Broken Harbour

“‘Grand,’ said the uniform. He would have done the chicken dance if I’d told him to, he was so relieved that someone was taking this thing off his hands. I could see him itching to get down to his local and throw back a double whiskey in one gulp. I didn’t want to be anywhere except inside that house. ‘Gloves,’ I said to Richie. ‘Shoe covers.’ I was already flipping mine out of my pocket. He fumbled for his, and we started up the drive. The long boom and shush of the sea rushed up and met us head-on, like a welcome or a challenge. Behind us, those shrieks were still coming down like hammer-blows.”

This passage characterizes murder detectives as different from uniformed police officers, as Scorcher wants to be on the scene of the murder, rather than desperate to get away from it. It also subtly shows the difference between the experienced detective, Scorcher, and the novice, Riche, through gesture. Scorcher flips his gloves and shoe covers out of his pocket deftly, while Richie fumbles for his. French uses simile in this passage to describe sensory details: She likens the sounds of the sea to a welcome or a challenge, but those sounds meld with Fiona’s wails, which are described as strong and harsh like hammer-blows. Vivid auditory details that are both natural and human are presented similarly, suggesting the connection between the landscape and what happened in it.

“I stayed in the doorway longer than I needed to. It takes a while to wrap your head around a scene like that, the first time. Your inner world snaps itself away from the outside one, for protection: your eyes are wide open, but all that reaches your mind is streaks of red and an error message. No one was watching us; Richie could take all the time he needed. I kept my eyes off him.”

This passage describes an experience very few people can relate to: viewing a grisly murder scene for the first time. French includes vivid physical details that characterize the unique quality of the experience, like the inner world snapping away from the outer one and seeing streaks of red and an error message. The use of the second-person point of view (“you”) also brings the reader closer to the experience. The passage also develops Scorcher’s character—although he is experienced and brusque, he is also patient with Richie, giving him time and privacy to process what he is seeing.

“I know this isn’t what we get taught on the detective course, but out here in the real world, my man, you would be amazed at how seldom murder has to break into people’s lives. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it gets there because they open the door and invite it in.”

This passage introduces one of the novel’s themes: The Question of Agency Versus Randomness. Scorcher’s suggestion that there are usually choices on the victim’s part that facilitate murder is important to establishing both the case and his worldview. As a detective, this belief helps him search for the underlying factors that can help explain what happened; as an individual, this belief is part of how he copes with the reality of his mother’s death by suicide when he was a teenager.

“I didn’t say a word. I was so angry that all that would have come out was a roar. Everything I knew about this case had lifted itself high, heaved itself upside down and come slamming down on top of me. This wasn’t the lookout post for some hitman hired to get back money or drugs—a professional would have cleaned up before he did the job, we would never have known he had been there. This was Richie’s mentaller, bringing all his own trouble with him.”

Scorcher uses a physical description of an abstract idea to make the passage more experiential and vivid, with the violence of the action underscoring its dramatic effect. Making this realization something that appears to move in space helps make an unrelatable experience—investigating a murder—feel more vivid and immediate. Scorcher’s anger is indicative of his character and worldview that atrocities like this are usually not random. Discovering Conor’s hide appears to be evidence that there is no logical explanation for the murders, which contravenes his belief system.

“I looked out over the water, into the night that was coming in on the tide, and I felt nothing at all. The beach looked like something I had seen in an old film, once upon a time; that hotheaded boy felt like a character from some book I had read and given away in childhood. Only, somewhere far inside my spine and deep in the palms of my hands, something hummed; like a sound too low to hear, like a warning, like a cello string when a tuning fork strikes the perfect tone to call it awake.”

French layers several similes in this passage to make it more vivid and Scorcher more relatable. The similes relate both to memories of the past, with his past self as old familiar book, and to the ominous future, with his feeling like the sound of a tuning fork awakening the cello. In the last sentence, the anaphora of the repetition of “like” adds to the musical rhythm of the sentence. The syntactical form echoes its content. Though it isn’t revealed until later, the importance Scorcher assigns to the beach is the result of his own childhood trauma.

“She was fighting to sit up. She was much too weak to do it, but not too weak to rip stitches trying. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said again. I cupped a hand around her shoulder and pressed down, as gently as I could. ‘There was nothing we could do.’ The moment after those words has a million shapes. I’ve seen people howl till their voices were scraped away, or freeze like they were hoping it would pass them over, prowl on to rip out someone else’s rib cage, if they just stayed still enough. I’ve held them back from smashing their faces off walls, trying to knock out the pain. Jenny Spain was beyond any of that. She had done all her defending two nights before; she had none left for this. She dropped back on the worn pillowcase and cried, steadily and silently, on and on.”

