminality and corruptibility (the dangerous class interloper seeking entree into higher circles, the resentful servant run amok, the venal blackmailer, etc.) once served as generic staples, class identity has become less of a structuring presence in today's narratives, and the elaborate British bestiary of classed types common in the work of Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Josephine Tey and their ilk has been relegated to (still popular) period drama and historical fiction. With the advent of the police procedural, the eccentric solitary detective became part of a team, a professional organization to which each individual brings unique specialization and expertise. The drama of police procedurals--as with any workplace drama--derives from the ensemble of different types and levels of authority within the workplace itself, and class identity has been subsumed into this mix. Detective figures in contemporary British crime dramas retain some superficial markers of classed identities, most obviously through their speech patterns. But what were once heavily weighted signifiers of class are now often loveable regionalisms or 'personal' quirks which at most reveal a greater or lesser accumulation of cultural capital. English television police dramas are likely to represent cross-class police partnerships as comic relief (Morse and Lewis, in Morse) or as different but equally valuable perspectives (Inspector Lynley and Barbara Havers, in The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, Lewis and Hathaway in Inspector Lewis). Similarly, inter-class tensions and working-class envy, common themes in Golden Age texts, have almost disappeared as motivations for criminal behavior.
What has not altered is the tendency of the popular detective genre to tap into the anxieties and stresses of the middle class, but rendering them in such terms that they seem individual and manageable, rather than structural and pervasive. Formula fiction dealing with crime reassures through narratives that appear to manage intractable social problems. As Michel Foucault famously argued, the historical function of popular discourses around crime has always been to show that the delinquent, whether he (or she) emerged from the lower orders or the special category of madness, "belonged to an entirely different world, unrelated to familiar, everyday life....extremely distant in its origin and motives."i The modern police procedural carries on this tradition while it adapts to a range of new social threats. Many critics have noted the flexibility of the procedural, and its relative openness to moral ambiguity; in The Public Eye: Ideology and the Police Procedural, Robert Winston and Nancy Mellerski describe the ways in which the contemporary procedural often resists the "satisfying restoration of order which confirms the value of the society being scrutinized."ii Within the formula of the investigation a number of social concerns can be discussed: particular laws, policies, or social prejudices may be critiqued or they may be endorsed; the police may be portrayed as more or less effective in defeating crime and more or less ethical in their methods of combatting it, according to the ideological bent of the crime writer. A degree of lingering uncertainty has become almost de rigueur for the genre, and, as Stephen Knight has declared, today's serious crime dramas tend to refuse "easy confidences and consolations."iii However, it is important to note that the police investigation eventually does end, and ends, if not with law and order triumphant--although this frequently happens as well--but with the identification and isolation of a deviant element. Whatever the moral status granted to individual policemen, the procedural enacts a process of criminalization in which a confession is produced and a criminal named as such. The narrative builds toward a climactic showdown between the deviant element and the members of the police, a showdown which clarifies the nature of the threat, and quells it, at least temporarily. In this way the police procedural operates to maintain a cordon sanitaire between the middle class and those renegade figures who threaten its way of life or pervert its values.
Irish crime fiction as a distinct cultural form has very recently come into its own, and the police procedural is proving to be a favorite form. Ireland's colonial history and centuries of hostility to English law and its representatives would seem to account for the near-absence of indigenous detective heroes until several decades after the declaration of the Irish Free State in 1922.iv But since the 1990's--cotemporaneous with the rise of the 'Celtic Tiger'--there has been a proliferation of Irish police protagonists, mostly centered in Dublin. Critics Fintan O'Toole and Ian Campbell Ross have observed the dominance of the Chandler-and-Hammett school of American hard-boiled writing over the tradition of the English whodunit in late twentieth and twenty-first century Irish crime literature. Today novelists like Declan Hughes, Cormac Millar, Ken Bruen, and Benjamin Black (John Banville) employ the figure of the lone male private eye in order to probe the "metropolitan heart of modern Ireland," a violent, gritty, often drug-ridden, recently urbanized nation now facing up to the hidden abuses in its past.v O'Toole posits that Irish crime writing has become "arguably the nearest thing we have to a realist literature adequate to capturing the nature of contemporary society."vi
Tana French (born 1973) is a young Irish-based actor-turned-writer of dual American and Irish nationality whose best-selling police procedurals move away from the decidedly masculinist hard-boiled school into more psychological and domestic territory. The crimes in three of the four novels that have appeared to date are set in suburban communities around Dublin. Her novels use murder plots to examine topical issues shaping middle-class life in her nation--a fading sense of Irish heritage, the housing market collapse, and unemployment, among others. Much of the poignancy of her work comes from its vivid dramatization of the aftereffects of violence, not of violence itself. Significantly, the outbreak of violence in these texts turns out to emerge from the seemingly ordinary middle class family.
French's procedurals are all first-person narratives that delve into the psychological conflicts of her police protagonists. Each novel works as a dual narrative that encompasses both the course of the criminal investigation and the detective's trajectory of self-discovery. In this way her procedurals collapse the personal and the professional into one first-person account. As each of her novels is narrated by a different member of the Dublin Murder Squad, read as a series, the stories build up an intriguing composite portrait of the squad and their shifting relationships to each other that creates an additional narrative arc. Using multiple first-person narrators also guarantees plural and often conflicting police points of view. The so-called crime is often viewed differently by different members of the Squad, and the ensuing debates allow the novels to exceed a reductive moralistic conception and move into the broader, existential category of tragedy. It then becomes the task of the investigation to reclassify the tragedy as a crime with a perpetrator who can be held accountable. A major strength of French's fiction is that these attempts at reinterpretation are never absolute; her work leaves this crime-tragedy debate open. In this way she could be considered to push the boundaries of the procedural genre.
While these crime stories retain a high degree of ambiguity as to the ultimate source of the mysterious outbreak of violence into the ordinary middle-class environment, the most plausible explanation is usually cast as a psychological one, in which particular members of the family under investigation are shown to be mentally disturbed. Foucault's 'special category of madness' always remains an available reading. At the same time, it is worth noting that French's fiction does not fall back on Golden Age class-based models of criminal behavior. Crimes that seem to be the result of wider social conflicts of the kind readers are familiar with from earlier examples of the genre, such as class envy or the desire for gain, are shown at the end to have no such motivation. Rather, the disruption originates within a problematic family context and a deeper psychological or moral disorder which ultimately lies beyond explanation.
When the problem is the pathogenic middle-class family, the police become not only the official face of the criminal justice system but also diagnosticians of family disorders. Often the role of the police in French's crime dramas looks more like a combination of social work and family therapy than the Golden Age detective's cerebral piecing together of clues, or the street-fighting daring of the hard-boiled detective. The action of the novels takes place mainly outside of the police department, and little attention is paid to the day-to-day gumshoe routines that take up much of the conventional procedural. The investigation of the family occurs in tandem with the police narrator's own psychological journey--the working-through of his or her pre-existing psychological trauma and coming to some degree of self-understanding. In texts obsessed with intra-family violence, the alternate professional family of the Murder Squad, while not untroubled, stands as a less corrupt and more reliable version of the family than those under investigation by the various detectives. The police family provides an official and arguably more objective standpoint from which family pathologies can be identified and judged. Thus French's work converts all problems into family problems, and in this sense, 'domesticates' the police force and the investigative process.
