A Shock [electronic resource]

Ridgway, Keith2021

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Summary

A Shock is a perfect, living circle of beauty and mystery; clear-sighted and compassionate, and, at times, wonderfully funny' - David HaydenTen years ago, Keith Ridgway wrote his landmark work Hawthorn & Child, which became a cult novel with a cohort of eminent, noteworthy fans (Scarlett Thomas in the Guardian was ‘completely thrilled by the audaciously deceptive simplicity of Ridgway’s writing’). Those fans have yearned for more from Ridgway in the long years since, have been disheartened when he intimated he had turned his back on fiction, only to wake up now with a start at the news that, out of the blue, he has produced a work at least as involving, clear-eyed and unsettling as Hawthorn & Child.His new novel, A Shock, is his seventh book. It features interlocking stories through which a clutch of more or less loosely connected characters appear, disappear and reappear. They are all of them on the fringes of London life, often clinging on – to sanity or solvency or a story – by their fingertips. Ridgway writes about people whose understanding of their own situation is only ever partial and fuzzy, who are consumed by emotions and anxieties and narratives, or the lack thereof, that they cannot master. He focuses on peripheral figures who mean well and to whom things happen, and happen confusingly, and his fictional strategies reflect this focus. Most of his characters are most sharply revealed by the imprecision of their own language in dialogue; it’s so deft, and it’s a high-wire act but, as in Hawthorn & Child, he achieves the right balance between the imperatives of drama and fidelity toward his characters. And his observational writing is always pin-sharp and often breathtaking.