Setting and symbolism in The Witch Elm

friggin' Toby

When I think of the word “setting,” I tend to think of concrete places, be they as big as a city or as small as a chair in the corner of a room. That said, I do think “setting” encompasses less concrete environments, such as a system composed of a network of laws and policies, people, offices, bureaucracies, etc. (In my first book, I think the criminal justice system is part of the story’s setting, even beyond those scenes that took place in the courthouse or police station.) Today, I want to talk about the more common idea of a setting (physical place) and what it can lend a story; specifically, I wanted the excuse to chew on what Tana French accomplished in her 2018 standalone The Witch Elm.

she’ll wreck ya

Setting can do a lot more than just keep your characters from talking in a void. It can:

1. Create an atmosphere that levels up the reading experience

2. Provide conflict, be it the main attraction or additional obstacles

3. Reflect an important character

4. Express a theme, message, or important emotion

And probably other stuff, too. Tana French did all four, though it took me a long time to notice.

Let’s start with the easy stuff.

Atmosphere

In books (and in restaurants), I love atmospheric settings: those that create a distinctive mood that enhances my experience. In stories of suspense, my favorite kind of atmosphere is gothic–that perfect blend of comfort, beauty, and romance or some other expression of love, mixed with coldness, dread, horror, and wickedness.¹ It makes the reading experience, at once, relaxing and titillating. The description of the comfy arm chair, the steaming cup of tea, and the plants glowing in the sunlight on the window offer me respite from the pleasurable-yet-miserable sense of dread I feel about the plot that’s unfolding. And they are the perfect foils to that plot. An otherwise delightful setting enhances the grotesqueness of the evil. 

The Witch Elm is one of my favorite examples of what I’m trying to describe here. (Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, too, but I already wrote about that.)

The Witch Elm is written in first person past, narrated by Toby, who is both charming and charmed until he’s viciously beaten during a burglary at his apartment. He survives the attack but is left with brain damage and severe physical injuries that affect his mobility and his ability to speak. Eventually, he moves into the Ivy House, a property owned by his uncle Hugo and frequented by the entire family. Hugo is dying of cancer, and Toby cares for him while Hugo, of course, is quietly caring for Toby as well. 

The Ivy House is the perfect gothic house: “The ivy was still there, lush and glossy with summer, but the house was more dilapidated than it had been in my grandparents’ time; nothing dramatic, but there were rusty patches on the iron railings where the black paint had flaked away, the spiderweb fanlight was dusty and the lavender bushes in the snippet of front garden could have done with some pruning.”² The house has a sitting room where the extended family likes to gather; the uncle has a study where he traces genealogy for work; there is an untamed garden off the house with an old witch elm (or “wych elm”) growing in it.

Speaking of the witch elm…

Conflict

In this novel, the setting also supplies the story’s main conflict: one day the family discovers a body decomposing in the center of that very witch elm.

The discovery, and thus the setting, sparks a series of mysteries: whose body is it; how did they die; how did they get in the tree; who is responsible?

As the police answer those questions, conflict continues to mount for Toby. The body belonged to Dominic, a former friend of Toby’s and classmate of his cousins Leon and Susanna. It seems Dominic died by strangulation with a garrott made from a sweatshirt string. In the house, police find evidence that the sweatshirt belonged to Toby. 

Character and theme

In this instance, I think the setting’s symbolism of Toby’s character goes hand-in-hand with its expression of a major theme or message of the novel, so I’m chunking them together. This is also the part of the piece where I really get into spoilers, so no hard feelings if you jet.

Stripped of his memory and charisma, Toby struggles to put the police off their suspicion of him. People tell the police of a conflict between Toby and Dominic that summer that Toby cannot remember, at least in part due to his brain damage after his attack.

