◉ Novel Study
One of the great pleasures of Tana French’s novels is her descriptive writing, and she pulls out all of the stops in The Searcher, in part because the setting—the tiny West Irish village of Ardnakelty and the mountains behind it—is a key part of the plot. I touched on her descriptions briefly in my analysis of the opening chapters of the novel, but I think the topic warrants further exploration.
Cal is unusually alert to setting details because he is working to decode his new surroundings, and he still hasn’t been able to leave behind the cop radar honed over years on the job. Nothing is ordinary background noise to him. Take, for instance, this passage in which Cal is high up on the mountain, outside an abandoned house that a missing teenager, Brendan, had been using:
Up here has a silence that separates it from the lowlands. Down below, there’s always a lavish mix of birds fussing and flirting, sheep and cattle conversing, farmers shouting, but up here the air is empty; nothing but the wind and one small cold call like pebbles being tapped together, over and over again.
Cal is alert to the possibility that Brendan has been killed, perhaps at this very spot, and also that he and Trey—Brendan’s younger sibling, who has led him there—could be under surveillance by whomever caused the teen to go missing. The texture of the description establishes this spot as barren and dangerous: “empty,” “wind,” “cold,” the repetitive tapping of the birdsong. The words associated with the lowlands, on the other hand, are vibrant, alive: “lavish,” “fussing,” “flirting,” “conversing,” “shouting.” This passage is strategically placed after Cal has scanned the abandoned house for traces of blood and before he begins combing the exterior yard for clues—perhaps even a body. The description is bracketed by action, so the pace of the scene doesn’t flag, and its tone heightens the suspense.
Here’s another example, where French uses setting details to give a quick car trip an ominous flavor:
The road up into the mountains feels different in a car, rockier and less welcoming, like it’s biding its time to puncture Cal’s tire or send him sideslipping into a patch of bog. He parks outside the Reddys’ gate. There’s no shoulder, but he’s not too worried that another car will need to get by.
Note how French personifies the road, giving it the possible agency to harm Cal. The detail about the lack of shoulder is a more interesting way to emphasize the loneliness of this spot than stating it plainly.
French also regularly uses description to establish character—both Cal’s, since he is always our observer—and the character described. For example, while Cal is interviewing Eugene, a friend of Brendan’s, he notices the boy’s “features are finely modeled enough that plenty of people, himself included, probably consider him good-looking, but he’s got a skimpy jaw and no chin.” This description reinforces other details that establish Eugene as a self-centered narcissist; the details also convey Cal’s distaste for a young man he finds unserious and insubstantial.
Let’s look at one more example, of another minor character:
“Ah, sure, it’s a grand soft day,” the uniform says comfortably, putting his paper away and leaning back in his chair. He’s a few years younger than Cal, with a round face, a belly under construction and an air of having been scrubbed shiny-clean all over. Someone has mended a rip in his shirt pocket with tiny, careful stitches. “What can I do for you?”
This is the first time we’ve seen this character, a police officer in the nearby town. We don’t even have a name for him yet; he is just “the uniform.” French weaves the description between two dialogue lines that get us into the scene. The dialogue lines are standard enough that they fade into the background, allowing the descriptive details to stand out. These details convey the sense that the police station is a calm backwater; this officer, with his fresh-scrubbed shine and carefully mended shirt, is not accustomed to seeing rough action—and likely not inclined to jump into it if called. Through this subtle bit of description, French is showing us that if—when—Cal runs into a sticky situation, he’s probably going to be on his own to get out of it.
One last technique I want to call your attention to is French’s recurring strategy for opening chapters in a way that reveals the day and time, while also layering on character and setting details. Here’s a typical example, from the opening of chapter nine:
Cal has always liked mornings. He draws a distinction between this and being a morning person, which he isn’t: it takes time, daylight and coffee to connect up his brain cells. He appreciates mornings not for their effect on him, but for themselves. Even smack in the middle of a temperamental Chicago neighborhood, dawn sounds rose up with a startling delicacy, and the air had a lemony, clean-scoured tinge that made you breathe deeper and wider. Here, the first light spreads across the fields like something holy is happening, striking sparks off a million dewdrops and turning the spiderwebs on the hedge to rainbows; mist curls off the grass, and the first calls of birds and sheep seem to arc effortless miles. Whenever he can make himself, Cal gets up early and eats his breakfast sitting on his back step, enjoying the chill and the earthy tang of the air. The doughnut Trey brought him yesterday is still in pretty good shape.
What French needs to establish here is that it is the morning of the next day. The last sentence alone would have done most of that work, but the additional details tell us that Cal understands how his brain works and that his own sharpness is a matter of importance to him. We also see how sensitive he is to his surroundings. If he was able to find delicacy in “the middle of a temperamental Chicago neighborhood,” it’s not surprising that the beauty of his current surroundings feels like “something holy.” French has embedded a clue here about how Cal’s well-trained radar for people—and what they are capable of—has been dazzled and misdirected by this West Irish village. Cal comes to this recognition much later in the novel, but French is tipping her hand here so that the later revelation lands as certainty for the reader.
Takeaways
Be alert to the connotations of words when writing description and use them to establish mood.
Description is a place to pull out all of your specialized writer tools, like simile, metaphor, and personification.
What your point-of-view character notices—and doesn’t notice—can reveal just as much about that character as it does about whatever they are observing.
Weave snippets of description in between more active aspects of a scene—between a series of actions or in the white spaces of dialogue lines.
Use description to foreshadow future plot developments or character arcs.
Chapter and scene openings are opportunities for description that also establishes setting, date, and time.
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Keep exploring
This is one novel’s breakdown from Novel Study — my series reverse-engineering how bestselling books actually work, opening to ending. The full method, with all the charts, is collected in the books.
This post is collected in Novel Study, Book 1 of the series.
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