Hawthorn & Child – Keith Ridgway

Other reviewers have compared Ridgway to Flann O’Brien but there are no policemen melting into bicycles here. The eponymous London detectives find themselves investigating a number of bizarre crimes and tragedies. The stories of the detectives and of those around them are so tangentially interwoven that it had me thinking, any page now, any chapter, it will all become clear. It reminds me more of Twin Peaks. Everything in it could happen and there are connections but, in the end, nothing really makes sense. Nevertheless, it is a gripping read.

Ridgway is a master of voice. I lost count but there must be a dozen different narrators, each of them uniquely off-kilter. Like your colleague in the next cubicle who looks conventional, but you know secretly he’s as weird as you are. Or is that just me?

When I finished, I was slightly deflated by the lack of an overarching narrative arc but not in the way I am by books where the only point seems to be the wonder of the author’s prose. If anything, it’s the lack of sense, the randomness of life that is the story. If Ridgway had doubled the length of the book and tied up some of the stories, I would have been happier but that is clearly not the book he wants to write.
Just to give you a taste of the subject matter, the opening investigation is into a drive-by shooting where the victim insists the car was a vintage model, but the nearest CCTV indicates a Hyundai saloon. Towards the end a woman, who probably had an affair with the detectives’ boss, hangs herself over a lighted cooker. In between there are stories of gangsters, affairs hetero and homosexual, none of them running in a straight line and excerpts from a fantasy novel starring wolves that seems to mirror the real world of the novel.

I can only say I liked it and I will look out for more by the same author.