I'm reading (listening to) In The Woods by Tana French. I've read one other novel by her, The Witch Elm, and it was really good, but it also bummed me out. The whole thing is one great big descent. Everything goes from good to bad and bad to worse in great detail. The Witch Elm is a standalone novel, while In The Woods is book one of the Dublin Murder Squad series. Plus it was available at the library. Plus I like mysteries. Plus In The Woods at least started a little more likely to have some fun in it and not all just darkness. But I'm 7/17ths of the way through and there are warning signs. The main detective, Rob Ryan, has a gap in his early memory -- the main character in Witch Elm got hit on the head and struggles with memory. He also may well be an unreliable narrator. (Wah!) He says early on, "What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this -- two things: I crave truth. And I lie." He's talking, in that quote, about how detectives sometimes lie in the search for truth. But in the whole scheme of the book it might mean, hey -- don't trust this guy.
I was hoping that he and his partner Cassie were going to be the detectives that we follow throughout the Dublin Murder Squad series. But that's not really how French rolls, I don't think. Her books seem to focus on the crime part as much as the mystery, and she makes sure you get that crime is real, really devastating, and not at all fun. After listening to the book for a lot of yesterday, I'm regressing to that place where I start to see flashes of movement in rooms where the lights are turned off. Where my ears strain after anything that might sound vaguely like footsteps. In short, it might not be that good for me. Maybe French utterly ruins all of her main characters. We'll see.
Dropping a couple more quotes I like from the book so far. I had actually intended to write about happiness this morning. My thought being that happiness would be more possible, it seems, if I could block a lot out. Block out expectations of buying a house and saving up for retirement. Worries about growing older or uglier. Concerns that I'm not keeping up with my peers, that I'm never going to "make it" as an artist. When like, my day-to-day life is pretty great. The work is good. The walks are good. The food and accommodations are good. All the little things are good. I will say, lastly, that Detective Ryan has something enviable: purpose. He works in a profession that has a great sense of purpose. He feels fit and right and lucky to be a detective on the murder squad. His days are long and hard and his nights are sociable and close with his team. He's like Remy the rat in Ratatouille. He knows who he is and he's carved out a purpose for himself that he can spend his days pursuing and getting paid for. (None of this side hustle nonsense.)
"I read a lot. I always have, but in those two years I gorged myself on books with a voluptuous, almost erotic gluttony. I would go to the local library and take out as many as I could, and then lock myself in the bedsit and read solidly for a week. I went for old books, the older the better--Tolstoy, Poe, Jacobean tragedies, a dusty translation of Laclos--so that when I finally resurfaced, blinking and dazzled, it took me days to stop thinking in their cool, polished, crystalline rhythms."
"Maybe she, like me, would have loved the tiny details and inconveniences even more dearly than the wonders, because they are the things that prove you belong."
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