Bringing the Housing Crisis Home
Although for most of the twentieth century Ireland was an economically poor and underpopulated nation with high rates of emigration, the 'Celtic Tiger' years of the 1990's witnessed a rapid influx of foreign capital and economic vitality. Ireland was suddenly the envy of Europe and a "poster child for success in the era of globalization."vii However, the good times came to a dramatic halt through the combined effects of the global financial crisis of 2007-2010 and the collapse of Ireland's overheated real estate market--making Ireland the first country in the Eurozone to experience a full-scale recession. During the Celtic Tiger period, the rise of speculative finance sent shock waves through a primarily rural and traditional culture. Government incentives and easy access to credit encouraged a massive accumulation of personal and mortgage debt. Wildly inflated urban real estate prices and a frenzy of new home building led to the creation of numerous housing developments in rural and semi-rural areas within commuting distance of Dublin. This over-building resulted in a gap between supply and demand, and in 2008 the real estate bubble burst and the major banks funding it failed. Bailouts from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund came with a high pricetag: the imposition of a four-year austerity plan which has resulted in new taxes (although no raise in the corporate tax), over 10 billion euro cut from public spending, and dramatic reductions in the number of public employees. The predictable result has been serious recession, and Ireland has since suffered unemployment rates up over 14%, the return of economic emigration, and industrial and student unrest that continues into the moment of this writing.viii Much of Ireland's new housing stock remains unoccupied, with abandoned, often unfinished housing developments still in limbo. With the domestic economy teetering, the Irish case serves as an unfortunate demonstration of the counterproductive logic of austerity. Meanwhile, national sovereignty itself is under attack in the sense that Ireland, like other debtor nations, retains limited control over the economic forces that impact the lives of its citizens.
Tana French's The Likeness (2008) and Broken Harbor (2012), can be read as narrative responses to the Irish financial crisis of 2008 and its depressing aftermath. French's thrillers deliberately reflect recent shifts in national consciousness, taking on the psychic and cultural repercussions of the boom as well as of the resulting crash and the ongoing recession. Hers is a world in which unsettled characters crave stability, especially a stability based on the idea of the family and home, but in which the traditional Irish literary linkages of nation-and-estate or nation-and-family are raised only to be revealed as obsolete in the fast-paced throwaway culture of contemporary Ireland.ix Like Fintan O'Toole, French views crime writing as a particularly appropriate vehicle through which to represent the unstable state of her nation; she believes that the extremes inherent to crime formulas enable the surfacing of the "troubles and tensions and the unresolved questions" of Irish society, both on a conscious and an unconscious level. She wants her fiction to become "a point of exploration for a society's deepest fears...things that it hasn't assimilated. And God knows, over the last fifteen years, Irish society has just been avalanched with more than we can possibly assimilate in this lifetime."x
A useful resource for pondering the effect of neoliberal financial discourses on the Irish consciousness is Randy Martin's theorization of an entrepreneurial homo economicus in his 2002 treatise, The Financialization of Daily Life, in which he considers the implications of the rise of the financial sector for contemporary forms of middle-class (U.S.) subjectivity. Martin calls attention to the ways postmodern subjects are interpellated into the volatile 'new economy' driven by financial speculation, and particularly the FIRE industries of finance, insurance, and real estate.xi He defines the ideal entrepreneurial subject as well-versed in fiscal self management--aspiring, financially literate, constantly vigilant, always on the lookout for new opportunities.xii This involves a constant overcoming of the anxiety associated with economic fluctuation and debt, and a taking on of responsibility for failures, bad investments, poor management decisions. Puritan concepts of thrift and delayed gratification are now obsolete, and money is to be managed and put into circulation. The regime of financialization teaches accommodation to the pervasive condition of precarite, and "establishes the routinization of risk."xiii As Martin notes, a society suffused with the ethos of risk means that uncertainty in employment and life opportunities is taken for granted: "Instead of talking about economic exploitation, racial domination, or sexual oppression, the attribution of risk shifted the burdens of these social effects to the groups themselves. Poverty and race could then become risk factors for failure....failure to thrive could be a natural or cultural attribute but not a feature of the market as such."xiv This highly individualist entrepreneurial subjectivity undermines traditional collective identities based on nation, region, religion, and class, as well as threatening the economic foundations of the nuclear family.
Martin emphasizes the ways in which the seemingly infinite abstractions of finance capital have dissolved older conceptions of property ownership. Financial instruments for the securitization of consumer and mortgage debt, for example, are today traded globally, fragmenting ownership and making it available for wide geographic dispersionxv (p. 20). Fiscal self-management involves a new instrumentalization of one's labor, education, and property, now approached as potential sources of leveraging or collateral. The home itself, the paradigmatic signifier of middle-class status, is now always leveraged, always potentially in the global marketplace. Richard Glover, expanding on the impact of Martin's ideas, clarifies the fundamental shift in attitude toward the traditional family residence, as the house is no longer a place to live so much as an asset generating income in the form of equity: "This is not simply the case for those investing in finance, but is increasingly the way homeowners themselves understand property....the home as a source of equity has seen a dramatic increase in the use of debt by households to act as a safety net to offset injury or unemployment, to meet educational and medical bills, and even to service daily living expenses."xvi This instrumentalization of the family home becomes perhaps the most common example of financialization's infiltration of daily life, taking what were once private spaces, conceived of as shelters against market fluctuation, and plunging them into the market with all of its uncertainties. Martin warns that "the present tendency toward leveraging ownership against future increases in valuation generates increased vulnerability to bankruptcy," and makes "[w]hat was once a source of security...a source of risk."xvii
Houses in literature have long served as powerful metaphors of nation and family, as well as marking off the ostensibly non-instrumentalized space of the private sphere. In the novels discussed in this essay, French turns seemingly peaceful suburban settings into crime scenes, relying on the symbolism of endangered, collapsing, and foreclosed houses to manifest the hidden dysfunctions of a particular middle-class family. But houses in French's novels are always more real estate than Gothic dreamscape. These places are haunted, not by ghosts, but by nostalgia for a time when it was possible to imagine the home as a space of safety and resistance to market forces. No longer the archetypal bourgeois sanctuary of popular imagination, today's suburban houses condense a number of contemporary anxieties endemic to the debt-ridden entrepreneurial subject. Thus homes are here used to evoke a state of existential homelessness, an apprehension of precariousness and vulnerability, whether it be the stable subject, the middle-class family, or the nation of Ireland.
However, while French's fiction usefully highlights the psychological toll exacted by the contemporary Irish economic crisis, the generic requirements of the police procedural can only work to demand identifiable culprits. The procedural ultimately cannot adequately represent, or offer solutions to, the causes of Ireland's ongoing social and economic upheaval. The larger structures of postmodern finance capitalism exceed simple representation or explanation, even as their effects could be argued to set in motion the individual examples of violence these novels purport to solve. French's use of threatened suburban locations and deserted housing estates serve as apposite metaphors for the collapsing condition of the Irish economy and indeed, Irishness itself. Thus the pun in my title is intended to suggest that we read French's crime fiction as an intelligent popular-cultural response to the rash of literal housing foreclosures, but to also keep in mind the generic closing off of any deeper investigation into destructive and even criminal financial practices and the neoliberal order that enables them.
The Likeness: When Real Estate Was Real
The Likeness is framed by allusions to the tradition of the Gothic--in passages that directly echo Daphne DuMaurier's Rebecca, the novel opens and closes with the female narrator's dreams of returning to the now-destroyed Whitethorn House, and her sense that the ghostly presence of her dangerous double has finally been laid to rest. The novel serves as a meditation on the moral and existential implications of postmodern identity flux, in part through its detailing of the temptations of the protagonist, a promising young policewoman, towards the impersonations of her undercover work. The Likeness sets up a series of eerie psychological and biographical parallels between Cassie Maddox, the detective figure and narrator, and the murder victim, a young woman in her mid-twenties using the alter ego of Alexandra--Lexie--Madison, an identity she stole from the Cassie herself, who developed it during her first operation as an undercover agent. Although the murdered 'Lexie' ultimately turns out to be an enigmatic drifter of Australian origin, she is a serial identity thief, with several well-established lives in her wake. For the past three years she has been studying English at Trinity College and living with a tight-knit group of fellow students in the eighteenth-century mansion Whitethorn House. Aside from a freakishly improbable physical resemblance, Cassie and 'Lexie' share an obvious penchant for false identities--Cassie in the service of the law, 'Lexie' in violation of it due to her habit of identity theft. As both 'Cassandra' and 'Alexandra' are female forms of the name Alexander, the similarity of nomenclature underscores the uncanny resemblances between the two young women. Both are marked by a covert foreignness (Cassie's mother was French); both were raised without a mother and now live entirely apart from family ties. And both appear to be psychologically torn between an aversion to human connection and the desire for belonging, family, and home.
