In the Woods

“We are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself.” 

Rob is offering an offhand comment about Mel’s reaction to death, yet he seems to be explaining his own profound reaction to the loss of his friends.

“I suppose the whole thing must have had its effects on me, but it would be impossible—and to my mind, pointless—to figure out exactly what they were.” 

Based on later events in the story, Rob’s comment indicates how out of touch he is with his own psyche. The loss of his friends had a profound and disturbing impact that he refuses to acknowledge here.

“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.” 

Rob sees connections where none exist. He wants to believe that by solving one crime, he can solve both. In reality, the connections he imagines are illusions of his own making.

“I am not good at noticing when I’m happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia.” 

Despite Rob’s talent for self-deception, this comment is a good description of his problem. He is so consumed by looking back that he destroys his present happiness.

“I suppose you could say my real weakness is a kind of long-sightedness: usually it is only at a distance, and much too late, that I can see the pattern.” 

When Rob makes this comment, he isn’t aware of how portentous it is. His inability to recognize a destructive pattern in Rosalind’s behavior has disastrous consequences for his own future.

“It was only then that it hit me, there in the chilly basement with half-forgotten cases all around […] the immensity of what I had set in motion.” 

Rob hasn’t considered that linking evidence from the two cases will open an inquiry into his own past. He seems to want closure for his friends yet fears the consequences of reopening the investigation.

“I was wildly, devastatingly homesick […] It was a constant agony, consuming and debilitating as a toothache.” 

Rob speaks about his first year away at boarding school. He can’t adjust because he misses his friends so intensely. This is another indication that he finds it impossible to let go of the past.

“This was in some ways the worst possibility of all: that they had simply kept running that day, left me behind and never once looked back.” 

This comment speaks to Rob’s inner conviction that he isn’t worthy enough, Jamie and Peter left him behind deliberately. His fear of abandonment becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy later in the book.

“In my memory, we spent a million nights in Cassie’s flat, the three of us […] over time those evenings have colored the whole season for me, like a brilliant dye flowering slowly 

Rob describes his relationship with Cassie and Sam in the same way he talks about Jamie and Peter. He has recreated the camaraderie of his childhood. But by the end of the story, he manages to sabotage this second chance at happiness.

“It was only much later, in the stale cold light of hindsight, that the little things rose up and rearranged themselves and clicked neatly into place to form the pattern we should have seen all along.” 

Rob fails to recognize what is happening right in front of him because he spends so much time mired in his pursuit of Jamie and Peter. He wants to make all the facts fit his theory instead of forming a theory based on fact.

“This case was like an endless, infuriating street-corner shell game: I knew the prize was in there […] but the game was rigged […] and every sure-thing shell I turned over came up empty.”

Rob is subliminally aware that someone is setting him up. Rosalind has been feeding him misinformation, but he’s still unaware that she is the source of his confusion.

“Losing a chunk of your memory is a tricky thing […] any nagging little half-remembered thing shimmers with a bright aura of hypnotic, terrifying potential: this could be trivia, or it could be The Big One that blows your life and your mind wide open.” 

Rob dreads recovering his memory. While he says he wants to know what happened to Peter and Jamie, deep down he fears what he might find out.

“All these private, parallel dimensions, underlying such an innocuous little estate; all these self-contained worlds layered onto the same space. I thought of the dark strata of archaeology underfoot.” 

Just as he comes to view the woods as sinister, Rob now perceives Knocknaree as a mysterious place containing a multiplicity of experiences—not all of them good.

“Since the moment the car crested the hill and we saw Knocknaree spread out in front of us, the opaque membrane between me and that day in the wood had been slowly, relentlessly thinning.” 

Despite Rob’s earlier protests to the contrary, he cares a great deal about his lost memory. His principal concern is to keep it buried. This quote suggests how much he fears what he can’t remember.

“I failed to understand the one crucial thing: where the real danger lay. I think this may have been, in the face of stiff competition, my single biggest mistake of all.” 

Rob makes this comment after Cassie shares her story about the sociopath she met at school. He doesn’t take the hint. Cassie is telling him, in a veiled way, to be wary of Rosalind.

“It was only then that I began to think this might be not a deliverance but a vast missed chance, an irrevocable ad devastating loss.” 

Rob is initially relieved to escape his horrifying night in the woods. His fear is so extreme that he only belatedly realizes that he might have learned something useful if he’d faced his demons and stayed.

“Sometimes I think about the sly, flickering line that separates being spared from being rejected. Sometimes I think of the ancient gods who demanded that their sacrifices be fearless and without blemish.” 

Rob speculates that Jamie and Peter abandoned him on the day they disappeared. His fear of abandonment is based on the even more destructive belief that he deserves it.

“In all my career I had never felt the presence of evil as I felt it then: strong and rancid-sweet in the air, curling invisible tendrils up the table legs, nosing with obscene delicacy at sleeves and throats.” 

As Rob listens to Damien’s confession, he grasps the depths of Rosalind’s depravity for the first time. He also realizes the subtle, predatory techniques she used to ferret out his weaknesses.

“Of all the things they had done to her […] this was the one that shocked me most profoundly. It was the diabolical expertise of it, the icy precision with which it targeted, annexed and defiled the one thing that had lain at Katy Devlin’s heart.” 

Rob is most upset with Rosalind because she portrayed Katy as a dilettante to convince Damien to help her. The lie misrepresents the true nature of Katy’s talent and devotion to ballet.

“The story was a hideous one in itself, as ancient as Cain and Abel […] but the words she said seemed to crawl hissing up the walls, spin sticky dark trails of shadow across the lights, nest in tangled webs in the high corners.” 

As Rob listens to Cassie’s explanation of Rosalind’s motives, he uses imagery of spiders and snakes to express his loathing. Unlike Cassie, he is unprepared for this revelation of the nature of evil.

“Every breath I took smelled of her cloying perfume and of something else, some overripe taint of rot, rich and polluting and possibly imaginary.” 

Now that Rob can see Rosalind’s true character, he describes her with language that conjures images of filth and pollution. This directly contrasts to his lyrical, romantic descriptions of her earlier in the book.

“She had simply, like any good craftswoman, used what came her way […] in me she had seen something, some subtle but fundamental quality, that made me worth keeping.” 

For the first time, Rob understands his own vulnerability to a sociopath like Rosalind. She can easily see his fear and self-doubt and exploits these weaknesses to her advantage.

“He could have told us on the first day what Rosalind was […] I couldn’t help thinking of all the casualties that silence had left behind, all the wreckage in its wake.” 

Because Rosalind seems so outwardly normal, even her own father can’t trust his impressions of her. Jonathan’s silence enables Rosalind to wreak havoc on other people’s lives.