Fifty Books Project 2023

In The Woods by Tana French

What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective.  Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass.  It is the core of our careers, the endgame of every move we make and we pursue it with strategies painstakingly constructed of lies and concealments and every variation on deception.

Re-reading that opening, I have to admit that while this crime novel was terribly enjoyable, it did not quite live up to its own hype.  It promises a great deal and falls a bit short on delivery, though, in truth, if it had only promised what it did ultimately delivered, that would be plenty.

Twenty years before the book starts, twelve-year-old Adam Ryan was playing in the wooded area of a Dublin suburb with two friends, Jamie and Peter.  The three were in some way attacked:  Adam was found covered partially in blood and in such shock that he was unable to remember what had happened; Peter and Jaime disappeared and were never seen again.  Despite the best efforts of detectives, Adam was never able to remember any part of the incident, Peter and Jamie were never seen again, and their killers were never caught.  Adam’s parents moved him to a private school in England and moved themselves to a different suburb.  He began using his middle name, Robert, to avoid publicity and moved on with his life, with almost everything that happened to him before age twelve erased from his mind.

Now, Robert Ryan is a successful detective with the murder squad in Dublin.  No one knows of his past.  However, another grisly murder has been committed in the same suburb, in the same woods.  A twelve-year-old girl is found dead, and keeping his obvious emotional connection to the site secret, Rob and his partner Cassie accept the assignment to the case.  It becomes clear fairly quickly that solving the two cases is the secondary issue in the novel – what we are really following is the slow destruction of Rob Ryan’s character and career as he proves unable to handle the stress of solving one crime and trying to remember the other. 

That story is powerful and sad – I found myself rooting for Rob and hoping he would overcome his returning memories and the insecurities they have given him – that he would pull himself together.  I was also rooting for his relationship to Cassie, the powerfully intelligent and quirky woman who is his partner.  Their relationship is at the heart of the book and the idea that their uniquely perfect partnership will blossom into love is on everyone’s mind – Rob’s parents, Rob’s roommate, the other detectives on the case, and of course mine while I was reading.  Her character is strong and fascinating and gives the novel an strong undercurrent of feminism.

It is difficult to discuss both the pleasures of the novel and its disappointments without giving away the ending – though it is foreshadowed in the opening and throughout as Rob, our narrator, points out moments of failure and laments that his entire life would be different if at these key points in the narrative he had made other choices.  Suffice it to say that he is not the hero that solves these cases.   One of the powerful impacts of the story is that he does not transcend his limitations:  that while a kind of perfection is held out to him – justice, the recovery of his own past, true love – he is left with a rather mundane life, slogging through a rather mundane career as a civil servant.

What is ultimately disappointing in the novel is in the details of the detective work.  The contemporary case is made very complex, with the possibility that it involves political corruption, family dysfunction, occult mysticism and a twenty-year dormant serial killer all held out at one point or another.  We get deep and intricate details of Dublin police procedure (the combination of French’s research and her imagination made me feel I could work for the Dublin police) and see Rob and Cassie follow a number of important areas of investigation much further than is usual in fictional police procedurals.  Then the case ends up hinging on a fairly obvious detail that (though French does not present it this way) should have been dealt with in the first hours of the investigation.  While there is an element of surprise, it comes more from French’s misdirection than complexity.  The denouement of Rob and Cassie’s relationship also seems to come from nowhere.  Rob, who has been so original and fully fleshed out, has issues with relationship and commitment that are at least ordinary, if not actually clichéd.  

This is French’s first novel, and in the dozen years since its publication she has written six others and become a regular resident of the best seller lists.  That success is well-deserved:  this novel transcends the limitations of its genre through crisp and visual writing, a truly impressive gift for character, and an unusual approach to resolution in a crime novel.  I missed the characters when the book was over and I have noted that Cassie Maddox appears in another of her novels.  I look forward to seeing what she has been up to.