Brain Hijacked By Tana French
Feb. 21st, 2010 05:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kitewithfishI just finished reading a book I bought yesterday, one of those mysteries that actually will not let you stop reading until you get to the final page because you cannot stand the possibility of another second of not knowing.
It's been a while, but I just had my brain totally hijacked by Tana French's IN THE WOODS. And I am thoroughly unsatisfied with the ending, but I also absolutely know that any other ending would probably have left me annoyed and unconvinced- the way it worked out was perfect for the character.
Just as a note, this review contains no spoilers. Safe to read.
So, this novel is about the slow unraveling of Adam Robert Ryan's adult life as a Irish murder detective as he tries, and perhaps fails, to confront his childhood memories of a murder.
In the 1980's, three small kids hitched themselves over the back wall of a yard to go play in the woods. At six thirty that day, one of them missed dinner. By the time the search was over several days later, one child had been recovered. His fingernails were broken off into the bark of the tree he had been clutching for hours. His shoes had been poured full of another child's blood, and then put back on his feet. He remembered nothing about the events, and was shuffled off to boarding school and changed his name.
This is the set-up. This is the hook, but it's far from the whole story. The actual story is about the brokenness of childhood as seen by an adult, and how you can't really ever be the people that your childhood self thought you were going to be when you would one day become a grown-up. This is the story of a man whose future was stolen, who became a detective not to solve his own mystery but because he could not return to the person that he was supposed to be before he lost his childhood and his two best friends, and then proceeds to destroy his present for himself. This story breaks your heart.
And it's a story about a place- a patch of ground covered in trees. As we start the story, the woods are dying- the last days of an archaeological dig are coming to an end before a motorway paves the lot of it flat. But the woods themselves are as much a character in this as the rest of the cast. The woods hide the monsters who killed two little children and never gave them back, but the woods were also the best playground these kids had, the safe place they knew like the back of their hand.
And I've just finished reading it, and spoiled nothing for you, and here's the thing: I still want to keep reading. I want there to be more.
Crap. I think I've got another favorite author.
It's been a while, but I just had my brain totally hijacked by Tana French's IN THE WOODS. And I am thoroughly unsatisfied with the ending, but I also absolutely know that any other ending would probably have left me annoyed and unconvinced- the way it worked out was perfect for the character.
Just as a note, this review contains no spoilers. Safe to read.
So, this novel is about the slow unraveling of Adam Robert Ryan's adult life as a Irish murder detective as he tries, and perhaps fails, to confront his childhood memories of a murder.
In the 1980's, three small kids hitched themselves over the back wall of a yard to go play in the woods. At six thirty that day, one of them missed dinner. By the time the search was over several days later, one child had been recovered. His fingernails were broken off into the bark of the tree he had been clutching for hours. His shoes had been poured full of another child's blood, and then put back on his feet. He remembered nothing about the events, and was shuffled off to boarding school and changed his name.
This is the set-up. This is the hook, but it's far from the whole story. The actual story is about the brokenness of childhood as seen by an adult, and how you can't really ever be the people that your childhood self thought you were going to be when you would one day become a grown-up. This is the story of a man whose future was stolen, who became a detective not to solve his own mystery but because he could not return to the person that he was supposed to be before he lost his childhood and his two best friends, and then proceeds to destroy his present for himself. This story breaks your heart.
And it's a story about a place- a patch of ground covered in trees. As we start the story, the woods are dying- the last days of an archaeological dig are coming to an end before a motorway paves the lot of it flat. But the woods themselves are as much a character in this as the rest of the cast. The woods hide the monsters who killed two little children and never gave them back, but the woods were also the best playground these kids had, the safe place they knew like the back of their hand.
And I've just finished reading it, and spoiled nothing for you, and here's the thing: I still want to keep reading. I want there to be more.
Crap. I think I've got another favorite author.
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things that this made me think of
Date: 2010-02-22 05:49 am (UTC)The actual story is about the brokenness of childhood as seen by an adult, and how you can't really ever be the people that your childhood self thought you were going to be when you would one day become a grown-up. This is the story of a man whose future was stolen, who became a detective not to solve his own mystery but because he could not return to the person that he was supposed to be before he lost his childhood and his two best friends, and then proceeds to destroy his present for himself.
Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans traces very similar themes in a very different way. I don't know that you'd enjoy it but they might be interesting to compare.
Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore also deals with forest in the same sort of Jungian way -- simultaneously shelter and trap, with its own mysterious agency. A lot of his books do, actually, come to think of it (Norwegian Wood too maybe) but I think it's most fully developed there.
- tim, who apparently likes authors with japanese names