In the Woods by Tana French

Novelist Tana French bucks the trend to shorter, simpler stories. This first tale about the imaginary Dublin Murder Squad is a gripping psychological thriller 592 pages long.

Rob, the narrator, slowly unveils how his life was derailed by the sudden and violent disappearance of his two best friends at age twelve. In an effort to protect their son from the publicity of having survived whatever fate caused his pals to vanish, his parents moved house, sent him away to boarding school in England, and changed his name.

Decades later, Detective Rob Ryan is back in Knocknaree, working with his partner Cassie Maddox on a murder that took place close to where his friends vanished years before. The child victim is found in an archaeological dig, soon to become a highway. Could that be a clue?

Partners in policing, Rob and Cassie enjoy a deep and trusting friendship. In every way that matters, they have one another's backs. They have the good cop-bad cop routine down pat, and Rob sees their mutual trust as more profound than first love, which is "nothing, nothing at all, beside the power of putting your lives, simply and daily, into each other's hands." But when the present case seems to interweave with the cold case from his past, he begins to unravel, and so does this ideal partnership. Once convinced that he was "the redeemed one, the boy borne safely home on the ebb of whatever freak tide" carried off his friends, he must face the reality that psychologically, he "never left that wood."

The housing estate where he once lived, and where the murder took place, has a social hierarchy. Conscientious mothers at the middle-class end forbid their children to visit the rough end. As an investigating officer, Rob is filled with apprehension when he senses the world of the estate filled with "private, parallel dimensions," with "the dark strata of archaeology underfoot." A fox outside his window reminds him of a city that "barely overlaps" with the one he inhabits.

Through the perceptions of the troubled detective, French plunges the reader into the recent past, a time when "people held onto their innocence" tenaciously, and parents allowed their children to play in the woods without worrying. Rob then he pricks his own bubble, referring to the burden of "all we now know about" things once seemed to be "only unthinkable rumours" that took place elsewhere. In Ireland, Missing Persons is "jaded from taking too many reports on children kept after school or lingering over too many video games." This touches on a wider loss of a social "innocence," a deep alteration in the social contract that has followed the erosion of trust.

Over a shared dinner, the detectives take a break from the case to discuss big questions. Humans need a belief system, says Cassie. As trust deserts the traditional bulwarks of church and politics, people make a religion of money, which is now confused with virtue. Only half-joking, she adds that another contemporary belief system is in bodies. Like the religion of money, a perverse faith in the body accords physical behaviours and health choices the status of good and evil. Her explanation: because in order to make daily decisions, people need something to believe in. "All this bio-yoghurt virtue and financial self-righteouness," she says, "are just filling the gap in the market."

A teen Rob once knew is a potential witness. Visiting him in jail to do an interview, the detective decides he's "a casualty of the eighties," whose life was blighted by an economic time when an entire generation "fell through the cracks." Along with such telling scenes, French salts other trenchant bits of social commentary with humour, like when Rob judges that his grandparents having started work at sixteen takes "trumps in the adult stakes, way above any number of piercings and tattoos." Or when he explains that though he dislikes beer, he drinks it in his father's company, because his dad "gets worried if I ask for anything else" and "considers men drinking spirits to be a sign of either incipient alcoholism or incipient homosexuality."

In O'Kelly, the police chief, we see the social programming of rigid sex roles and toxic masculinity, for instance, when he alludes to migraines as "womany shite." The elderly Mrs. Lowry, a potential witness, represents a generation that is "compulsively competitive about generosity." When the cops bring her some shortbread, she feels compelled to "get a bag of scones out of the freezer and defrost them in the microwave and butter them and decant jam," unwillingly to relax "until we had each swallowed a sip of tea." 

Three teenage toughs form a brotherhood, thinking of themselves as three musketeers. Of course, such a gang mentality inevitably generates violent behaviour. One boy, Jonathan does not condone this, but "lost somewhere in the wild borderlands of nineteen, half in love with his friends with a love passing the love of women," he does something his more mature self will regret deeply. When this memory is triggered many years later, he will apologize, however indirectly, to the woman on whom he helped his friends practice an unconscionable violation. 

Situating her book in the epicentre of our contemporary social atmosphere, French also raises the issue of allegations. Both an innocent female police officer and a man with a shady past are made to suffer the ignominy that inevitably follows allegations, which have to be checked out, "no matter how baseless they may seem." About such allegations, "neighbours always know...and there are always plenty of people who believe there is no smoke without fire." One is reminded of Stephen Galloway. Recently, he filed suit against Caralea Cole, the 48-year old artist whose name was protected by privacy rules while her unproven accusation of rape cost him his job.

After Detective Cassie's experience with a psychopathic boyfriend in college, would she label victimism as another quasi-religion? If so, it isn't the approach chosen by Halifax columnist Lezlie Lowe. Recently, she turned the darkly vengeful side of MeToo on its head. Without naming, shaming, or describing herself as a victim, she wrote a column about a man's disrespectful violation of her stated wishes. The incident happened many years before, and she'd long since got on with her life. However, reading her column, the male who'd misbehaved recognized himself and telephoned her with a sincere apology.

Though the problems portrayed are universal, the narrator insists that this is a peculiarly Irish story. With the book set on an ancient site about to be destroyed amid a maze of financial greed, political skulduggery, and crooked land deals, Rob cynically comments that in his country, "Corruption is taken for granted, even grudgingly admired: the guerilla cunning of the colonised is still ingrained in us." His countrymen continue to struggle over "that primal, clicheed Irish passion, land." Sam, another detective, loses his innocence over anonymous related threats carried out by a politician uncle he had previously admired.

This novel is larger than life, and far larger than the local Dublin setting. Many casual observations made by French's characters point out our contemporary social challenges, as well as portraying a recent but utterly vanished past. I'm currently listening to another audio book about the Dublin Murder Squad, and look forward to more tales from this skillful storyteller.