When 'Lexie' is found dead in a long-deserted famine cottage, victim of a single stab wound, the police conceal her death and launch "Operation Mirror": Cassie is sent undercover as a not-actually-mortally-wounded Lexie in order to discover Lexie's murderer. This involves her moving into Whitethorn House and taking up Lexie's identity, creating the bizarre scenario of a French/Irish policewoman masquerading as a Australian identity thief masquerading as an Irish graduate student in English literature (appropriately, 'Lexie's' research was on the use of pseudonyms by female novelists). In another of many plot devices that serve the text's psychological arc rather than any vestige of plausibility, Cassie, like Lexie, has been the victim of a stabbing--an event which brought an end to her earlier undercover operation into Dublin drug dealing. Traumatized by her previous experiences in the Undercover and Murder Units, Cassie is just emerging from a period of extreme anxiety, characterized by "shaking, not eating, sticking to the ceiling every time the doorbell or phone rang...My coordination went funny. And I stopped dreaming" xviii. Despite, or, more likely, because of, her still emotionally fragile state, Cassie welcomes the chance to return to undercover work, and the escape into another self. She connects feeling pleasantly disembodied and 'free' to her undercover persona as Lexie: "Both times, being Lexie Madison had come as natural to me as breathing. I had slid into her like sliding into comfy old jeans, and this was what had scared me, all along."xix
In the process of investigating Lexie's murder, Cassie is increasingly seduced into Lexie's double identity. The bulk of the narrative is taken up with Cassie's experiences at Whitethorn House, and her conflicting desires as she gradually becomes aware that part of her wants to flee into Lexie's life more than she wants to find Lexie's killer. Cassie feels torn between dedication to her police calling and her policeman boyfriend Sam, on the one hand, and her growing sense of kinship with her new 'family' of postgraduate students on the other--but this kinship is also paradoxically conflated with her assumption of Lexie's radically self-centered, asocial personality. While Cassie ultimately chooses loyalty to Sam and the force over loyalty to her new friends, her immersion into a plurality of selves--in some ways a replay of her earlier impersonation of Lexie--enables her, by the end of the narrative, to overcome her own near-death experience and perceived professional failures and re-establish herself as an effective member of the police 'family.' By the final pages, Cassie is both dancing and dreaming again, the presence of dreams (even ghostly ones) signifying her return to relative psychological health. Thus the narrative is structured around Cassie's professional rehabilitation, a rehabilitation achieved by her successful investigation of the murder of her doppelganger and the working through of her professional traumas.
The plot is arranged so that, for the bulk of the novel, the reader assumes that one of the angry locals has murdered Lexie as a kind of historical revenge towards the cliquish inhabitants of the village's former Big House. Built during the years of the Ascendency by the Anglo-Irish March family, Whitethorne has recently been inherited by the young graduate student Daniel March. While the dying town of Glenskehy, located in rural County Wicklow, hopes for the Whitethorne property to become available for development, and therefore, to provide service-sector jobs for unemployed villagers, Daniel, like his uncle before him, treasures his ancestral home and refuses to sell. This provokes numerous attempts to vandalize the house and drive Daniel and his friends away. It is therefore tempting to read The Likeness as an allegory of the rightful destruction of the last vestiges of the Anglo-Irish ascendency--an account of how the Dublin police combine forces with the resentful villagers of Glenskehy to finally purge the community of their former landlords. The eventual downfall of the old house and the last scion of March family might, in another novel, be seen as peasant retribution and the sweeping away of the old order in the service of a long-overdue modernization. But French's novel implies that Glenskyhy has succumbed to the false promises of the Celtic Tiger; it is the inhabitants of Whitethorn House rather than the Glenskehy villagers (the villagers hope for a golf course) who represent respect for a resistant Irishness rooted in the landscape and in property ownership. Therefore the demise of Whitethorn House is presented nostalgically, as the end of a group of brave iconoclasts standing against the wave of entrepreneurialism infecting Irish life.
Cassie's sympathies lie squarely with the graduate students restoring the old house against the villagers who repeatedly vandalize it. She is immediately attracted to Whitethorne House, "a wide gray Georgian," described as part "fairy fort," part Gothic manor, part ancestral home. Cassie, pondering her own status as an apartment-dwelling urban transient, acknowledges its enduring appeal: "If I had ever wanted a house...it would have been a lot like this one. This had nothing in common with the characterless pseudohouses all my friends were buying....This was the real thing, one serious do-not-fuck-with-me house with the strength and pride and grace to outlast everyone who saw it." xx Her appreciation of the aesthetic and cultural value of Whitethorn House clearly separates her from those who view it in terms of investment potential.
Written at the height of the housing boom, The Likeness directly addresses the complexities of the Irish desire for homeownership, diagnosing it as a logical result of a long history of colonial dispossession, including the painful memories of eviction still imprinted in the national psyche. As Cassie observes, "This country's passion for property is built into the blood...Centuries of being turned out on the roadside at your landlord's whim, helpless, teach you that everything in life hangs on owning your own home. That's why house prices are what they are..."xxi In the present Irish context, Cassie implies, property ownership speaks to the Irish need to claim a homeland, and is as much (or more) a sign of Irish cultural identity as of class mobility. For Daniel March, too, the concept of property stands for Irishness, but also acts as a necessary bulwark against the precariousness of new economy and its dangerous culture of indebtedness.
Daniel has taken the unusual step of legally dividing his valuable inheritance between himself and his four best friends: Lexie, Abby, Rafe, and Justin. He justifies this seemingly generous act by explaining the importance of property to an authentic existence; an existence, which, in his view, must be shared with like-minded people, as he explains his desires in life as simply, "the company of my friends, and the opportunity for unfettered thought."xxii The students' mutual possession of Whitethorn House enables the group to stay together, and to look forward to a life free of debt, wage-slavery, professional compromise, and, significantly, fear. "Have you ever considered the sheer level of fear in this country?" Daniel asks Cassie, rhetorically. "Part of the debtor mentality is a constant, frantically suppressed undercurrent of terror. We [the Irish] have one of the highest debt-to-income ratios in the world ...frightened people are obedient" Without Whitethorne, Daniel explains to Cassie, "we would have been in precisely the same situation as the vast majority of this country: caught between poverty and slavery, two paychecks from the street, in thrall to the whims of landlords and employers. Perennially afraid."xxiii
While Janet Maslin's New York Times review of The Likeness finds the group of literature graduate students "spooky" and sinister in their "bizarrely intimate state of camaraderie" ("the friendships of Whitethorn House are so close that the place sometimes seems like home to a cabal"xxiv) Cassie's attraction to the group provides a far more positive lens.xxv The Bohemian intellectuals at Whitethorn House provide articulate arguments for anti-consumerist values and mobilize a critique of Celtic Tiger Ireland. In this way, the graduate students comprise an updated version of what Raymond Williams has termed 'a dissenting fraction of the bourgeoisie.' For Williams, such 'fractions' are sociologically-similar groups of intellectuals and artists which emerge from, and sustain connections to, the upper class, yet work to oppose the "ideas and institutions of their class as a whole."xxvi Williams anatomized the legendary Bloomsbury Group which formed around the Stephen sisters (later Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell) and their gifted circle of friendsxxvii as the paradigmatic 'fraction,' an upper-class coterie sustained largely through social capital, but nevertheless performed an important liberalizing function within the class structures of early twentieth-century England.
