October 21, 2010
Keith Ridgway: The Long Falling
When I rule the world, the list of authors everyone must read (yes, you’d better start taking notes) will include Keith Ridgway. I’ve read three of his five books; I am rationing them. But you don’t need to buy them from £0.01 on Amazon Marketplace to see how well he writes. His blog posts show it: try him on old Nazis, on honey cake, on rent boys and Metropole, on The Kindly Ones, on Alone in Berlin (covering the last much better than I did). Yet at the time of writing, all his books have Amazon sales ranks – that handily specious guide to success – pushing the one million mark. It’s a world gone wrong.
The Long Falling (1998) was Ridgway’s first novel – after the novella Horses – and won two literary prizes in France, which shows that they have better taste than we do. If Horses was John McGahern with – forgive me – attitude, then The Long Falling, with its depiction among other things of contemporary gay Ireland, must be Colm Tóibín: the Director’s Cut. In fact, the gay interest and the political currents are secondary to a strong portrayal of a woman in crisis, worthy of my old friend Brian Moore. (And that is the last time I will liken him to another writer; Ridgway is gifted enough to be a point of comparison himself.)
Grace Quinn has lost both her sons. Sean died as an infant when a moment’s inattention allowed him to crawl into a ditch and drown; her other son, Martin, left home in the Cavan town of Cootehill after telling his parents who he really is, and getting the expected response from his father (‘I mean that I’m gay.’ ‘Queer?’ ‘Gay.’ ‘There’s no such word. Not that way. It’s queer.’ Then: ‘Your mother killed the wrong fucking one, that’s for sure’). Martin goes to Dublin. Grace is left alone, with a violent husband (what is it about the Irish? Great writers and bastards for dads. Is there some link?) and little sympathy from the locals.
Everybody knew her husband, and everybody knew her. Neither of them was liked. She, initially, because she had come from England, he because of his manner. Now he was not liked because of what had happened, and she because she was his wife.
“What had happened” is that Grace’s husband knocked down a girl with his car and killed her. “Grace could not afford to fix the front of the car. She drove it as it was, reminding everybody. People did not like her for that.” Two deaths, one estrangement, domestic violence (“He would punch, and he would throw me. He could pick me up and throw me”): enough tragedy, right? Wrong: this is literary Ireland. Room for a little more. So Grace hits her crisis, runs into it with her eyes open, and moves to Dublin to stay with Martin.
Imagine falling from a great height. Without panic. Imagine taking in the view on the way down, as your body tumbles gently in the air, the only sound being the sound of your progress. Your progress. Imagine that it is progress to fall from a great height. A thing worth doing. Though it is not a thing for doing. You do nothing, you simply allow it to happen. Imagine relaxing into the sudden ground. Imagine the stop.
We don’t have to imagine it, as Ridgway has done that for us, and gives us Grace’s long falling, her time of “trying not to break open”, in perfect detail, told from different points of view. One reviewer calls it “the Irish Crime and Punishment.”
She is thrown into the life of the city, where the Celtic tiger (remember that?) is just beginning to drag 1990s Ireland into the modern world. Her son takes her to a gay bar (while he visits a bath house alone: “They were all ages, walking to and fro, naked but for their towels, some carrying keys, some cigarette boxes, all with the same look. Just eyes. They looked like men given some terrible task. They wanted it over with”). But Ireland has been backward too long to crawl forward without a fight. There are beggars and drunks all over the place. Everyone in Martin’s liberal, secular circle is getting agitated about the ‘X case’, where the Irish Attorney General obtained an injunction to stop a 14-year-old rape victim from travelling abroad to get an abortion. The case provides a political backdrop for modern Ireland’s birthing pains.
Meanwhile, Martin is fretting about his lover, Henry, and what he might be up to in Paris, even as he struggles to come to terms with his identity in a country still emerging from under the dead hand of religion. “The circumstances of his life had flowed from the way he wished to make love. From that clumsy declaration. I am what I want. I am this.”