Jenny’s upset is characterized by how Scorcher and Richie view it. They are sympathetic because it appears Jenny has been victim to a heinous crime; they don’t yet realize that her distress is caused by the realization that she is still alive. Scorcher elsewhere suggests that the moment after notifications is important because it can help show whether someone is a suspect or not. French highlights the emotional intensity of this passage and increases the characters’ empathy for Jenny, which decreases suspicion about her as a suspect, conforming to the crime genre’s conventions by obscuring the identity of the murderer. In the last sentence, the repeated “and” constructions separated by commas—“steadily and silently” and “on and on”—creates an ongoing rhythm that echoes Jenny’s crying.

“The smell of the sea swept over the wall and in through the empty window-hole, wide and wild with a million intoxicating secrets. I don’t trust that smell. It hooks us somewhere deeper than reason or civilisation, in the fragments of our cells that rocked in oceans before we had minds, and it pulls till we follow mindlessly as rutting animals. When I was a teenager, that smell used to set me boiling, spark my muscles like electricity, bounce me off the walls of the caravan till my parents sprang me free to obey the call, bounding after whatever tantilising once-in-a-lifetimes it promised. Now I know better. That smell is bad medicine. It lures us to leap off high cliffs, fling ourselves on towering waves, leave behind everyone we love and face into thousands of miles of open water for the sake of what might be on the far shore. It had been in our man’s nose, two nights before, when he climbed down the scaffolding and went over the Spains’ wall.”

This passage emphasizes the connection between Scorcher’s past and the events of the current case via setting. He characterizes the smell of the sea as connecting to an animal instinct that compels people to take reckless actions. French’s syntax turns the adverb “once-in-a-lifetime” into a noun, “once-in-a-lifetimes,” which emphasizes the enticing potential and open-ended nature of those events. The passage also reflects the novel’s exploration of the theme of The Essential Animal Nature of Humans with the simile suggesting that the impulse can pull people as “mindlessly as rutting animals.”

“I waited for the rest, but Conor was waiting too: just watching me, with those swollen red-edged eyes, and waiting. Most confessions begin with It wasn’t like you think and go on forever. Killers fill up the room with words, trying to coat over the razor edges of the truth; they prove to you over and over that it just happened or that he asked for it, that in their place anyone would have done the same. Most of them will keep proving it till your ears bleed, if you let them. Conor was proving nothing. He was done.”

Through Scorcher’s perspective, the narrative describes a common characteristic of murder confessions based on his experience then directly juxtaposes that experience with Conor’s behavior. The short, declarative sentences at the end of the passage emphasize Conor’s difference from the usual, loquacious confessions Scorcher has observed from murderers. His references to the “razor’s edge” of the truth illustrate his understanding of the damage it causes, foreshadowing how the truth of this case will fundamentally reshape his perspective.

“And once we actually got into the car, oh my. How I love cars. I’ve seen guys who practically took baths in pure bleach after they finished doing their business, but did they bother to clean their cars? No, they did not. This one’s an absolute nest of hairs and fibres and dirt and all things nice, and if I were a betting man, I’d bet you plenty that we’ll get at least one match between the car and the crime scene.”

In this passage, French uses dialogue from Larry, from the Bureau, to characterize what goes into a murder investigation. Larry is a minor character, but he is significant because he exemplifies the black comedy used by some in the profession to cope. His use of a rhetorical question and his immediate answer suggest an amused curiosity about murder suspects and his enjoyment of exploiting their failings to convict them.

“When I think about the Spain case, from deep inside endless nights, this is the moment I remember. Everything else, every other slip and stumble along the way, could have been redeemed. This is the one I clench tight because of how sharp it slices.”

French uses Scorcher’s retrospective first-person narration, offered from after the case’s resolution, to build suspense about what will go wrong in the investigation. At this point in the narrative, it isn’t yet clear that Richie has found, but decided not to mention, the crucial piece of evidence that implicates Jenny Spain. French again characterizes the truth as sharp and destructive.

“‘There was nothing to stop it being us. You want to say, ‘There but for the grace of God,’ only you can’t can you? Because that’s like saying God wanted them to be…It wasn’t God. It was just an accident; just luck. Only for luck…’ Her hand was white-knuckled on her husband’s and she was working hard to hold in a sob. It hurt my jaw, how much I wanted to be able to tell her that she was wrong: that the Spains had sent out some call on the sea wind and Conor had answered, that she and hers had made a life that was safe.”

The narrative uses a neighbor’s dialogue to further explore the question of agency versus randomness. The character’s impulse is to hope that there is an explanation that means something similar couldn’t happen to her family. This aligns with Scorcher’s worldview and insistence on believing there is a reason for most murders. The inclusion of a physical detail—the jaw pain—emphasizes how desperate Scorcher is to believe that murder is not random.