Living as an alternative family, the five postgraduate students at Whitethorn House share clothing and meals and dedicate themselves to Bloomsbury values: the cultivation of friendship; scholarly work; artistic production; and the creation of an aesthetically-pleasing mutual living space. (Cassie, returning to Whitethorn House from Dublin, feels like she is going back to '1910'xxviii) Maintaining themselves on student grants or trust funds, the group works to restore the old mansion to its former glory and plans to live there on a permanent basis. When Daniel divides the possession of Whitethorne House, his overt project, as we have seen, is to guarantee their mutual withstanding of the economic pressures and the fear these produce. Daniel's arguments echo Woolf's famous rationale for women's financial independence in A Room of One's Own--the assumption that a degree of material security, symbolized by a house or a room, is a necessary precondition for the existence of intellectual and artistic freedom. Daniel further elaborates his concern that precarite corrupts people's deepest sense of themselves:
If your employer tells you to work overtime, and you know that refusing could jeopardize everything you have...then you convince yourself that you're doing it voluntarily...Because the alternative is to acknowledge that you are living in terror. Before you know it, you've persuaded yourself that you have a profound emotional attachment to some vast multinational corporation. You've indentured not just your working hours, but your entire thought process.xxix
The students' Bloomsbury aesthetic calls for living simply and rejecting the prevailing values of conspicuous consumption, and this too puts them at odds with the New Ireland. The students' ability to resist false needs and a chronic desire for more is a major source of their conflict with the 'outside world.' Recognizing that their alternative value system makes them cultural dissidents, they mull over the implications of their unfashionable but still clearly bourgeois refusal; as Abby muses one leisurely evening:
Our entire society's based on discontent: people wanting more and more and more, being constantly dissatisfied with their homes, their bodies, their decor, their clothes, everything. Taking it for granted that that's the whole point of life, never to be satisfied. If you're perfectly happy with what you've got, specially if what you've got isn't even all that spectacular--then you're dangerous. You're breaking all the rules, you're undermining the sacred economy, you're challenging every assumption that society's built on....We're traitors."
Daniel agrees: "It's a fascinating state of affairs. Throughout history--even a hundred years ago, even fifty--it was discontent that was considered the danger that had to be exterminated at all costs. Now it's contentment. What a strange reversal."xxx These descendants of Bloomsbury have escaped the rampant anxieties of financial uncertainty, and manage, at least for a time, to exist contentedly in their own self-contained world. The threat to this contentment comes not from fear of crime or violence (they do not even fear the rock-throwing vandals who have been terrorizing them), but from being forced to compromise a free and authentic life. However, given the students' reliance on the Bloomsbury centrality of personal relations, they are especially vulnerable to Lexie's and Cassie's falsifications, which undermine the bedrock of trust on which this group depends.
Not coincidentally, the post-Bloomsbury circle disavows traditional marriage and the idea of the nuclear family. The students, all from troubled backgrounds, have rejected (or been ejected from) their birth families and deliberately constructed a new family based on affinity and friendship. While only one of them is openly homosexual, all are 'queer' in their rejection of traditional monogamy and their willingness to submerge any desire for a long-term exclusive partnership into the alternative family of friends. This does not mean total celibacy: Lexie has apparently had romantic relations with both Rafe and Daniel; Rafe takes off for occasional drunken one-night stands, and he and Justin are also revealed to have clandestine encounters. Interestingly, occasional sexual tensions are not what tears the group apart. Rather the novel places the blame on Lexie, the bad seed, the alien incapable of lasting human bonds; or, alternatively, upon Daniel, whose apparent generosity may mask a Svengali-like manipulativeness and need to dominate others.
Sexual desire does complicate Cassie's official police duties, however, in the form of her growing attraction to Daniel March. Eventually her interest in the charismatic Daniel leads her to compromise her undercover identity and to deceive Frank Mackey, her mentor and supervisor, and the character who (in this novel) represents the pursuit of justice regardless of the cost. Cassie's betrayal of Frank, while short-lived, marks a permanent gap between Cassie's perspective and police orthodoxy. In the painfully honest conversation between Cassie and Daniel in which they open up to each other and she confesses her real identity, she acknowledges that, despite her many deceptions, the happiness she has experienced at Whitethorne House has been genuine. But with her confession it is clear that the two are now, however regretfully, antagonists, and this exchange precipitates the final confrontation between Cassie and Daniel in which he moves to protect the circle of friends against the treacherous imposter they have unknowingly welcomed into their fold. The ultimate outcome is a shootout that Daniel loses.
While the novel remains ambiguous, due to the plurality of police voices on this matter, the most likely source of social disruption appears to be the murder victim herself. As the generally reliable Sam sums up, Lexie "was bad news from the beginning."xxxi Lexie embodies a sinister strand of radical individualism--representing a kind of malevolent spirit of the age, or perhaps someone so psychologically scarred by her mother's untimely death that she becomes dangerously indifferent to human connection. Contact with Lexie has proved particularly painful to men, as she deserted her father, various boyfriends and a fiance before she came to Ireland. The mystery of Lexie's murder is thus the insoluble mystery of the femme fatale, here a global migrant who crosses borders and assumes new identities with impunity. But the novel's abundant parallels between Lexie and Cassie mean that both characters are aligned with the forces of postmodern capitalism and the havoc it wreaks on human relations.
In the course of her investigations Cassie discovers that Lexie, finding herself pregnant with Rafe's child, planned to jettison Whitethorne House for yet another new life. Lexie's death occurs when she announces her intention to sell her share in the property to Daniel's greedy, development-minded cousin, who the Glenskyhy locals support; the shocked group of friends explodes and a fight ensues. With the fate of their beloved house at stake, Lexie's stabbing by one of the students was accidental, but not, Cassie thinks, surprising, given the depth of her betrayal of their trust. In one reading, no crime was really committed; the perfidious Lexie is rightly punished and Cassie therefore enacts a hollow form of justice in abetting the police victory over Lexie's inadvertent killers. When, towards the end of the novel, Cassie learns that the Glenskeyhy villagers have finally succeeded in burning down Whitethorn House, she realizes that she shares with Lexie the blame for its destruction: "What Lexie had started, I had finished for her. Between the two of us, we had razed Whitethorn House to rubble and smoking ash. Maybe that was what she had wanted me for, all along."xxxii But unlike Lexie, Cassie retains a conscience; she at least remains haunted by the harm she has caused: "Whitethorn house let me into its secret chambers and healed my wounds, and in exchange I set my careful charges and I blew it to smithereens."xxxiii
The other potential villain of the novel is singled out by Frank Mackey: Daniel March, who can be read as a man out of time, a holdover from a gentler period, or as a socially-stunted cult leader whose obsessive need for followers causes him to put home above human life--both Lexie's and his own. Frank holds to the latter view, and believes Cassie's killing of Daniel to be amply justified by the mission of uncovering and punishing his hidden criminality. As Frank and Cassie review the finished Operation Mirror, Frank warns her not to blame herself and, implicitly, not to give in to her attraction to Daniel. According to Frank, Daniel deliberately committed 'suicide by cop' --aiming at Cassie with his uncle's old gun, forcing her to shoot him. Frank here articulates the standard move of the police procedural of the cordoning-off of the delinquent or deviant: "Don't ever forget there's a line," he tells her: "You and me, Cassie, we live on one side of it. Even when we fuck up and wander over to the other side, we've got that line to keep us from getting lost. Daniel didn't have it."xxxiv
Cassie's feelings for Daniel remain conflicted, however, and even while she understands Frank's professional point of view, a part of her respects Daniel's sense of noblesse oblige, his willing sacrifice of his own life to ensure the freedom of the friends he loved. In the climactic showdown scene, the cool-headed Daniel, knowing that Cassie is wired, claims that he alone wielded the knife that killed Lexie--although in a yet another plot twist, it becomes clear that he is covering for Justin. Deeply pained about her own role in Daniel's death, Cassie, in order to expiate her guilt, and presumably to ensure that Daniel has not died in vain, allows Justin, the real murderer in the technical sense, to go free. She now comprehends that truth is "more intricate" than she formerly believed. Even at the novel's close, Cassie's alliance with Whitethorn House runs deep; she still envisions the 'family' all together, "glittering and defiant, us against the world."xxxv (italics in original).