The plot in The Long Falling slows down at times and takes tricky turns elsewhere, but by the end the feeling is of an inevitability playing out. It seems like a story you don’t so much read as watch. (Aptly enough, it’s being made into a film. Well: a French film.) The brilliant details and sharp dialogue don’t disguise the tragedy at the heart of the book. The past is not dead: it is not even past. We discover that Grace’s falling began long ago, when she met her future husband, and in the grand tradition ignored her parents’ advice (“Don’t go to Ireland. Do not go to Ireland”). Late in the book, Martin is interviewed by a policeman, who tells him, “You’re going to have to start from the beginning, Mr Quinn, if you don’t mind. I’m not sure I follow you.” “From where?” says Martin.
“The beginning.”
“Where’s that?”
March 13, 2010
Keith Ridgway: Horses
Keith Ridgway’s Animals has stuck with me, in the three years since I read it, so firmly and so fondly that it’s a wonder I didn’t saddle it with the meaningless privilege of being one of my books of the year 2007. It’s a wonder too that it took me so long to revisit him, and that I did so only after finding a copy of his first book Horses in a secondhand shop while on holiday last summer.
I say ‘his first book’, which is both true and misleading. In fact Horses was published in 1997 as part of a Faber anthology of new authors (in their First Fiction: Introductions series). After Ridgway established a medium-sized name for himself with bigger, standalone works (two novels The Long Falling and The Parts, and a story collection Standard Time), Horses was reissued in a slim solo edition – 80 pages long – in 2003.
Animals was a more or less indescribable thing – perm three from unreliable narrator, psychological horror, Kafkaesque, black comedy, existential, absurdist – and having now read Ridgway’s earliest and latest published fiction, I can see just how far he’s come. But Horses remains a good book, and indeed with potentially wider appeal than Animals. It’s clearly the work of a young writer: how else to explain this perfectly polished, showpiece opening?
In the broad spaces of the streets near the square, Mathew stood and watched for the secrets which the rain reveals. In the air around the mountains he could see the clouds begin to form, to gather themselves like skirts held in, to muster and breathe deep and peer down the slopes to the place where people live, and plot a route. He saw them set off then with a tiny roll, and saw them pick up speed and press a silence out in front of them, and pick up speed again and canter quietly, billowing, and roll on into a gallop like a charge of black and ghostly horses, their hooves turning in the air, churning up a grey dust against the sun.
It’s prose with rhythm, timing, drive, perfect pitch and a few clever touches: the nod to the title, and the beginning of a subtle sleight of hand on the reader as to who, or what, Mathew is. As the first paragraph of a first publication, not half bad.
But it’s silly to damn such beauty as being indicative of immaturity: Ridgway can really write, that’s all. If struggling to find fault, one would do better to latch onto Julian Gough’s criticism of his Irish contemporaries, for “copying the very great John McGahern, in the 21st century.” Sure enough, Horses has McGahern qualities: the rural setting, the close-knit community, the febrile relationships, the broodings – resentment, regret, revenge – at the heart of many motivations.
Even then, Horses stands on its own four feet, not least because the violence and bloodletting which seeps through it would never have suited McGahern’s low-key style, or at least would not be put on the page so splashily. Here, things happen not only in the past but in the present too. Mathew Doyle (“unsuited for the world”) is believed to be responsible for a series of arson attacks on local buildings, including one which killed the horses so beloved of Dr Brooks’ daughter Helen:
Her hair fell over her eyes in wet ropes and she felt a pain in her heart, or where she thought her heart might be, or where it had been, for it was gone now, dead, smoke against the sky, with Poppy and Gepetto and Mountain Star.
