ISage author Keith Ridgway’s latest novel is in a dilemma, both mischievous and dangerous. The book’s epigraph is taken from a bleary-eyed ballad alluding to the “lofty” grandeur of the Rocks of Dunin. But these lines are accompanied by a footnote warning that “Debate continues regarding the rocks named in the song – whether they are in County Clare or County Kerry, or whether they exist at all…”
Place and knowledge remain deliberately fluid categories once the narrative begins. Bartholomew Port, known as Maeve, says goodbye to his partner Mooty as he sets off on a journey from South London to his birthplace Dublin. In the novel’s first Alice in Wonderland-style sleight of hand, Maeve is transported to the Irish capital not by air or sea, but by slipping through the bushes in Camberwell’s Burgess Park.
Like Ridgway’s previous imaginaries of urbanity, Dublin Mew finds itself uncanny – a place that “can unsettle you in an instant”. While Maeve recognizes the main routes and landmarks, there are sudden, disturbing presences all around her. Uncomfortable scenes, fantastic children on the windowsills and mysterious passers-by dressed in bright yellow flicker for a moment in the flow of urban chaos. Maeve’s dislocation in this area, where she should feel most “at home”, is part of Ridgway’s conceptual investigation of what happens to home when we leave it and when we return. What becomes of home in our absence – in reality and in our imaginations? The strangeness is further heightened as Maeve relates the events of a future exile, or perhaps sanctuary, the circumstances of which remain hazy until the end of the novel.
Like Paul Lynch’s Booker-winning Prophet’s Song, this is an Ireland trembling with nascent social unrest. Early on, through a musical number delivered by the bellboys at Maeve’s hotel, we learn that there is a growing rift between Dublin’s greedy landlords and their disenfranchised tenants. But change is in the air; People are mobilizing in Dublin and around the world. Over tea and biscuits, an old friend, Dinny, whispers to Maeve about increasing activism and political assassinations. But Dini cannot say much. He jarringly describes their tense historical moment—which is largely the same as ours, or not too far in the future—in which “strange things abound. Strange things. Strange times. Dark times.”
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Darkness, real and symbolic, was central to the aesthetics of Ridgway’s previous work, 2021’s A Shock, a fascinating novel of linked stories exploring the sticky, often sinister corners of London life. The same is true here. For most of the novel’s sweaty and claustrophobic central section, Maeve is swept up into an underground protest movement intent on laying siege to the Garda headquarters, and spends a night in the misty tunnels beneath the city. Narrative variability comes in the form of fragmentation. As different factions travel to different parts of this underground network of passageways, where “acoustics float and waver and wobble”, the storytelling becomes polyacoustic. The focus shifts from the details of Maeve’s delusions, and the darkness is illuminated by the Beckettian monologue and Joycean proclamations of the radicals and revolutionaries creeping along. These sections are some of the novel’s most deliberately elliptical, but they offer the most concentrated knowledge of it. There are brilliantly fresh, scattered reflections on Ireland’s long history of failed resistance against imperialism, the centrality of the imagination in progressive politics, and the nature of the times.
Reproducing the dilemma on the page in this way can 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 diversity of prose gives us ample support to move forward passing through the shadows. And there are laughs, too: the slapstick digression about split trousers, a slight curiosity over the best way to make a crisp sandwich and the planning of military horses are all part of Ridgway’s wonderfully amusing and offbeat comedy.
The most obvious and powerful element of this charmingly labyrinthine novel is Maeve’s longing for her beloved Mooty. In a world of political turmoil and failed plans, the desire for human connection, and the desire to celebrate that connection, transcends everything else. Finally, Maeve says: “Maybe I was dead before I met you and you were only a dream. You, Mooty. A fantasy. Did I create you? Your tall laughing body in the evening light, your laughter and your jokes… No, your beauty was not something I would dare dream of. You were real. I can still taste you. I can feel the warmth of your body in the morning chill. You are real.”
