Tana French’s In the Woods is a great book and one of the saddest I’ve read in a long time. French writes beautifully and the novel is haunting, lyrical, heart stopping, and heart breaking. It is a thriller, a story of friendship, a story of sorrow and loss that can never be made up, or fixed, or glossed over. One boy survives a summer’s expedition into the woods; his two friends do not and are lost forever. But the innocence — the optimism and the boyhood — of this boy are lost too, and he will never be whole.
The book begins with our narrator, Adam Ryan, telling us he is a liar. He is a police detective, assigned to the murder squad. As a detective seeking truth he must lie to cajole, trick, and encourage the truth to come out of witnesses, situations, evidence: “I crave truth. And I lie.“ Ryan is also the boy who went into the woods thirty years ago with his two best friends and the only one who came out again. He has no memory of what happened but the evening haunts him, constantly.
When another child, a slight girl of twelve, is found dead in the same woods, Ryan takes on the case and is pulled back into his past. Will he find out the truth of what happened to his friends in those woods? Will he find out the truth of what happened to this little girl? Working with his partner Cassie, Ryan begins a spiraling journey downwards into a case of dead ends, abundant lies, constant manipulations, and fear.
Truth — what we know, what we suspect, what we deny — is a big theme in the book. With truth goes responsibility, but the same goes for lies: when we lie or manipulate, we alter reality, and the responsibility is ours for whatever havoc is wreaked. Ryan blocks out the truth of what happened to him as a child: the truth is neither denied nor affirmed, and this limbo wreaks the most havoc — and pain — of all. Cassie cannot lie, it is not in her make-up: will this be her greatest weakness or strength? Lies are used against her, and even Ryan falls to the doubts sown through lies.
Friendship is another big theme in the book. There are a number of groups identified in the book, groups of sustaining friendship and groups of destructive friendship. The question of how far one goes to maintain the bonds of friendship, and how the bonds can be abused, is explored. When we see Ryan destroying the best friendship he has, the best chance he has of eventually finding some peace, maybe even some truth, the pain we feel is palpable. I wanted to jump into the book and shake him, and stop him from ruining everything.
That’s what this book does to you: it grabs you, holds you tightly and intimately. You care about Ryan as if he were a best friend, someone you love and sometimes hate, and someone whose sorrow you ache to relieve. He shares his deepest thoughts, his fears, his dreams and his drinking, his detective work and his long evenings spent in Cassie’s flat. You become his friend alongside Cassie, and know him even better, but you will be no more prepared for what is coming than she was.
This stunning book by Tara French is a must-read, a sorrowful and moving account of memory, manipulation, friendship, and regret, deep, deep regret, and the even worse horror of when there is no regret at all.