“In the second before I could open my mouth, it surged up inside me, sudden and powerful as flood waters and just as dangerous: the thought of telling him. I thought of those ten-year partners who knew each other by heart, what any of them would have said: That girl the other night, remember her? That’s my sister, her mind’s fucked, I don’t know how to save her…I saw the pub, the partner getting the pints in and tossing out sports arguments, dirty jokes, half-true anecdotes, till the tension fell out of your shoulders and you forgot your mind was shorting out; sending you home at the end of the night with a hangover in the making and the feeling of him solid as a rockface at your back. The picture was so clear I could have warmed my hands at it.”

This passage highlights the painful sensation of a possibility that hasn’t had the chance to become reality as Scorcher considers confiding in Richie. His projection of how it will affect their relationship is given in such specific terms that the narrative implies it is due to past experience. Instead, he decides to maintain his control and distance, but French includes vivid detail about the possible closeness and the sensory detail of its tangible warmth to emphasize how much Scorcher wants it.

“She said, flat and hard as a brick slamming down on stone, ‘No. Conor didn’t.’ She was as certain as she had been about Pat. She needed to be. If either of them had done this, then her past as well as her present was a mauled, bleeding ruin. All that bright landscape of ice creams and in-jokes, screams of laughter on a wall, her first dance and her first drink and her first kiss: nuked, humming with radioactivity, untouchable.”

French uses the metaphor of brick on stone to emphasize Fiona’s absolute refusal to consider Conor as the murderer. The polysyndeton in the last sentence emphasizes the numerous memories she stands to lose. The inclusion of radioactivity is an unexpected and jarring inclusion, which emphasizes the wrongness of murder encroaching on previously happy memories, rendering them “untouchable.”

“Tiny memories fell through my mind, blooming like flakes of flaming ash. Dina four years old and shrieking blue murder in her bath, clinging to Mum, because the shampoo bottle was hissing at her; I had thought she was trying to dodge having her hair washed. Dina between me and Geri in the back of the car, fighting her seatbelt and gnawing her fingers with a hideous worrying sound till they were lumpy and purple and bleeding.”

French uses simile to highlight the power of memory and its destructive power, like flaming ash. The memories are painful because Scorcher has been suppressing them, and they suggest that Dina’s mental illness wasn’t caused by their mother’s death, a conclusion that he has always wanted to believe. This passage illustrates how, over the course of the novel, Scorcher’s insistence on causal relationships is dismantled in both his personal and professional lives.

“After two weeks, our mother’s dress came up in a Cornish fishing boat’s nets. I identified it—my father couldn’t get out of bed, I wasn’t about to let Geri, that left me. It was her best summer dress, cream silk—she had saved up—with green flowers. She used to wear it to Mass, when we were in Broken Harbour, then for Sunday lunch at Lynch’s and our walk along the strand. It made her look like a ballerina, like a laughing tiptoe girl off an old postcard. When I saw it laid out on a table in the police station, it was streaked brown and green from all the nameless things that had woven around it in the water, fingered it, caressed it, helped it on its long journey.”

Scorcher’s mother’s dress serves as a symbol of the thwarted potential of her life: something beautiful that became stained by the sea. His memories of “her best summer dress” and the happiness that accompanied its wearing are bluntly juxtaposed with the image of the soiled dress found after her death. The fact that Scorcher had to identify a piece of clothing rather than a body emphasizes the fragility of life and how little was left of his mother.

“PLEASE READ!!!! Had some trouble getting live bait—finally got to a pet shop + got a mouse. Stuck it down on one of those glue boards + put it in the trap. Poor little bastard was squeaking like crazy, felt like shit about it but hey a guy’s gotta do what a guys gotta do right?? I watched the monitor practically EVERY SINGLE SECOND ALL BLOODY NIGHT—swear on my mothers grave I only closed my eyes for like twenty minutes around 5 am, didn’t mean to but I was shattered + just nodded off. When I woke up IT WAS GONE.”

The inclusion of Pat’s message from the wildlife site provides a different form of evidence gathering and varies the narrative style. Rather than finding this out via interview with one of the other characters, Scorcher and Richie can read about Pat’s experience in his own words. French uses the online medium to illustrate Pat’s mental state with disjointed and incomplete sentences and capitalization underscoring the depth of his distress.

“Sweet Jesus, Conor, that’s not how it works! We need to get on the property ladder!’ I go, ‘Like this? By going a million miles into debt for some dive that might never be a decent place to live? What if the wind changes and you get stuck like that?’ Jenny tucks her hand in my elbow and she goes, ‘Conor, it’s fine […] you’re being totally old-fashioned. Everyone’s doing it these days. Everyone.’”

