Irish author Keith Ridgway’s latest novel deals, both mischievously and menacingly, in ambivalence. The book’s epigraph is taken from a misty-eyed ballad pining for the “lofty” magnificence of the Cliffs of Dooneen. But these lines are appended with a footnote cautioning that “debate continues concerning the cliffs named in the song – whether they are in County Clare or County Kerry, or whether they exist at all …”
Place and knowledge continue to be wilfully unstable categories once the narrative begins. Bartholomew Port, known as Mew, says goodbye to his partner Mootie as he sets off on a trip from south London to his birthplace, Dublin. In the first of the novel’s Alice in Wonderland-style sleights of hand, Mew is transported to the Irish capital not by air or sea, but by slipping through bushes in Camberwell’s Burgess Park.
As in Ridgway’s previous fictionalisations of urbanity, the Dublin Mew finds himself in is uncanny – a place that “can turn on you in an instant”. While Mew recognises the thoroughfares and landmarks, there are sudden, unnerving presences around him. Discomforting apparitions, portentous children at windows and enigmatic passersby wearing vivid yellow momentarily flicker into being in the flow of urban chaos. Mew’s dislocation in this terrain where he should feel most “at home” forms part of Ridgway’s conceptual inquiry into what happens to home when we leave it and when we return. What does home become in our absence – in reality and in our imaginations? The uncanniness is ramped up further because Mew is relating events from a future exile, or perhaps sanctuary, the circumstances of which remain blurry until the end of the novel.
As in Paul Lynch’s Booker-winning Prophet Song, this is an Ireland trembling with nascent social unrest. Early on, through a musical number delivered by bellboys at Mew’s hotel, we discover there is a growing schism between Dublin’s rapacious landlords and their disenfranchised tenants. But change is in the air; the masses are mobilising in Dublin and around the world. Over tea and biscuits, an old friend, Dinny, whispers to Mew of activism gathering momentum – and of political assassinations. But Dinny cannot say too much. He fretfully characterises their tense historical moment – which is largely the same as ours, or not too far into the future – as one in which “weird items abound. Strange things. Strange times. Dark times.”
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Darkness, real and symbolic, was principal to the aesthetic of Ridgway’s previous work, 2021’s A Shock, a woozy novel of connected stories exploring sticky, often sinister corners of London life. The same is true here. For much of the novel’s sweaty and claustrophobic central section, Mew is swept up in an underground protest movement intent on laying siege to Garda headquarters, and spends a night in murky tunnels beneath the city. Narrative shiftiness comes in the form of fragmentation. As separate factions travel down different parts of this subterranean network of passages, where the “acoustics swam and tumbled and bobbed”, so the storytelling becomes polyphonic. Attention turns from Mew’s account of confusion, and the darkness is lit up by Beckettian monologues and Joycean declamations from the radicals and revolutionaries who crawl alongside him. These sections are some of the novel’s most deliberately elliptical, but they offer its most concentrated wisdom. There are brilliantly fresh, scattered reflections on Ireland’s long history of thwarted resistance against imperialism, the centrality of imagination in progressive politics and the nature of time.
Reproducing ambivalence on the page in this way might be a risky and potentially alienating strategy for the reader. But it’s thrilling to watch Ridgway play with clarity and certainty; the linguistic energy and variety of the prose gives us plenty of sustenance to keep going as we clamber through the shadows. And there are laughs too: slapstick digressions about split trousers, little disquisitions on the best way to make a crisp sandwich and scheming military horses are all part of Ridgway’s wonderfully absorbing and offbeat comedy.
The most lucid and affecting element of this appealingly labyrinthine novel is Mew’s longing for his beloved Mootie. In a world of political turmoil and botched plans, the desire for human connection, and the desire to commemorate that connection, transcends everything. Towards the close, Mew says: “Perhaps I died before I met you and you were only a dream. You, Mootie. A figment. Did I make you up? Your tall laughing body in the evening light, your laughter and your jokes … No, your beauty was not something I would dare to dream. You were real. I can taste you still. I can feel the heat of your body in the cold of the morning. You are real.”