Searching for Solid Ground in The Searcher
The stakes in The Searcher aren’t as explosively high as in Tana French’s other novels. Instead, she explores the shifting moral landscape of modernity through the lens of a missing teen, his vulnerable younger sister, and the retired cop who helps her with the search.
Review by Peter Blair
Love is whatever you can still betray… betrayal can only happen if you love,” reflects Magnus Pym, the central character of John Le Carre’s novel A Perfect Spy. Like Le Carre, Tana French is a writer whose characters know betrayal. Le Carre writes about spies, French about detectives, but both write about betrayal—by colleagues, communities, friends, or family. French’s latest novel, The Searcher, is no different.
French herself has described The Searcher as having “a flavor of a Western, almost, in that it’s the retired gunslinger being dragged out of his retirement for one last job.” Its premise bears some traces of the genre, as it involves a thirteen-year-old girl working with a retired law enforcement figure to track down the person who killed her male relation. The retired cop in this instance is Cal Hooper, a former Chicago detective who left the force early and bought a fixer-upper in the Irish countryside. The girl is Theresa (Trey) Reddy, whose beloved older brother Brendan has disappeared. The official story is that he left home of his own accord, perhaps to live a better life elsewhere, or to escape local trouble, but Trey believes he was abducted. When she hears that the new “blow-in” (read: interloper) used to be a cop, she asks him to help her find out what really happened.
Though it contains its own dose of betrayal, The Searcher is a departure from some of French’s earlier novels, which position the reader to expect an apocalypse—you’re aware that something explosive is waiting around the corner. The true nature of the crime will be unveiled and the revelation will destroy lives, careers, psyches, and relationships. The Searcher is quieter. The rhetorical stakes are lower; it’s more about healing than destruction.
The novel is about more than moral disorientation alone, if morality is construed narrowly. It’s about existential disorientation more broadly, and the possible remedies for it.
French’s novels are often intertwined with their economic, social, or political contexts. Her 2012 novel Broken Harbor is about a triple homicide, but it is also about Ireland’s economy after the 2008 financial crash, which ended the country’s “Celtic Tiger” period. The murder victims live in a “ghost estate” created by the crash, and their economic misfortunes play a large contributory role in their deaths. The Searcher is similar. The context for Brendan Reddy’s disappearance is the hollowing out of the Irish countryside by mass exodus of its young, low marriage and birth rates, drugs, and deaths of despair. “We lost enough of our young men,” remarks one character, “There’s a few of them… that keep their feet on the ground regardless. The rest are hanging themselves, or they’re getting drunk and driving into ditches, or they’re overdosing on the aul’ heroin, or they’re packing their bags.”
American circumstances also feature in the narrative. Cal, we learn, retired early in part because of his involvement in a foot chase in which his partner fired on a Black eighteen-year-old bail-jumper. The partner believed, or at least claimed to believe, that the teenager was reaching for a gun. Cal doesn’t spend much time reflecting on this incident, and its importance in the novel is obscured by French’s choice to make Cal’s early retirement overdetermined (he also turns in his badge because of an unrelated subplot involving his daughter and his ex-wife). However, French makes it clear that the shooting shook him. In giving his account of the incident to Internal Affairs at the time, he backed up his partner’s story that the teenager was reaching for his pocket when his partner fired:
It might be true—Cal thinks it is, he thinks that probably is what he saw. That doesn’t alter the fact that he didn’t say that to IA because he thought it was the right thing to do. He did it because he knew everyone around him believed it was, and he himself had no ideas. He was so deafened by the locust buzz of all the anger and the wrongness and the complications surrounding him, he couldn’t hear the steady pulse of his own code any more, so that he found himself having to turn to other people’s—a thing that in itself was a fundamental and unpardonable breach of his own.
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In an interview, French said that, in writing this novel, she was thinking about the nature of morality today, as she sees it. As one might expect with an Irish novelist, the contemporary moral landscape is defined in contrast to Ireland’s Catholic past:
I was thinking a lot about how complicated it’s become to try and navigate your way through right and wrong. It used to be, I get the sense, quite easy. You were told, in Ireland by the Catholic Church, but you were told wherever it was by a religion what was right and what was wrong, and for most people, that was the end of the story and you knew. It was a very solid thing. Nowadays it’s much more complex. I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all. It’s a good thing we’re being forced to work to figure out for ourselves what constitutes right and wrong. But it’s also constantly shifting… I was thinking about that a lot: How somebody who doesn’t like morality being complicated navigates a world where it’s getting more and more complicated. And how that defines his right and wrong in the midst of all that.
This theme also shows up elsewhere, like when Cal explains to Trey his understanding of the difference between etiquette (purely conventional), manners (“treating people with respect”), and morals (“the stuff that doesn’t change”), while reflecting on how younger generations don’t maintain these distinctions. But the novel is about more than moral disorientation alone, if morality is construed narrowly. It’s about existential disorientation more broadly, and the possible remedies for it.
The most memorable aspect of the novel is the father-daughter bond that forms between Cal and Trey, and the way it develops over shared, skilled work.
More than the crime itself, or the efforts to uncover it, the most memorable aspect of the novel is the father-daughter bond that forms between Cal and Trey, and the way it develops over shared, skilled work. At the novel’s start, Trey is too wary to ask Cal straight off to help figure out what happened to her brother. She hangs around his property but doesn’t open up. Cal earns her trust by teaching her to do some basic carpentry. He also teaches Trey to hunt with his Henry rifle, to dress a rabbit they catch, to cook. After the novel’s final revelation, the story ends more or less where it began, with Cal and Trey working together to repair a desk.
Trey comes from a poor, broken home—her father, an unreliable figure, left the family to try to make money in London. She and her siblings are seen by the area as “white trash,” delinquents who don’t attend school and who can’t be trusted. It’s clear that nobody has taught her much of anything and that her life lacks solid moorings, especially after the disappearance of her brother. In learning from Cal, her surrogate father, her life begins to be redeemed, bought back from the disorientation that surrounds it.
Peter Blair is the Program Director for the Augustine Collective at the Veritas Forum. Before joining Veritas, he worked at the American Interest and the Thomistic Institute. He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of Fare Forward, and currently is Editor-at-Large for FF. He tweets at @PeterAWBlair and runs The Pelican, a pro-life newsletter.
The Searcher was released on October 6, 2020, by Penguin Random House. Fare Forward thanks the publisher for providing our reviewer with an advance reader copy of the novel, which you can purchase from their website here.
