Tuesday, January 14, 2014

A Detective's Relentless Search for Truth, at Work and Within

“What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective. Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass. It is the core of our careers, the endgame of every move we make, and we pursue it with strategies painstakingly constructed of lies and concealment and every variation on deception. The truth is the most desirable woman in the world and we are the most jealous lovers, reflexively denying anyone else the slightest glimpse of her. We betray her routinely, spending hours and days stupor-deep in lies, and then turn back to her holding out the lover’s ultimate (claim): But I only did it because I love you so much.
          I have a pretty knack for imagery, especially the cheap, facile kind. Don’t let me fool you into seeing us as a bunch of parfit gentil knights galloping off in doublets after Lady Truth on her white palfrey. What we do is crude, crass and nasty. A girl gives her boyfriend an alibi for the evening when we suspect him of robbing a north-side Centra and stabbing the clerk. I flirt with her at first, telling her why I see why he would want to stay home when he’s got her; she is peroxided and greasy, with the flat, stunted features of generations of malnutrition, and privately I am thinking that if I were her boyfriend I would be relieved to trade her even for a hairy cellmate named Razor. Then I tell her we’ve found marked bills from the till in his classy white tracksuit bottoms, and he’s claiming that she went out that evening and gave them to him when she got back.
          I do it so convincingly, with such delicate crosshatching of discomfort and compassion at her man’s betrayal, that finally her faith in four shared years disintegrates like a sand castle and through tears and snot, while her man sits with my partner in the next interview room saying nothing except ‘Fuck off, I was home with Jackie,’ she tells me everything from the time he left the house to the details of his sexual shortcomings. Then I pat her gently on the shoulder and give her a tissue and a cup of tea, and a statement sheet.
          This is my job, and you don’t go into it—or, if you do, you don’t last—without some natural affinity for its priorities and demands. What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this—two things: I crave truth. And I lie.”

From In the Woods, by Tana French


I love this author. Her books are filled with terrific metaphors and just great writing and storytelling skill. Her characters have such interesting personalities—human, flawed, struggling in all the ways most of us do in our attempt to fit the pieces of life’s puzzle together.

Her Irish heritage, setting, language, and culture often pop up within these pages and it gives an interesting look into another country’s particularities while at the same time reminding us we’re all, wherever we live, pretty much alike.

This was her first novel and it is terrific. Dealing with the vulnerability and innocence of children, the worst news a parent can get, the strange obsessions and violence of the deranged, and an unflinching ragged detective caught in forlornness and misgivings, French weaves a story of alarm and mystery that holds the reader’s attention from page to page.


This novel led me to the ones that follow and you will want to read them as well.


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