Set in the year 2000, Out of the Woods draws the reader into the life and mind of Jess, a legal secretary who travels to the Hague to work for a war crimes trial – the first of its kind since Nuremberg. With masterful evocation of setting and a nuanced conveyance of internal states, this novel explores empathy, grief and lived experience through the existential power of words.
Jess is entering a season of change. Her adult son no longer needs her, and her ex-husband has a new partner. Overqualified for the work she is doing, but too old to change careers, she embraces the opportunity to work on an important case, even though it necessitates her living abroad. Jess transcribes words spoken by witnesses and defendants, recording accounts of the atrocities committed by the Bosnian Serb Army against the innocent men, women and children of Srebrenica.
Jess is uncomfortably intrigued by the defendant, a war criminal she refers to only as K. Disturbed by her reluctant sympathy, Jess grasps at empathic straws in an effort to understand how a human may be complicit in catalysing human suffering. Both in court and in her personal life, she experiences the impulse to silence confronting truths in order to avoid the secondhand discomfort of exposed perpetrators. Foreboding parallels and Hannah Arendt-flavoured sentiments connect the confronting banality of war crimes with the insidious evil of complicity in a way that’s thematically relevant both personally and as one bearing witness.
Each chapter ends with epistolary snippets, which function as frames for subtextual resonance, magnifying the concrete phenomenological effects of abstractly heinous causes. This simultaneous significance and insignificance of lived experience in the context of genocide draws distinctions between denial of accountability, misattributed responsibility and unimaginable human suffering.
Through Jess’ thoughts and memories, it becomes clear that her deeply conditioned habit of intuiting needs has resulted in her assuming responsibility for the moral and behavioural failings of others. The high expectations she places on herself unwittingly enables the ignorance and incompetence of those around her, as she seeks the comfort of order in an intrinsically chaotic world. Upon returning to Australia to care for a dying family member, a realignment of perspective alters the way she engages with the world and brings her closer to the centre of her own narrative. The second half of the book delves deeper into the personal, with echoes of everything that has come before, and all that will come after.
So much of this book centres on words, and the ways in which they can convey or obfuscate meaning. Jess spends her days absorbing streams of testimony, transcribing tragedies and confessions, delivered to her through headphones in a measured monotone, via the voices of real-time translators. All traces of emotion are stripped away as first-hand accounts are obscured by second-hand translations. This layered mediation distances the messenger from the receiver and changes the shape of the original words. This instance is just one among many examples of how Shirm expertly measures linguistic weight throughout her prose, with the words themselves feeling as potent as the characters and concepts they conjure.
The macro-tragedy of genocide comprises the countless micro-tragedies of lived experiences, and it is only by homing in on minute details that a true account of the bigger picture can emerge. Shirm emphasises this in both the structure of the novel, and in the ways in which Jess’ own story unfolds.
Read: Book review: Bloomer, Carol Lefevre
This is a story that will stay with the reader and is highly recommended for those who have overcome suffering, for those who are still in the process, and for anyone who has ever projected empathy as a form of self-defence.
Out of the Woods, by Gretchen Shirm
Publisher: Transit Lounge
ISBN: 9781923023314
Format: Paperback
Pages: 343pp
Release Date: 1 April 2025
RRP: $34.99
