Reviewed by Ian Lipke
Gretchen Shirm’s book, Out of the Woods, is such an accomplished piece of work that a reader is encouraged into speculation. Evidence exists to provide a solid case. We are told that the writer was a former lawyer, a conclusion we would have drawn from the tightness of the title, the careful laying out of arguments, the minutiae that compress the subject matter and the heroine’s careful handling of her lover when they first meet.
But first things first.
The book opens with an Australian woman travelling to The Hague to take up an appointment as secretary for an Australian judge. Her brief is to sit through the trial of a former military officer charged with war crimes. The account steps out of the ordinary when she finds herself struck by two competing intellectual forces, the obviously true competing testimonies of the witnesses and an enduring doubt of the defendant’s guilt.
She hears incredible stories of survival, stories that would appear unbelievable were it not for the intricate and painstaking method of their narration. The woman is called back to Australia to deal with issues of her own history. However, she cannot leave European affairs to Europe. The central question that Out of the Woods asks churns along in one’s consciousness viz what it means to bear witness to the suffering of people who have experienced real tragedy and whether it is possible, afterwards, to resume a normal life.
Little things are treated in this book with the same level of importance as significant others. We are told, for example, that everything in the court looked clean and sterile, “everything shone” (10). Soon after the appraisal of the courtroom, the new typist’s attention is drawn to a man whom she thought “might have been an interpreter, he had the look about him, a sort of vacancy and silence, as though words might pass easily through to some other place” (11).
Readers are given an insight into someone she once held dear, as she comes to realise what she feels about her ex-husband. “Something was dropped within him, something was let go of, a certain pretence was released” (53). Moreover, readers are subjected to a slow unveiling of the courting of the young woman and her new boyfriend. The point that has to be made is the slow unravelling, the minute explanations the author adopts in practising her style.
With a lesser writer control over her delivery of her tale might well have been lost, the author could have lost control. And the result could have been a shambles. This story is never that. Each character is well developed, each sequence of events polished.
Out of the Woods is not the first novel written by Gretchen Shirm. She is the author of Having Cried Wolf, Where the Light Falls and The Crying Room and was a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist. Two of her novels were shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize for fiction in the N.S.W. Premier’s Award. Her short stories have been published widely as has been her literary criticism. Gretchen worked as a public law lawyer for more than a decade and now teaches creative writing.
Out of the Woods
(2025)
by Gretchen Shirm
Transit Lounge Publishing
ISBN:978-1-923023-31-4
$34.99;350pp