Bibliopath #17: In which we get lost in the woods
Dear reader,
Here's our topic sentence—it comes from Tana French's In the Woods, a sharply crafted murder mystery/police procedural that I read obsessively. The main character, Rob Ryan, a detective in the Murder division of the Irish police, is describing the adjustments that the best detectives make—the sacrifices of the vocation in pursuit of arrests and justice—particularly in the interrogation room:
"Humans are feral and ruthless; this, this watching through cool intent eyes and delicately adjusting one factor or another till a man’s fundamental instinct for self-preservation cracks, is savagery in its most pure, most polished and most highly evolved form."
It's a sentence that captures the paradox at the heart of a lot of mysteries—how chasing a monster can make you monstrous; the evil that detectives can both endure and produce for the sake of an ideal of what is good.
Here, French sets us up with a phrase that is both provocative and supposedly axiomatic: "humans are feral and ruthless". You could question the proposition, of course, but given the narrator's encounters with the worst of humanity, you are inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt that he has seen both in his work.
After the semi-colon, the sentence pauses on a knife-point on "this", before a parenthetical that explains what "this" is: it's the pursuit of a suspect, the adjustment of factors like a clockmaker or a scientist until a person "cracks", the phrasing mirroring the unrelenting nature of the interrogation itself.
But we're not finished—we emerge from the parenthetical into a declaration like a baseball bat—"This ... is savagery". But that's not all, as it's qualified into very un-savage categories—"most pure", "most polished", and "most highly evolved".
But there's one last turn: that last phrase clicks into place, and we are trapped—after all, the first phrase isn't talking about the victim in the interrogation room but about the detective, the narrator, and by implication, us. The phrase "highly evolved form" both echoes and builds on the opening phrase. To be feral brings up obvious bestial connections—we would usually think of our evolution as coming into our higher thinking, to become less savage. And the idea that we would hone our savagery, sharpen our ruthlessness in order to achieve our ends—well, that's not a reality that we often like to think about.
At least, not until a sentence like this peels away the truth like a great detective.
Guan