The Likeness is, among other things, a cautionary tale of the instabilities of identity in a postmodern world, and a portrayal of the futility of alternatives to neoliberal capitalism. As a police procedural it works to identify two very different offenders. Whichever candidate one chooses, the perversely solitary Lexie or the perversely over-attached Daniel, Lexie who lives solely for the moment or Daniel whose desires are unhealthily (or perhaps just unluckily) frozen circa 1910, both are safely dead by the end of the novel, and the way is now paved for the heteronormative and comparatively healthy relationship of Cassie and Sam. The remnants of the queer family are dispersed and the dangerous contentment generated by the countercultural 'cabal' has been quelled, living on only in Cassie's dreams. Lexie's murderer is now known to Cassie, if not to the world, and Lexie's elusive identity is finally pinned down with the discovery of her Australian nationality. Significantly the beautiful old house with its aura of permanence has been leveled, and the security it appeared to guarantee has proved unsustainable in the turbo-charged capitalism of the new Ireland in which, as Daniel observed, "centuries-old communities are disintegrating like sand castles."xxxvi While the novel strikes a decidedly nostalgic note about these losses, at the same time the overarching frame of Cassie's personal and professional rehabilitation clearly implies that a working-through and rejection of the past--and with it, the anachronistic values of Whitethorne House--is a necessary part of the process of healing and moving ahead. Cassie's choice of Sam aligns her with the future and marks a new and promising beginning.
Because the detective in this police procedural is female (and this is the only one of French's novel to date narrated by a woman; it is noteworthy that none of those narrated by males end in romance) Cassie's return to her professional duties on the Murder Squad is overshadowed by the traditional resolution of marriage. Marriage clarifies Cassie's separation from the fundamentally asocial femme fatale, while it places her firmly within a family context which is both personal and professional. In a telling gesture, Cassie replaces the microphone she has been wearing around her neck but under her shirt--her standard operating equipment as Lexie, and as an undercover agent--with Sam's engagement ring. Her wayward desires are now under control, and her identity has stabilized into her role as Sam's partner. Justice may or may not have been done, but Cassie has found a home.
Broken Harbor: Death by Suburbia
The perils of the new economy are foregrounded in French's 2011 Broken Harbor, a novel set in the wake of the housing crisis and the imposition of austerity. While The Likeness chronicles the defeat of an experiment in resisting consumer culture and entrepreneurial subjectivity, Broken Harbor focuses on the psychological toll of the recession and chronicles the self-destruction of the entrepreneurial subject. Here the main characters all seem disconnected and adrift, and most are unemployed. 'Ghost Estates'--half-built housing developments left over from the property bubble--litter the landscape, leaving entire communities of potentially haunted houses and imparting an atmosphere of desolation and ruin. For Italian political theorist Maurizio Lazzarato, the subjective figure of the post-2008 European economic crisis is "the debtor affected by guilt, bad conscience, and responsibility. As the crisis has worsened, his entrepreneurial contours have faded and the epic panegyrics to the glory of innovation and knowledge that accompanied the beginnings of neoliberalism have fallen silent."xxxvii This vacillation between the exhilarating embrace of risk and the internalization of failure, with a final silent acquiescence, marks the trajectory of Broken Harbor's guilt-ridden narrator, Mick "Scorcher" Kennedy. Mick, one of the Murder Squad's most successful detectives, is from the first aligned with the entrepreneurial attitudes of Celtic Tiger Ireland. He describes himself as "a big believer in development--blame the property developers and their tame bankers and politicians for this recession if you want, but the fact is, if it wasn't for them thinking big, we'd never have got out of the last one. Places are like people are like sharks--if they stop moving, they die."xxxviii In many ways a consummate 'yuppie,' Mick enjoys his modern luxury apartment and nice car; exudes confidence, even swagger; and asserts the necessity of maintaining a 'positive mental attitude.' His professional downfall therefore comes as a surprise both to himself and to the reader.
We realize early in the novel that Mick's relentless confidence masks his attempts to gain control over a past that will not let him go. Mick is haunted by the tragedy of his adolescence: the fact that his mother killed herself, that he was the last person to see her alive, and that he did not save her. The depressed mother drowned herself in the bay at the beachside community where the family vacationed every year, called, appropriately enough, 'Broken Harbor.' Mick's mother attempted to kill his younger sister Dina as well, to take her with her into death, but Dina escaped and now suffers serious mental illness perhaps as a result. Mick's father subsequently withdrew from the world and has never recovered from the shock of his wife's suicide. Racked with guilt, Mick shares the care of his younger sister and his unwell father with another sister, Gerry; Mick's own marriage has failed apparently due to the strain of his caretaking commitments.
What was once the quiet and isolated seaside hamlet of Broken Harbor has recently been developed into a new suburban-style housing community, 'Ocean View Estates,' a fact that Mick learns as he and the Murder Squad are called to a crime scene there.xxxix At first Mick welcomes the presence of new housing in this location, and its implied erasure of his troubled past. But unsurprisingly the repressed returns, in the form of a case with too many echoes of the events that destroyed Mick's childhood. Mick's assignment to the Broken Harbor murders marks a return to his own earlier trauma, and his investment in the mystery in part an attempt to shore up the precarious edifice of normality and forward motion on which he has built his adult life. The complexities of the Broken Harbor case, which involve the shocking discovery of his partner-protege's deliberate concealment of evidence, lead the straight-shooting Mick to violate his professional ethics and manipulate evidence in turn, so that sufficient suspicion will fall on the real murderer. Like Cassie, Mick's professional detachment is severely challenged over the course of the narrative; however, he is punished--or rather, he punishes himself--for his inability to stay on right side of the line. By the end of the novel the mystery is solved, the errant partner expelled from the Murder Squad, and the guilty party held accountable. But with his sense of professional integrity irreparably damaged Mick feels his only choice is to resign from the police force.
Ocean View Estates is, significantly, the site of two crimes: a gruesome triple murder, the result of an apparent home invasion, and the rampant financial speculation, predatory lending, and outright fraud that led to the Irish housing bubble. Ocean View is now a Ghost Estate; a "village of the damned."xl Simultaneously new build and ruin, the estate lies only halfway completed. Some sections contain empty and unsold houses, in others the streets are laid out but houses have never materialized. The remaining inhabitants are left with mortgages far exceeding the value of the property, and cheaply-built homes are already beginning to disintegrate. The original builders have long since abandoned the project and dissolved their company. And so the Estate remains mostly derelict, a mute testimony to the destruction of traditional communities at the hands of international investors, unscrupulous local speculators, feckless politicians, and the risk-oriented mindset of the 'ownership society.'
When Mick and his young partner Ritchie enter the ordinary suburban home of the Spain family they encounter a blood-spattered chamber of horrors. The two small children sleeping upstairs have been smothered, the father has been stabbed to death in the kitchen, and the mother lies near him, apparently mortally wounded, the victim of both stabbing and a blow to the head. The police notice that the house is newly furnished and in mint condition--except for the mysterious giant holes hacked in the walls. The couple were, in life, successful Dublin professionals in their late twenties who appeared to have every prospect ahead of them. Digging into the Spain's affairs, the police learn that Pat and Jenny recently purchased their Ocean View Estates home in order to live their suburban dream. Then Pat lost his job in financial services and was unable to find a new one, and so the family fell on hard times. Back went the SUV, and within a few months they were behind on their mortgage and rapidly accumulating credit card bills. Embarrassed by their helplessness, blaming themselves, the Spains but did their best to maintain a facade of middle-class normality despite their declining financial and emotional situation. They became increasing isolated, and increasingly obsessed with their own bad luck.