When Toby learns that Dominic was widely known to be harassing Leon and was even suspected of sexually assaulting him, Toby thinks he has found Dominic’s true killer. When he confronts Leon, Susanna comes to Leon’s defense and says that Toby clearly doesn’t remember what was going on around the time of Dominic’s death. Dominic had been harassing Susanna as well, growing bolder and more threatening with each interaction. Toby begins to doubt his own innocence, suspecting that he might have hurt Dominic if he knew what Dominic had been doing. 

Toby tells Uncle Hugo his worries, who, in an act of sacrifice, confesses to Dominic’s murder, is jailed, and dies.

Safe from discovery, Susanna and Leon tell Toby that they killed Dominic themselves. As Susanna recounts the escalating torture she received from Dominic, Toby repeatedly stops himself from saying aloud that she should have told him everything so that he would have understood how bad it was. He is mortified by what she and Leon experienced and wishes he had known more so that he could have helped them.

Meanwhile, one of the detectives working Dominic’s case is unsatisfied by Hugo’s confession and continues investigating. He comes to Toby with one final twist of evidence. Shortly before the murder, someone was emailing Dominic from an anonymous email account, pretending to be Susanna and imploring Dominic to pursue her sexually. Toby was the one writing the emails. I will forever be chasing the feeling I had when I read this part of the book. I was SO invested in Toby–the Toby who survived the attack and was navigating the world in a completely different body. I believed him, because he believed himself when he thought he would have helped his cousins if he’d understood the gravity of the situation. Turns out, he had understood—he was just an apathetic asshole who thought it was a funny prank to encourage the situation.

When I got to this part of the book, I remember whispering “Toby, no,” aloud. I was so shocked but so in it. It was completely real for me. Completely believable that the old Toby existed but also that a traumatic experience could alter someone’s psyche so drastically that they would find their past actions unthinkable, especially when the trauma stripped that person of the privileged position he had once enjoyed.

literally every “Michael - Toby” pic that comes up on google is how I felt at this point in the book

I’ve left off the last few bits of what happens, just in case you want to read the book. A little motivation to see how it ends. 

Now for how the setting ties into this f-ing incredible character work Tana French did.

When I first finished the book, I was really hung up on the character piece of the story and didn’t spend much thought on setting beyond how atmospheric it had been. I didn’t start analyzing the setting until almost a year later, when I was preparing slides on setting for a writing class, and I made myself list all the things I thought setting could accomplish. That was when the realization hit me: Toby IS the garden and the tree with the body rotting inside. Like the garden before it grew wild from neglect, before his attack, Toby had been gorgeous and charming, but there was a wickedness, callous and cruel, rotting at the center of him. 

I went upstairs to Ben, who’d also read the book, and I told him “Toby IS the tree with the body rotting at the center of it!” And he was like “Who’s Toby?” Because we’d read it a year before. But once I caught him up he totally agreed! And from there, I had that awesome thing where the mental dominoes start falling and you understand this whole other layer of an already great story.

Some major themes of the story were identity, privilege, and family history. The setting was certainly reflective of these themes. Toby’s old memories of the Ivy House do not square with the “dilapidated” reality that faces him now. The paint has chipped; the garden has long gone untended and has grown wild. He has nostalgia-soaked memories of his childhood at the house with his cousins that don’t square with the harsh reality of his true relationship with Susanna and Leon. Toby’s face, body, mobility, mental agility, and speech do not square with the Toby who lived before the attack. Toby’s memories and understanding of himself, as a person, do not square with what he learns from his cousins, friends, and his own words put to email. The book’s setting drives these themes home for the reader.

Before you’re like “it’s too much! Tana French is too great! Why do we bother studying her!” let me just say: well, yes, but also, she probably built this level of intricacy into the story as she worked on many drafts.

she’s a witch!!!!!!!

I noticed in the acknowledgements that she thanks her brother for sending her “the case of Bella in the Wych Elm.” Turns out, the wild idea of a body stuffed down a wych elm and discovered years later was not French’s. But French built the garden around the elm; the identity of the person whose death and body were concealed; the family who lived in the house on the edge of the garden; and the character of Toby. The incredible impact of French’s setting in this story is probably the result of many, many layers of work, not a single flash of effortless, unattainable brilliance. (Maybe effortful, unattainable brilliance, but why not study her just in case it is attainable?)

