That is a perfectly reasonable question for anyone to ask who is reading Tana French’s novel The Searcher for the second time.  Or third.

When I first read this book, I opened to the first page and read:

When Cal comes out of the house, the rooks have got hold of something.  Six of them are clustered on the back lawn amid the long wet grass and the yellow-flowered weeds, jabbing and hopping.  Whatever the thing is, it’s on the small side and still moving.

That’s the first paragraph.  It’ the one I want to talk about, but it might not be too far afield to note that further down on that same page Cal considers putting the creature out of his suffering.  He does not because: a) the rooks have been here a lot longer than he has and b) it would, therefore, be “pretty impertinent of him to waltz in and start interfering with their ways.”

The rooks are an important part of the little Irish town to which Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago cop, has moved to have a relaxed retirement.  The rooks never become a major character; they never reveal or interfere with the plot.  That would be pretty impertinent of them.

On the other hand, I now know, having read the book once, that they keep coming back and that Cal thinks about them in several revealing ways.  And since I know that about the story, I was surprised to see them as the major actors—it is hard not to say “a major metaphor”—of the book.  They didn’t have rooks in Chicago; they are new to Cal.  And if they had had rooks, Cal would very likely have felt that he needed to do something about them.

But that was his old life (cop) and his old setting (Chicago) and we learn in this first paragraph that Cal is not feeling that way about Ardnakelty in the west of Ireland.  He is not a cop here.  Ardnakelty is not Chicago.  The rooks were here first. He bought a fixer upper and hopes to live there.

I know what is going to happen in Cal’s life.  It starts to happen two pages later.  But it begins when someone or something disturbs the rooks.  Cal doesn’t care that something disturbed the rooks because that feeling he used to get on the back of his neck—he calls it “an alarm system”—has been turned off.  Why would he need it in the empty spaces of western Ireland?  

Then one night the back of his neck flared.  This is a feeling he learned to pay attention to in his many years as a cop in Chicago and he turned it off when he got to Ireland because he knew he wouldn’t need it.  But something disturbed the rooks.  

The rooks are his alarm system and he doesn’t know how not to pay attention to them.  He just doesn’t know what it means.  Very shortly, of course, he finds out.  The behavior of the rooks is confirmed by the feeling on the back of his neck a few nights later and the plot is off and running.l

When you start the book for the first time, you take the rooks for granted, just as Cal did.  But when you know that their behavior means something and that Tana French is using the rooks to get you ready for it–that’s what I know now–you read it differently.  You know that someone or something would have to play that part.  We have to see Cal as carefully fitting in to his new surroundings.  You know he would not have thought it “impertinent” to check out what a bunch of crows were doing in an alley in Chicago.  But “impertinent” is a real thing here and that hesitancy is emblematic of how he hopes his life will be here in Ireland.

Fortunately for all of us readers, Cal’s impertinence is about to be trampled underfoot and there will be a very engaging story about rural Ireland.  With the rooks returning regularly to remind us that they are there.