A captivating mystery rich with loss and fragile hope
Written: Aug 30 '07 (Updated Sep 01 '07)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: A detective's struggles with betrayed innocence illuminate complexities in his life and, perhaps, ours.
Cons: An important character may seem too vaguely defined.
The Bottom Line: Tana French has written a terrific first novel. Some readers might find its resolution to be flawed, but others will think it's inspired.
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| eplovejoy's Full Review: Tana French - In the Woods |
Two children vanish on a terrible day in a small community in Ireland in 1984. They leave behind blood that cannot be identified and a boy who must struggle for the rest of his life with his inexplicable survival of the unknowable misfortune that ripped away his friends. Twenty years later, a girl is murdered in the same patch of woods. The survivor of the earlier horror, now a detective, risks his career and his partner's as he grasps for answers that might always evade his reach.
Loss and the threat of more loss pervade Tana French's riveting In the Woods. But hope permeates the novel as well, as it can in life even when we are challenged beyond what we think are our limits. French's detectives are a new team but they work together with an ease that feels long-practiced. Their sophisticated awareness of themselves and each other enables them to persevere even when they confront many mysteries that seem impenetrably dark.
Central to In the Woods is Detective Robert Ryan, our narrator. He struggles to remember what happened 20 years ago to his friends, Germaine ("Jamie") Elinor Rowan and Peter Joseph Savage, and to make sense of why he was spared. Even after 20 years, that struggle reveals new insights:
There was a time when I believed, with the police and the media and my stunned parents, that I was the redeemed one, the boy borne safely home on the ebb of whatever freak tide carried Peter and Jamie away. Not any more. In ways too dark and crucial to be called metaphorical, I never left that wood.
Despite the decades-old anguish with which he grapples, Ryan has a sly sense of humor. It flashes throughout his narrative, as when he describes why he has always resisted suggestions that hypnotic regression might reveal what his memory has buried: "I worry that I might come out of hypnosis with that sugar-high glaze of self-satisfied enlightenment, like a seventeen-year-old who's just discovered Kerouac, and start proselytizing strangers in pubs."
Ryan likes his partner, Cassie Maddox, personally and professionally. But thankfully not romantically. The ease with which they work together pays off for the reader in many ways that are more interesting than they would be if Ryan and Maddox became a couple. We grow to like them. As with our friends in the real world, we can enjoy their company even as we wish we could steer them away from decisions that seem ill-advised.
One of those could be Ryan's decision to hide from his superiors his connection to the earlier case that might relate to the new murder. His first name is Adam and his going by his middle name of Robert seems too flimsy a subterfuge to withstand the scrutiny that will come with a high-profile case. The anxiety of wondering when -- or if -- the brass will learn of Ryan's past and how badly it will damage the detectives' careers is one of many emotions French manipulates with masterful deftness.
In the Woods is rich with uncertainties. This makes it fitting that what might be its chief flaw will strike some readers as a strength. With Ryan and Maddox, French has created fully realized characters who seem like real people. She does less with a character who is important to the new murder. There are such people in the world and French's restrained description will persuade those who have encountered them in either literature or life. To anyone who has not, French's descriptions of this person will likely seem inadequate.
In the Woods forces contemplation of tragedy. We like to tell ourselves that people whose loved ones have been violated gain some comfort from knowing what happened. But a mind forced to contemplate a single horror is no calmer than a mind plagued by thousands of horrible possibilities. We can try to build barriers between the awful and us, but memory cannot be contained. It transcends our barriers at its whim. Closure is a myth.
French knows that. She weaves throughout In the Woods the grim possibility that Ryan will not learn anything about what happened to his friends and him 20 years ago. She suggests also that he and Maddox might not solve the present mystery, or may do so only incompletely.
French's storytelling is subtle and the uncertainties she weaves are engaging. Life seldom ties everything up neatly. In the Woods is true to that part of life and many others.
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NOTE: So much about In the Woods made me want to give it a five-star rating. I did at first. But the more I think about the ending, the more it comes up a little short. It lacks the polish of French's prose. I've lowered the rating a bit so that when French writes her next book, my rating of that one can reflect what I trust will be its superiority.
Recommended:
Yes
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eplovejoy
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Member: Peter William Warn
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