Practice notes

And in pursuit of attaining Tana-French-level writing, here are some notes on how she wrote her incredible setting into this novel.

Many scenes opened with description of the setting before the real action of the scene began. This is how Chapter 4 opens:

We woke early; my Ivy House bedroom, high above the garden, let in a lot more light than the one in my apartment. Melissa had work. I got up with her, made us breakfast–Hugo was still asleep, at least I hoped he was just asleep–and walked her to the bus stop. Then I made myself another cup of coffee and took it out onto the terrace. 

The weather had changed in the night; the sky was gray and the air was cool and still and saturated, ready to rain. The garden, beneath the great lines of trees, looked as if it had been abandoned for centuries. The big pots of geraniums on the terrace burned in a crazed, frenetic red against it all.

I sat down at the top of the steps and found my cigarettes…

In scenes that started with dialogue or other action, French was quick to anchor the reader in place. This is how Chapter 5 opens:

Susanna swooped Sallie onto her hip, grabbed Zach’s arm in the same movement and hustled the pair of them back up the garden, talking firm reassuring bullshit all the way. Sallie was still screaming, the sound jolting with Susanna’s footsteps; Zach had switched to yelling wildly, lunging at the end of Susanna’s arm to get back to us. When the kitchen door slammed behind them, the silence came down over the garden thick as volcanic ash.

The skull lay on its side in the grass, between the camomile patch and the shadow of the wych elm. One of the eyeholes was plugged with a clot of dark dirt and small pale curling roots; the lower jaw gaped in a skewed, impossible howl. Clumps of something brown and matted, hair or moss, clung to the bone.

The four of us stood there in a semicircle, as if we were gathered for some incomprehensible initiation ceremony, waiting for a signal to tell us how to begin. Around our feet the grass was long and wet, bowed under the weight of the morning’s rain.

She even peppered setting through dialogue and the beats between. Example:

“And then,” Susanna said, “I found out he’d spent the party nicking the garden key.”

She sighed. “That was what did it,” she said, “in the end. It meant he could get to me here, any time he wanted. Here.” An iron spike of outrage through her voice, a jerk of her head to the house, and for a moment I saw the way it had been: warm, shabby, happy, us noisy and tangled in our fort and our contraptions, Hugo calling Dinner! up the stairs through the fog of savory smells.

“And he did, too. A couple of days later Hugo sent me out to the garden to get rosemary, for something he was cooking. Remember where the rosemary bushes were? Right down the back? …”

I could probably keep going but this thing has gotten silly long so I’m going to end my love letter to Tana French here.

I’m really excited for Andromeda’s book club to start next week. We’ll be working our way through Martin Edwards’s The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators. (Andromeda in the posts and me and others in the comments.)

he big

I hope to discover a laundry list of books worth studying!

Any thoughts on The Witch Elm, if you’ve read it, or any other book that taught you something about setting?

1. Petition to come up with another word that basically means gothic but doesn’t make people think specifically of beautiful old houses because sometimes a story is what I’d call “gothic” but it’s set somewhere that you’d be like “why are you calling this gothic?” Like Andromeda’s upcoming book, THE DEEPEST LAKE. It has a beautiful house in it but most of the book takes place outside the house: elsewhere on the grounds of the property, in the city, or out on the lake itself. So “gothic” feels like the wrong word. But the setting is simultaneously beautiful and makes me feel like I’m traveling to Guatemala myself, but also stressful, dread-inducing, downright terrifying at different points. How do you say the setting is “scary-cozy” but sound literary?

2. Except maybe that there’s no suggestion of ghosts, which are often present in “gothic” stories, but let me use the word because THERE IS A GHOST OF SORTS COMING.