The Searcher

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-7

Chapters 8-14

Chapters 15-21

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Symbols & Motifs

The Absent Father

Absent fathers, whether physically or emotionally distant, are a consistent motif in the novel. Johnny Reddy, who abandoned his wife and their six children for a trip to London, is the most notorious absent father. According to Lena’s assessment, “Johnny was always a great man for the ideas […] not so great for making them happen” (58). While this directly refers to Johnny’s inability to execute his business ideas and provide income for his family, it also indirectly refers to the thoughtless way in which he fathered six children, without doing anything to raise them into decent citizens, capable of handling the world. Brendan’s lack of trust in his father forces him to model himself against Johnny. For example, he ensures that he keeps his promises and takes care of his younger siblings where his father will not. It also subconsciously causes him to despise authority figures in general—hence his rudeness to the teachers at school and Mart Lavin and his cronies. However, Brendan’s lack of a father ended in his death, as his inexperience led him to make risky plans that he was not prepared for. Therefore, as much as Brendan tried to be a better man than his father, he had not developed the skills to succeed as a fully-fledged adult.

Brendan and Trey’s experience of an absent father who irresponsibly brought children into the world without looking after the consequences, reflects Cal’s own experience. Cal grew up relying on his mother and grandfather when his father was elsewhere, siring half-siblings who Cal has little connection with. While Cal also modeled himself against his father and was far more responsible parent to Alyssa, Alyssa and Donna considered him inadequate because he lacked nurturing qualities. While Cal could easily conform to the patriarchal defensive ideas of fatherhood, he found that he could not provide the emotional support his daughter needed. Cal is a watershed figure, who needs to learn to embrace a more modern understanding of paternity.

On a larger scale, the motif of the absent father emerges as the reason for the gap between Ardnakelty’s older and younger generations. There is no link figure to go between them and ensure that the older men’s experiences are passed on to the younger. Instead, the generations are radically different gangs of men who inhabit the same territory. Cal and Trey’s friendship seems to be a prototypical example of experience mentoring youth. Cal’s passing on of skills such as carpentry to Trey, whilst getting to know her, is an important step in healing the rift between Ardnakelty’s old and young.

Irish Ambiguity

The quality of ambiguity as it relates to Ireland, is a consistent motif throughout the novel. The changeable weather, landscape, and people, who are never exactly what they seem, ensure that Cal experiences culture shock. His attitude to this changeableness is a barometer for his feelings about Ardnakelty.

At the beginning of the novel, in the month of September, when the weather is at its mildest, Cal enjoys the ambiguity as being wholly different from the stark precision he is used to. Although he “doesn’t fully have the hang of the local accent […] he likes it—rich as the air, with a needle-fine point that makes him think of cold river water or mountain wind—but chunks of the conversation go right over his head, and he gets distracted listening to the rhythms and misses more” (6). This passage, full of similes likening the locals’ speech to the natural world, indicate that Cal is in the happy state of incomprehension. The fact that he is listening to the idiosyncratic rhythms of the speech and is not upset by missing the meaning, indicates that Cal is in tourist mode. He has not integrated in the community but appreciates the change of scene. He is also unaware that being influent in local ways will damage him.

However, as the novel progresses and Cal is continually presented with challenges for his failure to appreciate that the weather, the landscape, and the people cannot be taken at face value, he becomes increasingly frustrated. The discovery that Trey, the child he automatically took for a boy, is to everyone else’s knowledge, a girl, is the final straw. His desire to banish Trey from his life as he focuses on refurbishing his home, indicates that Cal is close to giving up trying to be part of the community. However, when Trey turns up the next day and pronounces him as the reliable aspect of a landscape that is always changing, Cal has no choice. He thus learns to immerse himself in the ambiguity, most of all, in the lack of definitiveness between right and wrong. At the end of the novel, when the good of Cal and Trey’s friendship is evident, coexisting with the injustice of Brendan’s killers lack of punishment, Cal appreciates that right and wrong are not so clear cut as the laws that govern his own moral code. He embraces ambiguity as he learns to do good in a corrupt system. As French was writing at a time when the acts and responsibilities of the American police force are being debated, Cal’s pragmatic attitude to right and wrong, is consonant with the times he lives in.

The House

The house is an important motif in French’s novel. Unlike Cal’s former town Chicago, where many people live in tower-block apartments, Ardnakelty’s houses cut idiosyncratic figures in the rural landscape. Both by nature and by location, the characters’ houses are symbolic of their social standing.

Cal’s house, which is a “low, grey undistinguished house built sometime in the 1930s” (8) is symbolic of his desire to keep a low profile. The fact that he found out about it from a picture on the internet and bought it at a distance, emphasizes his outsider status in a community that is accustomed to people inheriting farmland. His method of purchase also aligns him with modernity and the trend that Mart fears will come to pass: Rural houses going derelict and then being bought up by moneyed foreigners with no connection to the land. The state of the house, which was abandoned for years by the O’Shea family, as the younger generation have emigrated, illustrates the symptom of Ardnakelty’s aging population and the lack of youth investment. The house, which is full of religious Marie O’Shea’s Catholic statues, is a figment of the past in increasingly secular, modern Ireland.

The Reddys’ isolation from mainstream society is expressed by their mountain home, which is only accessible by a steep climb and walking through bogs and squelchy mud. Just as their house is inaccessible, the downtrodden, socially excluded Reddys are suspicious of strangers and not especially welcoming to them. The state of the house, “run-down, with the window frames peeling and sagging, and moss growing between the roof tiles” (112), indicates that this human-built structure has almost returned to nature, a state that matches the unmannered, sometimes feral nature of the Reddy children. Still, living in such conditions also means that the Reddys are agile and adaptable, like Trey, who can easily scale the mountain and learns to navigate the terrain between her and Cal to spy on him in his own home.

Brendan’s fixing up of the abandoned cottage, which Cal feels resembles his, indicates the scale of his ambitions. Though the prejudiced town would castigate Brendan to the shambling Reddy house and so keep him in place, he chances to reclaim a cottage from the mountain people, cleaning it and fixing it up enough to facilitate the needs of his out-of-town friends in Dublin. The ordered state of the house indicates that Brendan is methodical, rather than the slap-dash caricature of the rumor mill. Thus, as Cal gains a different impression of Brendan, the interior of the homes in the novel reveal aspects of character that are not otherwise obvious.

Although the private homes are ostensibly refuges where people can keep their secrets and the public house Seán Óg's is the locale of community debate, such distinctions are crossed. While Cal gets the message that the locals know about his interference in the Brendan case at Seán Óg's, he also monitors the activity at the entrance of his home, as he knows that Mart may appear at any moment and learn the truth about his activities. Cal’s elaborate ritual of buying the biscuits Mart likes to stop him coming too close to his home is an example of this. When Mart actively trespasses in Cal’s home, interpersonal boundaries are crossed, as Mart acts in the larger interest of defending the community against Cal’s plan.