One of the most enjoyable things about reading Tana French’s novels is her wonderful language. I’ve been thinking a little though about whether or not the vivid, sensory voice always fits with her characters.

Take, for example, Broken Harbor‘s  narrator Scorcher Kennedy. A driven and compulsive murder detective, he has (no big surprise in a Tana French book) a terrible childhood secret that, when revealed, does a lot to explain his manic-defense-mode working style and his need to alphabetize his bookshelves. OK, he reads, but check out this description of early-morning drive back into Dublin from a mostly-abandoned housing development thirty minutes outside of town:

The haunted blackness of the estate, scaffolding bones looming up out of nowhere, stark against the stars; then the smooth speed of the motorway, cat’s-eyes flicking in and out of existence and the moon keeping pace off to one side, huge and watchful; then, gradually, the colors and movement of town building up around us, drunks and fast-food joints, the world coming back to life outside our sealed windows. (p. 169)

There is also this, where Kennedy is remembering interrogation rooms where he finally got an admission of guilt out of a suspect:

I remember every one. I save them up, a deck of richly colored collector’s cards to be kept in velvet and thumbed through when the day is too long for sleep. I know whether the air was cool or warm against my skin, how light soaked into worn yellow paint or ignited the blue of a mug, whether the echoes of my voice slid up into high corners or fell muffled by heavy curtains and shocked china ornaments. (p. 385)

There’s more of this passage and I almost can’t bear to leave out, but you get the idea. The deeply felt and closely observed language of these thoughts doesn’t seem consistent with what else we know about Kennedy, who as a cop has a tendency to black-and-white thinking, and is so guarded in his relationships with others that he gladly accepts the burden of loneliness rather than risk revealing certain personal details to his co-workers.(And did I mention that he alphabetizes his bookshelves?)

Kennedy’s voice as a narrator also shows how intensely—and physically—he experiences heightened emotions. His spine snaps, the blood shakes in his throat, electricity shoots along his skull and down to the base of his spine. Before I actually took the trouble to make a list of all these physical sensations I was putting them in the same category as the type of quoted passages above. Now I think they’re just good writing.

So—given Tana French’s gifts as a writer, I’m not surprised she would want to give her narrator such a poetic voice. I’m just saying it would be less noticeable if (for example) she used a different point of view. But she has other very important goals for using a first-person narrator. And while I am noticing the seeming disparity between the character and his voice, I have to say that it does nothing, really, to diminish how much I enjoy her books.