A Bit Wooden

I picked up Tana French’s praised In the Woods because I was interested in whether it’s possible to produce a crime novel set in contemporary Ireland that doesn’t make your toes curl in embarrassment. Of course there’s plenty of potential material out there—we have more than our share of misdeeds—it’s just that fictional depictions of the interactions between Irish police and criminals are typically pallid photocopies of either US or UK models. French sidesteps this pitfall by having her work explore the psychological turmoil stirred up by a child murder. The body of a young girl is found on the site of an archaeological dig taking place on the exurban outskirts of Dublin; the discovery sets in train an investigation that, according to the back cover blurb, “takes the reader on an irresistible journey through a tangled web of evil and beyond—to the inexplicable.” I can’t fully vouch for the veracity of this breathless promise—I’m still only on around page 150 of a nearly 500 page book.

In the Woods, by Tana French. Published by Hodder Headline Ireland.

In terms of style, however, it’s already clear that the writing is a cut above the bullet-point prose of, say, a James Patterson policier. Unfortunately, while clearing that low hurdle, it often fails to reach the heights I had been led to expect from some of the plaudits I had read. It seems as though French, appraised of the genre’s clichés, swerves away from them only to end up in new cul de sacs. So, avoiding the hackneyed image of a grizzled, maverick ‘tec, French gives us as our narrator Rob Ryan—a new breed of more cultivated investigator. But the erudite copper (with a shadowy past nonetheless) already feels like an established archetype. And Ryan’s above-average education means that hard-boiled one-liners are replaced by observations that can sound laboured in their efforts to put a new spin on old subjects:

 For example, 

Few people would have considered her beautiful, but my tastes have always leaned towards bespoke rather than brand-name….

Or

Every coincidence felt like a sea-worn bottle slammed down on the sand at my feet, with my name engraved neatly on the glass and inside a message in some mockingly indecipherable code.

And

My time in training and in uniform [...] all felt like an embarrassing daze scripted by Ionesco…

The last quote forces you to consider the plausibility of an Irish police officer comparing his professional life to a script by a European absurdist playwright. Yet at least the above examples are lucid; I’ve read the following section repeatedly and I still can’t fathom what the word soupçon (meaning suspicion or a trace of something) is doing there:

We give taxpayers their money’s worth of comforting cliché. We mostly shop at Brown Thomas, during the sales, and occasionally come into work wearing embarrassingly identical soupçons. 

In sum, the uneven quality of the text reminds me why I usually avoid genre fiction in favour of the far smaller ghetto of literary fiction. There the storylines may be unoriginal, and the suspense tepid, but—for me at least—a book has to offer something over and above plot to keep you turning the pages.