Further investigation by the police reveals a proliferation of suburban pathologies. Suburban homeownership for the Spains signifies upward mobility, a life free of social embarrassment, a recognizable social identity. But when this identity crumbles Pat and Jenny lose their hold on reality. As the pressures of debt and financial insolvency tightened, Pat Spain became convinced that his home is infested by an unspecified wild animal, a mysterious creature no one else ever sees. In crazed pursuit of this ghost-creature or hallucination, Pats sets about dismantling the house, installing video monitoring systems throughout and carving holes in the walls. The presence of this animal is, intriguingly, never explained in the course of the novel. It may be a genre-shifting Gothic element haunting the ruins of modern suburbia, a vestige of the Irish past. Or it may represent Pat's externalization of abstract and intangible financial threats, his coping mechanism for dealing with elusive enemies outside of his control. The damaged house, apparently intact when seen from the outside, but riddled with holes and futile surveillance devices within, becomes a potent metaphor for the internal decay of the Spain family, and perhaps for the middle-class family itself under the onslaught of austerity. And of course the imploding house also serves as a symbol of the Irish economy in its similar state.
Pat's obsession leads him to attack their (shoddily built) home, ostensibly to protect it from the mysterious predator, while Jenny's madness takes an even more dangerous form. Mick ultimately deduces that this 'perfect' wife and mother, incapable of imagining any alternative way of existing, actually smothered her two toddlers, stabbed her husband with a kitchen knife, and attempted to take her own life as well. When she finds she is unable to finish the job herself, she elicits the help of an old lover, Conor Brennan, who at first believes he has succeeded in the mercy killing she begs for; however, Jenny, against her own wishes, survives, and is at the end of the novel charged by the police with the murder of her family. In Jenny's twisted mind, she was liberating Pat and the children by taking them with her into death.
Just as in The Likeness it appears for much of the novel that a disaffected villager with a suspicious history of vandalism is the likely culprit, so in Broken Harbor we are set up to suspect Conor, a childhood friend of the family from their Dublin days, now a redundant computer programmer with too much time on his hands. Lately Conor has been spying on the Spain family from a nearby abandoned house. Mick, idealizing the Spains, assumes that Conor, too, envied their marital happiness and successful lifestyle, an envy which led him to kill. Mick dislikes Conor, who is one of several characters who critiques the Spain's social climbing and consumerist values, and therefore Mick's as well. However, it turns out that Conor correctly feared for their sanity in the isolation of the suburbs. Mick's suspicions of Conor are shown to be misguided, and Conor's assessment of the impact of suburban alienation is vindicated by events. As in most of French's novels, the twist is that the violence comes from within the family rather than from an envious external presence.
Broken Harbor continually parallels the entrepreneurial outlook of Mick Kennedy and the Spains, and stresses Mick's identification with the murdered Patrick Spain--a man who lived by the rules and did everything right until his life was suddenly derailed by redundancy. Mick shares Pat's values, admires Pat's initiative, is himself attracted to well-dressed, heavily made-up, artificially-tanned women like Jenny Spain, who he explicitly compares to his own ex-wife. All place a high priority on maintaining the outwardly perfect life and with it, 'a positive mental attitude.' The novel portrays these characters as pathetically helpless in coping with the financial and professional setbacks that challenge their philosophy of self-making and personal responsibility. All become overwhelmed by guilt at what they internalize as their own failure. Pat responds to adversity by channeling his energies into the pursuit of phantom creatures; Jenny and Mick through self-excoriation, which in Jenny takes the extreme form of suicide and murder.
Mick's similar mindset--his ability to imagine the Spains' mortification when their social identity can no longer be sustained and the walls, figurative and literal, that support it prove insufficient--are what enable him to untangle the threads of a tangled case and lead him to Jennifer Spain. Mick realizes, however, that there are other, less sympathetic perspectives: "Probably Ritchie would have seen a spoiled middle-class princess whose sense of herself was too shallow to survive without pesto salad and designer shoes. I saw a frail, doomed gallantry that broke my heart."xli Yet in spite of his empathy for Jennifer Spain, Mick believes in punishing those who break the rules. Mick conflates the legal code and what he sees as a basic human need for a structured, bounded existence, linking both of these to psychic stability. As he concludes, in a telling passage: "We need straight lines to keep us safe, we need walls; we build solid concrete boxes, signposts, packed skylines, because we need them. Without any of that to hold them down, Pat's mind and Jenny's had flown wild, zigzagging in unmapped space, tied to nothing."xlii (Ritchie and Conor might agree, but would characterize this 'scaffolding' in terms of the close-knit supportive community.)
When Mick finally persuades the still weak Jenny, recovering in the hospital, to confess, his theories are confirmed. She describes her extreme shame and bewilderment at what she perceives as overwhelming failure, and her impulse to 'rescue' her family from their disintegrating lifestyle. Recounting her thoughts just before the killings, she describes a hallucinatory American Beauty moment in which she suddenly becomes aware of an ephemeral loveliness perceptible within the suburban environment:
Everything looked so shiny and so sharp it hurt, and it was all so beautiful--just ordinary stuff like the fridge and the toaster and the table, they looked like they were made out of light, floating, like they were angel things that would blow you to atoms if you touched them. And then I started floating too, I was floating up off the ground, and I knew I had to do something fast, before I just drifted away through the window...xliii
The passage clearly reinforces Mick's view that without the proper scaffolding--the law, social mores, and self-discipline all seem likely candidates here--modern people lose their mental and moral equilibrium. But the striking image of the floating kitchen also demonstrates Jennifer's semi-conscious awareness that there is no 'there' there in suburbia, nothing to take hold of in a world built on consumer credit and planned obsolescence and calculations of future equity. Bourgeois property no longer sufficiently grounds conceptions of material reality under the provisional conditions of financialization. Traditional female work, and mother love itself, similarly prove inadequate insulation for the nuclear family against an economic crisis which has become an existential crisis. In desperation, the mother constructs death as the only way back to the tangible, the 'real.'
The fragile suburban home in Broken Harbor stands as the exact opposite of the solid old stones of Whitethorn House: the former a reminder of the loss of local control when the home enters the globalized financial marketplace, while the latter signifies an earlier, more direct relationship to property and use-value, an independence from the vicissitudes of the market. While we see the pre-modern alternative of Whitethorn House eventually destroyed by the forces of postmodernity, Ocean View Estates never exists as 'property' per se, only as an empty facade, a mere advertisement for a home. The later novel, unlike The Likeness, depicts no alternative spaces, or no spaces that exist in the present--only the memory of the more communal Dublin neighborhood in which Jenny, Pat, and Conor grew up. Such traditional communities apparently enable the more anchored worldviews of Conor and Ritchie, who remain unpersuaded by the new economy's false promises.
Ritchie's moral perspective, like Cassie's, challenges the rigid logic of the police mission and the idea of justice narrowly defined. The investigation nearly goes astray due to Ritchie's concealment of evidence incriminating Jennifer Spain in order to make it look as if her husband had committed the murders. Assuming that the deceased Pat Spain's reputation no longer matters, Ritchie's motive for this violation of procedure is sympathy for Jennifer--his understanding that she is suicidal and that once she emerges from the hospital, she will immediately kill herself: "You saw the state of her. She's already gone, man. Let her go. Have a bit of mercy," Ritchie tells Mick.xliv In Ritchie's view, Jennifer Spain's suicide is the most humane conclusion to a terrible tragedy; in Mick's, her suicide will only compound it. Mick's immediate response shows that he is replaying the trauma of his childhood: "What about her mother and sister? Got any mercy for them?" Mick concludes that Ritchie's perspective (which could with equal plausibility be read as naive, or as justified in its grasp of the moral complexities of the situation) disqualifies him from being a good detective. Ritchie lacks the requisite respect for the 'rules' and makes the grave error, in Mick's opinion, of substituting his own judgment for the judgment of the law.