This passage puts the Spains’ decision and struggles in the context of the property boom and bust in Ireland in the early 2000s. Pat and Jenny serve as a representation of the many couples who made similar decisions, in part because everyone else was doing the same thing. That the big conflict between the Spains and Conor was about the house is fitting in connection with the novel’s focus on the recession and home settings.

“Conor’s arms had loosened; his hands were cupped on the table, palms upturned, and his lips had parted. He was watching some slow procession of images move past a lit window, faraway and untouchable, glowing richly as enamel and gold.”

French uses the metaphor of a “procession” to illustrate the power of memory. Conor’s body language shows that he has sunken completely into memories in this passage. The vivid imagery of the memories “glowing richly as enamel and gold” contrasts Conor’s idealistic and nostalgic view of the past with his current circumstances.

“No street lighting, no outside lights in the Spains’ garden: once it got dark, he could have come over the wall and spent his evenings pressed against their windows, listening. Privacy should have been the least of the Spains’ problems, out among rubble and creeping vines and sea-sounds, miles of motorway from anyone who gave a damn about them. Instead, not one thing had been their own. Conor wandering through their house, pressing up against their late-night wine and cuddles; the Gogans’ greasy fingers pawing over their arguments, poking into the soft crevices of their marriage. The walls of their home had been tissue paper, ripping and melting to nothing.”

This passage highlights the tragic irony of how close Conor was to the Spains; their isolation is one of the reasons for the tragedy, but it was an illusion, as was their privacy. French uses clear physical descriptions to highlight the violation of privacy and the fragility of their home, particularly with the image of “greasy fingers” tearing at the “tissue paper” of their home.

“‘Come on, you motherfucker, you cocksucker, hit me, I’m begging you, give me an excuse—’ One thing was warm and solid: something on my shoulder, holding me in place, holding my feet down on the ground. I almost threw it off before I understood that it was Richie’s hand.”

This passage shows an uncharacteristic loss of control for Scorcher, who usually doesn’t lose his temper with suspects and has never struck one. It suggests how much the case has affected him, reinforcing how it has upset his fundamental worldview. The delayed reveal that the warm and solid thing is Richie’s hand shows how immersed Scorcher is in questioning Conor before he is interrupted, while that warmth and solidity also implies that, in Richie, Scorcher has a supportive colleague and friend.

“All those years of endless excruciating therapy sessions, of staying vigilant over every move and word and thought; I had been sure I was mended, all the breaks healed, all the blood washed away. I knew I had earned my way to safety. I had believed, beyond any doubt, that that meant I was safe. The moment I said Broken Harbour to O’Kelly, every faded scar in my mind had lit up like a beacon. I had walked the glittering lines of those scars, obedient as a farm animal, from that moment straight to this one.”

This passage makes the abstract concept of mental scars physical and capable of being visualized as glittering lines like a beacon. The simile emphasizes how powerful Scorcher’s memories and scars are in his life that they are tangible and capable of affecting his path. The moment is important to his character trajectory, as he realizes that his carefully cultivated control does not mean he is healed from his past trauma.

“There have been so many of them. Run-down rooms in tiny mountain-country stations, smelling of mould and feet; sitting rooms crammed with flowered upholstery, simpering holy cards, all the shining medals of respectability; council-flat kitchens where the baby whined through a bottle of Coke and the ashtray overflowed onto the cereal-crusted table; our own interview rooms, still as sanctuaries, so familiar that blindfolded I could have put my hand on that piece of graffiti, that crack in the wall. They are the rooms where I have come eye to eye with a killer and said, You. You did this. I remember every one. I save them up, a deck of richly coloured collector’s cards to be kept in velvet and thumbed through when the day has been too long for sleep.”

The passages use of vivid detail and a series of specific images highlights the depth of Scorcher’s professional experience. However, the tone of the passage is nostalgic, foreshadowing Scorcher’s decision to leave the profession. The metaphor of the memories as collector’s cards suggests memory as something that can be collected and interacted with purposefully as a form of comfort.

“For one last second, I saw Broken Harbour the way it should have been. The lawnmowers buzzing and the radios blasting sweet fast beats while men washed their cars in the drives, the little kids shrieking and swerving on scooters; the girls out jogging with their ponytails bouncing, the women leaning over the garden fences to swap news, the teenagers shoving and giggling and flirting on every corner; colour exploding from geranium pots and new cars and children’s toys, smell of fresh paint and barbecue blowing on the sea wind. The image leaped out of the air, so strong that I saw it more clearly than all the rusting pipes and potholed dirt.”

The narrative develops this alternate view of Broken Harbor through specific imagery that describes the potential of Broken Harbour as it could have been. The syntax of clauses separated by commas and semicolons connotes the manifold possibilities of the place: a long list of things that could have been. The prominence of this vision suggests Scorcher’s optimism for development and progress, and the ability to see things as they could have been despite his experiences with Broken Harbour.