Tana French: Gloriously sordid
One of my favorite things to do on or before a vacation is to hit a bookstore and prowl through the mystery and true crime sections, searching for books that combine reasonably deft writing with somewhat gothic content: child disappearances, dark forgotten secrets, people living double lives. Arty stuff, you know, on that thin-thin line between a soupcon of sleaze and ewww, that’s totally gross! I went through a Flowers in the Attic
A couple years ago, the pay dirt came in the form of Tana French’s In the Woods
Here’s the set-up. Back in the Eighties, three twelve year olds in Knocknaree, Ireland ran off to play in a nearby forest. Two vanished from the face of the earth. The third was found days later, covered in blood and trauma. He couldn’t talk; when he did, he couldn’t remember. His memory never came back.
Scrolling forward to the now, the survivor has grown up, picked up a BBC accent, changed his name to Rob Ryan and become a member of the Garda Síochána in Ireland… and he’s just, in typical fiction-cop fashion, decided not to tell his bosses about this extremely good reason as to why he shouldn’t be investigating yesterday’s murder of a little girl in the Knocknaree woods.
Potentially standard fare, right? Except French takes you off-road so fast you’ll get whiplash.
First, there’s her prose. Here’s the opening, which I oblige each and every one of my various UCLA classes to marvel upon:
Picture a summer stolen whole from some coming-of-age film set in small-town 1950s. This is none of Ireland’s subtle seasons mixed for a connoisseur’s palate, water-color nuances within a pinch-sized range of cloud and soft rain; this is summer-full-throated and extravagant in a hot pure silkscreen blue. This summer explodes on your tongue tasting of chewed blades of long grass, your own clean sweat, Marie biscuits with butter squirting through the holes and shaken bottles of red lemonade picnicked in tree houses. It tingles on your skin with BMX wind in your face, ladybug feet up your arm; it packs every breath full of mown grass and billowing washing-lines; it chimes and fountains with bird calls, bees, leaves and foot-ball bounces and skipping chants, One! Two! Three! This summer will never end. It starts every day with a shower of Mr. Whippy notes and your best friend’s knock at the door, finishes it with long slow twilight and mothers silhouetted in doorways calling you to come in, through the batts shrilling among the black-lace trees. This is Everysummer decked in all its best glory.
Evocative much? Folks, it’s all like that.
Then there’s the fact that narrator Rob gives us all of a page to roll in the pretty words before he explicitly tells us he’s a big whopping liar: oh, he may be well-spoken and good-looking, but you can’t trust him any further then you can throw a city bus. Fortunately he’s got a nice partner–the sweet, vulnerable, witty, brilliant Cassie, heroine and narrator of The Likeness
There’s all these little glimpses into what Ireland is like, under the skin.
Then there’s that central mystery: what really happened to little Adam Ryan? Where did his friends go, and does it have anything to do with the dead little ballerina who turned up days before, on the Stone Age sacrificial altar in the wood?
This book is French’s first, and it closes on a strange note. Its impact didn’t hit me until days later… it sank in slowly, how fine a book this is. So if you feel a little flummoxed upon reaching the end, you’re in good company.
If you’d rather not be flummoxed until you’re enraptured, though, there’s an easy solution: Read Faithful Place
(Faithful Place
How much do I love Tana French? I’ve written her fan letters that beg her to write faster, letters wherein I all but offer to make her soup and do her laundry, where I shamelessly hint that she should become my total BFF and send me advance copies of, I dunno, her grocery lists. But don’t take my word for it. Grab up one of these books. I promise you, she’s getting better with every single word.
You have a limited amount of time, so why spend it reading about things that suck or are only kind of okay? Favorite thing EVER is not a review site. We're unrepentant fans, and this is the stuff we love. Hope you like gushing, because we're about to embarrass ourselves.
Okay, sold. That description is aMAzing! How many books does she have, all told?
Just the three, so far, but she seems to be writing one a year.
I read some more of In The Woods and I really liked Faithful Place, because for all that it was a mystery it was straightforward, and the characters were alive and it’s like I could see it in my head as if I was watching a BBC Mystery, classy and good with amazing acting and she’s got such real dialogue you can hear them talking Irish and all. And this one is fucking enthralling though: the guy tells you straight off he’s a liar but you’re all oh he’s a straight shooter and now it’s all murky and you’re beginning to think he’s dodgy as fucking hell and the story is SO CREEPY and good.
If ftE is only for me and Matt alone to be introduced to awesome shit we never would have found on our own, it is so fucking worth it.
Also I totally guessed it was [spoiler] early on in Faithful Place. Woo! I m so smrt s-m-r-t!
You are a big smartypants of smartyness!
IN THE WOODS is one of the creepiest things I’ve ever read.
So: in the woods SO CREEPY and if we get to Portland this weekend I’ll chew your ear about the books, all three and have you ever read The Secret History? I am totally writing an ftE about that one.
SO CREEPY. Alyx and I have discussed the ending at length. I’d adore chewing it with you.
Yeah–it’s such an interesting book! Why do we not have the next one from her right now??
Oh wow, good pimping. If I wasn’t already there, you’d have me.
I read all of them, by the way, and they were fantastic. I’m lending them to a friend, and I may not get them back, but I will buy them again then, because I loved them and will definitely re-read them.
They’ll make amazing movies.