On a street in a working class neighbourhood in Dublin, in the mid-eighties, nineteen year old Francis ‘Frank’ Mackey stands outside, in the middle of the night, waiting for his girlfriend, Rosie, with whom he is about to make a run for England. She never shows up. Twenty years later, Frank, now a member of Dublin’s undercover police force, receives a call from his panicked relatives. Someone has found Rosie’s suitcase in an abandoned house at the end of the street, and Frank’s theory that Rosie left for England without him is dashed to pieces. It isn’t long before Frank is sucked back into the neighbourhood he’s left behind twenty years ago and, more poignantly, is reluctantly yet firmly embraced by his chaotic, messy family.
The premise of the novel is simple, but Faithful Place isn’t a simple book. The mystery is as much a plot point as Frank’s complicated family, the politics of working class Dublin, even metaphysical matters such as familial ties. Frank’s family is not merely a collection of quirky Irishmen. This is not a Wes Anderson movie. Instead, they are all individuals with their own coping mechanisms to deal with years of abuse at the hands of poverty in general and Frank’s alcoholic father in particular; whereas Frank’s older sister Carmel feels guilty for not having done more, his older brother Shay is resentful for Frank being the one that got away, the one who, as he sees it, avoided responsibility. In a strange way the novel isn’t even all that concerned with the fate of Rosie. Which isn’t a point of criticism, necessarily; it gets there in the end, it just takes a scenic route to get there.
The characters are larger than life, which, I suppose, is inevitable. Frank is an undercover cop; unafraid, a slick talker, manipulative. Though he’s a big, strong guy, he mainly gets his way by being cunning and devious, which is refreshing. There’s some fairly cliché background noise – he has a gorgeous ex-wife with whom he bickers, of course, and an angelically blonde daughter, because guys in books like this always do, though to be fair there’s more to his child than meets the eye.
Franks’s family, too, are mostly made up from the Irish Cliché Starter Set, then refined a little. There’s the mammy – she insists on being addressed as such – cantankerous and devout; the alcoholic, abusive husband, and the siblings, men of few words and women of many. The other major character is the neighbourhood itself, slowly gentrifying, but not enough that rumours of Frank’s return don’t spread like wildfire. The neighbourhood is an impenetrable unit that judges and decides, and regards Frank as one of their own as well as a traitor.
The novel could have been refined a bit more; Frank’s family dynamics are a little too overblown, the novel’s conclusion is not so much put up as caked on, and though Frank is an interesting character, he’s also sorely lacking in relatable qualities. It makes a heavy-handed point about familial responsibility but doesn’t explore it beyond taking a very firm position, and there’s a bit of wasted potential there. Nevertheless, I liked Faithful Place. It’s not perfect, but it’s far ahead of most of the genre and I was surprised by how refreshing it felt. I’d never read Tana French’s work before, but I’ll definitely give it another go.