Their last encounter serves as a standard procedural scene in which the police seek to impose moral clarity on an ambiguous situation. However, as in other Tana French novels, the various perspectives are allowed to co-exist and none appears to be wholly endorsed. The outraged Mick tells the disobedient Ritchie: "That's what the whole bloody system is for: to stop arrogant little pricks like you from playing God, handing out death sentences whenever they feel like it. You just stick to the fucking rules, hand in the fucking evidence and let the fucking system do its job....That's why we have rules to begin with."xlv Ritchie refuses to back down, responding, "I'll trust my own mind on this one," guaranteeing his demotion from the Murder Squad but preserving the possibility that his is a valid analysis of the situation. His attempts to recategorize events as family tragedy are denied by Mick, who insists that Jennifer Spain be held accountable for the lives she has taken. The novel remains in Mick's consciousness, so we are perhaps more likely to stand with him in his assessment that Jennifer must pay for her crime. Yet Mick's subsequent actions show him to be more similar to Ritchie than he will here admit. He goes on to violate the rules himself, lying to his superiors and planting evidence in order to ensure the incrimination of the guilty Jennifer. Having crossed this line, he is now rendered unworthy of his self-image as an incorruptible police detective who always adheres to the letter of the law. As the novel ends, Mick's future is open--the only immediate certainty is that he will shortly join the growing ranks of Ireland's unemployed.
Broken Harbor provides two options for the origin of the Spain's tragedy: the recession and the resulting self-inflicted wounds of the entrepreneurial subject, or the mystery of the suicidal mother, represented by both Jenny and the long-dead Mrs Kennedy, mother of Dina and Mick. The suicidal mother does not only destroy herself, but dooms her entire family; relegated to the realm of the mad, there is no explanation for her destructive presence. This position is articulated by the equally unstable Dina, who carries on the maternal madness. When her brother tries to understand the causes of Dina's condition, she insists that it just is: "There isn't any why."
Refusing Dina's fatalism, Mick believes in taking action, making one's own luck, and accepting responsibility. But the reader is meant to see that Mick's previous history with maternal suicide clearly influences his determination to incriminate the other guilty mother, and that he will resort to any extreme to keep Jennifer Spain from killing herself because of his lingering guilt over his own mother's death. In this replay of his teen-age trauma he saves the mother from her self-destructive impulses and thus restores his own sense of moral balance, even though this means the surrender of his professional ethics. In the logic of the novel, charging Jennifer Spain with murder will result in her long-term commitment to a mental institution and she will be denied the death by her own hand that she desperately seeks. Pat and Conor are exonerated, their reputations cleared, and blame is rightfully placed back on the perverse mother, who is condemned to live with the unbearable knowledge of what she has done.
Mick's motives for preserving Jennifer's life may well derive from his need for justice, for 'following the rules' in terms of penalizing the guilty and attaining closure for the case. But they also come from a less respectable place--from his unconscious need to punish his own mother for the suffering she left in her wake and for the role of family caretaker he is still being forced to assume. An equally potent desire is his need to locate a culprit for her suicide, to find a reason, which leads him to blame his own youthful negligence. Mick relives his final encounter with his mother in the last pages of the novel, and again comes to the conclusion that he must accept the responsibility for her death: "I was the only one in the world who knew that the reason was me. I had learned how to live with that."xlvi His resignation from the force can therefore be seen as an act of self-abasement, of expiation for his earlier sin. But particularly noteworthy is the way that Mick's personal trajectory ends in an embrace of guilt that seems far in excess of his own moral failings.
The novel ends on a bleak and wistful note, in which the success of the police investigation is overshadowed by the unshakeable sense of tragedy and failure that clings to all the characters. The final scene is a silent tableau of the motherless brother and sister, Mick and Dina, curled up together; enclosed and supported, at least for the moment, by the four walls of Mick's bachelor flat. Mick has regained psychic stability, and a measure of control over his life--but these have come at the cost of his career and his professional family on the police force. All we know is that Mick will continue to atone for his perceived sins by caring for his lost sister, permanently damaged by that past maternal crime.
We also learn from Jennifer Spain's sister that Ocean View Estates is slated for demolition: "It's good riddance," she says; "Better late than never."xlvii But Mick is saddened by this news, as, in his eyes, speculative development still stands for progress and forward movement, and Ocean View Estates could have represented the suburban idyll he has always dreamed of. On his last visit there he has a vision of the Ghost Estate as the dignified remains of a vanished civilization: "The place looked like Pompeii, like some archeological discovery preserved to let tourists wander through it...trying to picture the disaster that had wiped it bare of life."xlviii Broken Harbor began as the site of multiple crimes--the crimes within the family, and the fraudulent schemes perpetrated upon the larger community--and the family crimes have been solved, offenders identified and confronted. However, there has been no investigation of the sequence of acts and policies that led to the scandal of Ghost Estates, and no persons have been held accountable. Instead, we are left with Mick's reimagining of this crime scene as the sign of an unstoppable natural disaster; his vision of Pompeii and its obliteration by Vesuvius works to erase all culpable human action and resituate the housing crisis in the realm of natural history. In Mick's logic, some acts of violence are criminalized, while others are interpreted as cataclysms for which there is no prevention or remedy. The novel itself appears to follow Mick Kennedy's lead in its avid prosecution of individual perpetrators of interpersonal violence while criminogenic systems are naturalized and left to operate unchecked.
Conclusions
Fredric Jameson has suggested that stories of ghosts and haunted houses can no longer accommodate our increasingly abstracted and unreal realities, and so have ceased to be vehicles through which we consider the traces and implications of the past. Perhaps, he speculates, "the narrative of ...the properly postmodern ghost story, ordered by finance-capital spectralities rather than the old and more tangible kind, demands a narrative of the very search for a building to haunt in the first place."xlix Tana French's novels, artifacts of the current moment, offer fine examples of such narratives; formerly haunted houses have been replaced by the evocative Ghost Estate, the hollowed-out postmodern ruin. These texts summon nostalgia for a time when dwellings were more than simulacra, when homes were substantial enough to symbolize continuity into the future, when they could be haunted by the spirits of the past rather than by the destroyed dreams of the present. While the role of gender in French's novels deserves its own essay, both of the texts discussed here circle around the problem of maternal absence or failure, and vividly dramatize the emotional havoc wreaked by perverse or absent mothers. This notable lack of proper mothering corresponds to, and reinforces, the evacuation of the bourgeois home itself.
Both The Likeness and Broken Harbor creatively use the format of the crime drama to examine the impact of economic recession on the culture of contemporary Ireland, and to critique entrepreneurial forms of subjectivity. However, despite the immediate presence of socio-economic turmoil in these crime novels, it could be argued that their real subject matter remains a version of psychology that transcends history and economics, and their ultimate goal a kind of salvage operation on the nuclear family. French's development of a dual narrative structure, in which the detective's therapeutic journey toward psychic wholeness frames the investigation of a suspicious domestic milieu, allows for productive debate within the novel while it intensifies its psychological aspects. This narrative structure also enables a catharsis in the resolution of the first-person narrator's psychic and professional drama, alongside the final displacement of criminal guilt and criminalized pathology away from the police narrator (who still retains guilty feelings, in part because this condition is endemic to the entrepreneurial subject in general). Although some degree of ambiguity inevitably persists, criminal guilt is directed toward a disturbed individual assigned to the special category of madness. Psychological kinks--Lexie's essential asociality, Daniel's obsession, Jennifer's perfectionism, Ritchie's misguided empathy--are unearthed to mark out these characters, and to separate them from the well-intended, essentially moral police narrators, who usually manage to 'follow the rules.' At the end the narrator emerges chastened and changed. And, however unstable the condition of other families, the reader can rest assured that the family of the Dublin Murder Squad will continue their delicate work of detecting domestic secrets.
