Book review: Strange world, familiar sadness

Keith Ridgway’s powerful fictional gift is to render the contemporary Ireland of Dooneen both recognisable and strange, as if we are in a world that we instinctively know but do not fully understand.

• Dooneen
• by Keith Ridgway
• Fitzcarraldo Editions, £14.99

From the west coast of Ireland, an Irish man named Bartholomew Port writes letters to London to his partner Mootie about his trip to Dublin.

Having arrived via a portal in a bush in a London park, Port has landed in a city where cars have been abolished, trams are plentiful, and the streets are filled with moving walkways known as “clickers”.

But this seemingly futuristic Dublin is also laden with remnants of the past: The long-defunct Evening Press is still in circulation and Greene’s much lamented bookshop is still open on Clare St. 

We are plucked and placed, then, in an unreal city composed from Ridgway’s unique and brilliantly disorientating imagination.

Ridgway’s powerful fictional gift is to render the contemporary Ireland of Dooneen both recognisable and strange, as if we are in a world we instinctively know but do not fully understand. 

The Ireland he depicts is not strictly futuristic or historical, but an alternative version of the present.

Port soon finds himself caught up in political intrigues arising from a housing crisis of epic proportions. 

In his depiction of social and political clashes, Ridgway draws on the imagery and language of historical Irish revolutionary and labour movements. 

Organisations defending tenants, such as Dish (Dublin Initiative for Social Housing) and their ideological counterparts, Rathúnas do Chách (Prosperity for All), are in conflict, while the government is in defensive mode against radical forms of insurgency.

There is a notable and strangely surprising specificity in the Dublin that Port travels around. 

Some of the action occur in places such as the Huguenot Graveyard on Stephen’s Green, or in the Ginger Man pub near Leinster House. 

Port continually moves around the streets and bridges of Dublin city centre by tram, clicker, or on foot.

In any such fictional perambulations around Dublin, there will inevitably be echoes of Joyce. 

Stylistically, Ridgway’s novel is also innovative and written in a distinctly Irish idiom. 

The narration is mainly comprised of letters to Mootie, interspersed with multiple first-person narrative “transcripts” from activists with whom Port becomes involved, other fragments, newspaper excerpts, and songs. 

As the novel progresses, a large number of characters enter, whose interactions and relationships with Port are not always transparent. 

But while Joyce’s Dublin always retains a concrete nature, Ridgway’s Dublin has something of the substance of a fully realised dream, and in this sense further comparisons with Kafka can be drawn.

Dooneen offers a version of reality where everything is apparently presented but resistant to explanation. 

As he gets engulfed in a shadowy world of insurgency and intrigue, Port appears at times to be similarly moved along through the action by forces he can barely understand.

Yet if the action of Dooneen is wrapped in mystery, the novel’s moral clarity is striking. 

There is no ambiguity in evictions, homelessness, and the misery caused by governmental failure. As one rebel character says about political cynicism: 

“A parliament is a sort of proxy war, and it can run a long time like that, it can consume a lot of that dangerous energy. But there comes a time when the proxy war is having proxy results, abstracted victories, when it becomes an end in itself and avatars are just shadow boxing, detached … And the people are mere spectators, increasingly frustrated.”

Dooneen is a highly political novel. It depicts desperate communities bound together in communal action, in conflict with a neglectful, violent, and self-serving State. 

It is a strange, beguiling book, full of humour, sadness, and cruelty. Yet, importantly, beating too within the novel’s heart are compassion and love.