As well as Mathew and Helen and her father, the remaining cast does not extend much beyond Garda Sweeney and Father Devoy (yes, yes, I told you), and the short, explosive nature of the story, with a lot of conversation and a little action too, makes it read at times like a play on the page. Alongside the reasoning adult minds of the doctor, the priest and the policeman, the heart of the story pits two unworldly souls against one another: Helen, who is distracted with grief (“[she] wondered whether you could be struck by lightning and swallow the power that had hit you and make it yours, so that your life would be electric bright and burning to the touch”), and Mathew, an innocent (“Terror sorry for the horses. Terror sorry”).
The tight, claustrophobic drama of Horses portends terrible things to come before its end – and great things to come from its author after that.
April 4, 2007
Keith Ridgway: Animals
If the cover of a book is important, what of the author’s name? Keith Ridgway is saddled not only with a name which is not quite chiming with authority (and destined to be misspelled in search engines), but a cover design which aims for plain starkness and ends up boring. With Animals, he is taking his revenge on society.
To avoid demanding of you what Ridgway does of his readers, I will say straight away that Animals is one of those books, often touted but rarely with accuracy, that rewards patience. This is a novel which it is sometimes tempting to give up on, but which you will be very glad you didn’t.
It takes us into the life of an unnamed illustrator, a man of – shall we say – sensitive temperament and somewhat obsessive-compulsive tendencies. He is troubled by “the business of being in the world and how to negotiate it.” As a consequence, the story is muddled and disordered, and he keeps jumping ahead too far and then pulling us back with an explanation. The events themselves, involving a dead mouse, a collapsing swimming pool, a see-saw stacked with spiders, and a haunted building, are both banal and freakish. And the narrator is plausible until he flurries into accounts like this:
As the towel came away from my lower cheeks I noticed first a small black mark on my left cheek, adjacent to the nostril. As I instinctively leaned in toward the mirror to better see what this might be, the towel, held by my hands, continued downwards, revealing above my mouth a stuttering continuation of this black mark into larger blobs and beads and scatterings, like an ink blot on my skin. As I peered, seeing that the trail continued onto my lips, and indeed between them, and as my eyes and my involuntary tongue confirmed that these blackish reddish bluish things were not marks or traces but actually material of some description – debris – and as my independent, quick-moving tongue trapped one part of this detritus against the test surface of a tooth to discover a hard stringy grittiness, so my hands took the towel away from my neck and my eyes looked down, to confirm almost instantly what I had begun to suspect: that what littered my skin and had fallen or crawled into my mouth was the sundered parts of a large black spider, whose bulky twitching carcass was smeared across the white towel I held in my hands like the entrails of roadkill dragged across the snow.
- which neatly highlights the issue of whether all the terrible and confusing things the narrator sees are real, or
nothing more than the physical manifestation of my own fear of the real world – by which I mean the natural world, by which I mean those parts of the world that are not created and controlled by us. By mankind.
This is central to the book, which is peopled with characters alongside the narrator who make their own reality: such as David, the friend whose self-contained fantasy fiction world earns the narrator’s contempt: “You’re wasting your time. You have a wonderful talent for writing and you’re wasting it. You’re like a beetle fallen on its back. You could spend the entire rest of your life describing the clouds;” or Rachel, an artist who subverts normal understandings of reality by faking missing persons notices. And along the way the book raises issues about the purpose of art, and the uses of terrorism.
All of this makes Animals one of the most interesting, and singular, books I’ve read in ages. Even in a tradition of paranoid, delusional fiction, it is a truly novel novel, and satisfyingly disturbing. Ridgway is an admirer of Beckett, and it’s not hard to see his influence here (though Animals is rather more readable than that suggests, and the occasional longueurs are not too offputting). It’s also lightly peppered with black wit.
Another obvious comparison is Kafka, not least for the inclusion of a character, gender undeclared, named only K. But where Kafka’s protagonists are trapped in an impossible system by a faceless bureaucracy, Ridgway’s narrator finds threat and confusion in the ordinary world, the one the rest of us seem to manage in just fine. Or as he would put it, “None of this is true.”