Tana French's stories effectively probe the anxieties of a troubled middle-class--identity theft, unemployment, downward mobility, housing foreclosure, property devaluation, chronic uncertainty--but, true to the genre of the police procedural, ultimately work to condense these anxieties into a quarantine-able threat with a recognizable human face. This narrowing of criminal responsibility, while it serves the emotional trajectory of the narrative, leaves the perpetrators of many unethical and criminal activities untouched. The generic demands of the procedural call for the identification and removal of an individual offender and not an analysis of a complex system. The impact of the criminogenic structures of postmodern finance capitalism may be registered, but these structures themselves remain beyond scrutiny. Yet by far the most widespread form of actual crime under finance capitalism, with the most detrimental impact on the public good, in Ireland and elsewhere, is the corporate tax evasion and underpayment of taxes that starve public institutions and infrastructures. It barely needs saying that these crimes are not the sensational acts of personal violence that circulate through the popular thriller or even the most subtle of police procedurals.l
Works Cited and Suggested Further Reading
1 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 286.
2 Robert P. Winston and Nancy C. Mellerski, The Public Eye: Ideology and the Police Procedural (New York: St Martin's Press, 1992), p. 8-9.
3 Stephen Knight, Crime Fiction Since 1800: Detection, Death, Diversity (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 219.
4 Long subsumed into the larger English tradition, novelists like L.T. Meade, Freeman Wills Crofts, and Cecil Day-Lewis (using the pen name of Nicholas Blake) wrote successful whodunits during the Golden Age, but featured English settings and English detectives who bear no trace of their authors' Irish nationality. Ian Campbell-Ross provides an extremely useful survey of some of the major Irish contributions to crime-themed literature in his introduction to the collection, Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the Twenty-First Century (Dublin: Liberties Press, 2011).
5 Campbell-Ross, Down These Green Streets. p. 30-31.
6 Fintan O'Toole, "From Chandler and the 'Playboy' to the Contemporary Crime Wave," in Down These Green Streets. p. 360.
7 Peadar Kirby, "When Banks Cannibalize the State: Responses to Ireland's Economic Collapse," Socialist Register 2012 (New York: The Monthly Review Press, 2011), p. 249-268.
8 The annual unemployment rate for 2012 was 14.8%, a number which many commentators believe to be an underrepresentation due to the high rate of emigration in search of work in England, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere. Unemployment has held steady at just above 14% for the past few years. Ciara Kenny, "Unemployment Rate Remains at 14%," The Irish Times Thurs May 2, 2013, www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/ireland/. Also see Kirby, as well as Peter Rigney, "The Impact of Anti-Crisis Measures and the Social and Employment Situation: Ireland," Report from the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, 28 Feb 2012.
9 Intriguingly, Fintan O'Toole compares the "dislocations of rapid social and technological change experienced in boom-time Ireland" with the economic conditions that helped generate a new wave of crime fiction in the U.S. in the 1920's and 30's, connecting the careers of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler to the effects of Fordism, mass production, and the Depression in the U.S. Down these Green Streets, p. 360.
10 Claire Coughlin, "Paper Tiger: An Interview with Tana French," in Down These Green Streets, p. 336.
11 Randy Martin, Financialization of Everyday Life (Philadelphia: Temple U. P., 2002), passim. "The current financial mode is not simply spectacle...but an invitation to participate in what is on display as a fundamental part of oneself. Finance is not only the question of what to do with the money one has worked for, but a way of working that money over, and ultimately, a way of working over oneself" (p. 16-17). Martin's book was written out of the U.S. context, and before the recession of 2007, in part in response to the influx of guides to financial planning and the slew of management self-help books which purport to navigate workers and bosses through the flexible new economy (such as Tom Peters 1999 bestsellers The Brand You 50 : Or : Fifty Ways to Transform Yourself from an 'Employee' into a Brand That Shouts Distinction, Commitment, and Passion! ). However, Martin's insights into the mutations in subjectivity under finance capital in the U.S. certainly resonate with the even more dramatic impact of financialization during the Irish boom.
12 Martin, Financialization, p. 36. See also Max Haiven's essay "The Financial Crisis as a Crisis of Imagination," Works and Days. 59/60. Vol 30, Issues no 1 & 2 (2012). A helpful short definition of the concept of 'finance' comes from Haiven as "the commodification of risk: the transformation of future possibilities into present-day contracts to be bought and sold." p. 191.
13 Martin, Financialization, p. 103-106.
14 Martin, Financialization, p. 109.
15 Martin, Financialization, p. 20.
16 Richard Glover, "The Financialization of Social Life and the Socialization of Finance:Reviewing the Concepts & the Literature," wordpress, 2010, p. 2. richardrglover.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/financialization-of-social-life.
17 Martin, Financialization, p. 31.
18 Tana French, The Likeness (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), p. 9.
19 Likeness, p. 245.
20 Likeness, p. 46.
21 Likeness, p. 46.
22 Likeness, p. 338.
23 Likeness, p. 337-338.
24 Janet Maslin, "The Case of a Dead Doppelganger Turns a Detective's Life Inside Out," The New York Times, July 17 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/books/17/masl/.
25 Several reviewers, as well as French herself, have noted the influence of Donna Tartt's The Secret History (1992), an academic mystery about murder within a secretive tight-knit group of Classics undergraduates at a liberal arts college, and a text which similarly straddles the boundary between literary fiction and crime fiction.
26 Raymond Williams, "The Bloomsbury Fraction," in Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism. Ed. Francis Mulhern (London: Longman, 1992. pp. 125-167.), p. 138-9.
27 famously including such influential English intellectuals and artists as John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Dora Carrington, and others.
28 Likeness, p. 317.
29 Likeness, p. 337.
30 Likeness, p. 164-65.
31 Likeness, p. 439.
32 Likeness, p. 438.
33 Likeness, p. 443.
34 Likeness, p. 449.
35 Likeness, p. 446.
36 Likeness, p. 335.
37 Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition. trans. Joshua David Jordan (Amsterdam: semiotext(e), 2011), p. 52. For Lazzarato, such terms as finance capitalism or finance economy are more accurately described as debt economies (p. 24) as the condition of indebtedness, once widely entrenched, has far-reaching effects, involving processes of subjectification and asymmetrical social relations. In the new debt economies, debt acts as a "'capture', 'predation,' and 'extraction' machine on the whole of society, an instrument for macroeconomic prescription and management, and as a mechanism for income redistribution. It also functions as a mechanism for the production and 'government' [in the Foucaultian sense] of collective and individual subjectivities." p. 29.
38 Tana French, Broken Harbor (New York: Viking Penguin, 2012), p. 11-12.
39 French locates this as "somewhere out past Balbriggan" in "North County Dublin" in her interview with Claire Coughlan in Down These Green Streets. p. 341
40 Harbor, p. 13.
41 Harbor, p. 393.
42 Harbor, p. 406.
43 Harbor, p. 416.
44 Harbor, p. 380.
45 Harbor, p. 381.
46 Harbor, p. 442.
47 Harbor, p. 434.
48 Harbor, p. 436.
49 Fredric Jameson, "The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism, and Land Speculation." The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern (London: Verso, 1998), p. 188.
50 Many thanks to the kind friends and colleagues who read and commented on various drafts of this essay: Francesca Sawaya, Kendra Hovey, Jennifer Desiderio, Sandra Cookson, Dan Shoemaker, and Julie Kim.