Why I read it: I wanted an audiobook, and it was available at the library. I’ve enjoyed some of the other Tana French books I’ve read.

This thing was long! 22 hours! And audio means you can’t skim the boring parts (I know I could speed up the audio, but I am not that kind of person.) Nonetheless, I got through it in nine days. I could not seem to stop listening, at the expense of sleep.

I found the reading (listening) experience a strange combination of riveting and boring, exasperating and propulsive. Toby Hennessy, the first-person narrator, is another one of Tana French’s out-of-touch-with-himself male characters, reminding me a bit of the one from “In the Woods,” the first Tana French book I’d read (and nearly my last, so annoying did I find Rob Ryan).

What I liked: the actor reading the book was excellent at distinguishing the different speaking styles of the characters in a fairly dialogue-heavy book. Uncle Hugo was especially delightful. I found myself a bit in love with poor, dying Uncle Hugo just because of his way of speaking. French is great at creating atmosphere: you can almost clock her going through the various senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste, as she puts you in a scene. The house where much of the action takes place is vividly depicted and almost a character in its own right. There is a heavy use of foreshadowing (which I think I noticed especially because the other book I was reading at the same time, “Birnam Wood,” has none at all) which creates an atmosphere of sinister disquiet. Whenever you think things are bad, Toby is ready to remind the reader the REALLY bad thing hasn’t happened yet.

The virtues of this book are also in some sense its weaknesses. All the atmosphere-building makes for a slow burn — sometimes a bit too slow. If I’d had a dollar for every time Toby says “For a long time….” I would quit my job and live off my savings. The conversations go on and on and on. Many childhood good times are recalled; the shrubbery of the garden is lovingly described.

Part of what makes it claustrophobic is that while Toby is an admiring observer of the sensory world around him, he’s not notably insightful about either other people or himself. He’s suffered a head injury early in the book, which affects his memory and his outlook, but still. We are stuck in his head, and it’s not the greatest place to be. I couldn’t help wishing Uncle Hugo were telling this story, or one of Toby’s cousins, though I recognize that would be an entirely different novel. I guessed who the real killer was well before Toby learned it, which made me proud of myself, until I realized that Toby isn’t that bright, and this was no doubt French’s intention all along — to make the reader feel smart.

French is acclaimed for writing entertaining murder mysteries that also have a literary flair and social commentary, and it’s possible I am less on board with this idea than I used to be. That is, I think the rigorous demands of murder mysteries can often prompt characters to do things because the plot needs them to, not because this is what the characters WOULD do (I remember thinking how “Broken Harbor” was extremely clever right up until the point when this happened), making the literary flair seem more like window dressing than intrinsic to the work.

“The Witch Elm” has a lot to say about privilege: Toby comes from a comfortable middle-class family, has always been handsome and popular, the sort of person who sailed through life taking his good luck for granted. Being attacked by burglars and suffering a head injury leaves him neurologically impaired in a way that might be permanent. For the first time, he’s that person others look at with pity, don’t take seriously. The events of the story force him to realize just how oblivious he’s been to the problems of people he thought he was close to: namely, his two cousins, who are his age and for all intents and purposes like his siblings.

The book also concerns itself with a related problem of identity, of nature vs. nurture, if you will. There’s a lot of: if this one particular thing had not happened, would this person have turned out the way they did? Or was the character baked into the person, just waiting to emerge all along?

It was interesting and yet it began to seem a little too much, again I think possibly because of the ponderousness of Toby as a narrator. But then, he has to be the way he is, to make the point the book is trying to make.