engleski

The Mystery of Girlhood in Tana French's "The Secret Place"

All six of Tana French's crime novels are consistently narrated in the first person, with the exception of her fifth novel, The Secret Place (2014). Narration in The Secret Place alternates between a first-person narrator, detective Stephen Moran, recounting the renewed murder investigation at St Kilda's, an exclusive boarding school for girls, and an omniscient third-person narrator reporting past events that led up to the murder. The employment of this narrative device serves to emphasize the similarities between past and present events, the enclosed and socially stratified world of the girls' private school and the highly elite and competitive realm of the Dublin Murder Squad, the intense friendship of the four girls and the nascent relationship between future police partners Moran and Antoinette Conway, etc. However, the novel especially focuses on the private aspects of the crime as well as the investigation itself. Not only does the crime happen on the grounds of a private school for girls and the main suspects are two tightly knit groups of friends, but Moran's and Conway's investigation can also be labeled "private", or even "secret", because it is carried on in an unofficial manner: Moran obtains the clue because one of the girls knows him from a prior investigation, Conway and Moran are not officially partners and Moran is not a member of the Murder Squad, etc. But above all, accentuating the private is deeply connected to the central theme of the novel, the power of friendship between teenage girls and the "mystery" of girlhood. This part of the novel is deliberately told by an omniscient, objective narrator that demonstrates the negative, murderous effects of the girls' isolation – in the school, within society, and in their own misguided attempt to protect themselves from the dangers of the outside world.

Tana French ; girlhood ; gender ; class ; crime fiction

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