Tana French’s ‘Broken Harbor’ Suffers from Bad Dialogue — You Read That Right

I became interested in Tana French’s books because of a friend’s recommendation. This friend shared some of my tastes. We loved the novels of Ruth Rendell and P.D. James. My friend said French’s books were just as good.

Maybe she’s right about French’s first novel, In the Woods. I haven’t read that one, but people seem to speak about it in a breathless way, and it won several awards. But I’ve read two of French’s novels, The Likeness and Broken Harbor, and I’ve had a hard time with both of them.

I read The Likeness in preparation for this review. I thought it would be a good idea to familiarize myself with French’s style.

The Likeness is the tale of a young woman, Cassie, who impersonates a murder victim to try to learn about the circumstances of the victim’s death. Cassie pretends that the woman did not, in fact, die; she insinuates herself into a tightknit group of friends — a group that may or may not include the murderer. As Cassie gets to know the friends, she falls in love with them. She struggles to remain impartial, and it’s especially hard because she’s playing two roles at once — inspector and cheerful, innocent grad student.

The Likeness had a gripping climax. But the novel was far, far too long. It was bloated. The dialogue was often painfully false. The characters sometimes felt like props — not like actual people. No one had a sense of humor. What’s worse, clichés were presented as evidence of humor. But the clichés weren’t humorous; they were just clichés.

These facts surprised and disappointed me, because French has a towering reputation. Her novels are consistently well-reviewed. She is a bestseller and a critic’s darling.

Anyway, I wasn’t really looking forward to Broken Harbor.

Let’s start with a synopsis.

This latest French novel is about an excellent detective, Mike “Scorcher” Kennedy, on the Murder Squad. Kennedy lives in Ireland, in a time not too far from our very own. The recession has recently hit. Houses are abandoned. Developments are rotting.

Kennedy is summoned from his desk to take on a new case. Several members of a family, the Spain family, have been murdered. Son, daughter, and husband are all dead. The wife, Jennifer Spain, is just barely alive, and who’s to say how long she will last?

Kennedy enters the Land of the Spain Case with a colorful assortment of friends, enemies, allies, and tricksters. There’s Kennedy’s assistant, a young man named Richie Curran who has a gift for empathy. There’s the nefarious Quigley, a greasy rival of Kennedy’s. There’s the snooty Dr. Cooper, who has to make each interaction as difficult and unpleasant as possible.

Rather quickly, Kennedy is faced with a series of daunting tests. Is one suspect as clearly guilty as he seems to be? Why did one of the victims post several ranting online accounts of a possible rodent intruder weeks before the murders occurred? How can Kennedy manage his severely disturbed sister, Dina, when he has so much work to do? How can Kennedy keep his memories of his own suicidal mother from bogging him down during this case?

I’ll leave it there. Just know that the climax is surprising and powerful. Like The Likeness, Broken Harbor has as its best feature a startling twist and resolution.

There’s one other thing I can praise about this novel. French has some interesting observations about murder and human behavior. A stalker is likely to kill you with several, unnecessarily zealous wounds; if you have just a slight cut, it’s unlikely you were assaulted by a stalker. (Actually, that insight is from The Likeness.) When an autopsy is performed, your skull might be forcibly cracked. Your face might be peeled back like the plastic on a frozen dinner. Your liver might be deposited on a scale and weighed (for reasons unclear).

Also, if a murderer is likely to die and can confess off the record, he or she will probably do so. (Perhaps this is simply for the relief of unburdening oneself.) It’s pointless to ask if there are signs of forced entry at a crime scene, because it’s very easy just to fake signs of forced entry.

If you are an investigator, your job is not to befriend and console the victims. The most compassionate thing to do is just to stick to the facts. This point may seem counter-intuitive: Shouldn’t you try to offer some emotional support? But French persuasively argues that detachment is the best modus operandi. Your job is simply to solve the case; solving the case will do more good, in the long run, than offering a shoulder to cry on.

I enjoyed thinking about each of these topics as French presented them.

But here is what I hated, just hated about this book.

French has a terrible habit of writing bad dialogue. This news startled me, because French seemed to boast about her dialogue-writing abilities in some press materials; she said that she would not write a line of dialogue that she couldn’t imagine herself saying on-stage. And yet characters are constantly interrupting themselves to use epithets and names. “Old son.” “Mikey.” “Dina.” This error is middle-school-level. When you are talking to someone, you don’t constantly stop yourself to address the person by name, or by a nickname. Even if you did, you would want to leave this tic out of your prose, because it slows down the narrative. Everytime the words “old son” appeared in Broken Harbor, I wanted to scream.

Like The Likeness, Broken Harbor is far, far too long. It could be trimmed by at least 100 pages. Critics were observing this unpleasant feature of French’s writing as early as The Likeness; it’s now inexcusable that she hasn’t addressed the weakness. Dialogues are frequently interrupted to provide lazy, obvious bits of narration. At one point, French stops a dialogue to tell us that her protagonist is stressed and experiencing heartburn. We could have inferred this information, and it contributes nothing to the story.

Part of the fun of reading is that, if the story is well-told, you have to meet the writer half-way; you have to supply some of the details, with your own imagination. French is too hasty to challenge the reader’s inferential skills. She seems to assume that the reader is not very bright — and this tendency is grating, to say the least.

Also, there are far too many flat characters. One or two here and there can be fun, like a bright orchid in a field of sunflowers. But nearly everyone in Broken Harbor is predictable and one-dimensional. Quigley is a cartoon character. The dirty next-door neighbors will always be weak-willed and dishonest. The protagonist will always be tough as nails. (At one point, French actually uses the phrase “tough as nails” — and here I wanted to put a bullet in my brain.)

So: shoddy dialogue, clunky, obvious bits of narration, and characters who are paper-thin. A writer’s job is to be both surprising and inevitable. With rare exceptions, French’s prose is both lazy and false.

I feel compelled to make these points because French’s novels have an unearned reputation for greatness. If you want to read a mystery, do yourself a favor. Pick up something by James, Rendell, or Donna Leon.