Much like this review, this book starts out with a boner. Tone? Set? Sort of. I don't want to give the impression that this book is juvenile in nature, but it's important for you to know that it's not, not, not a straight police procedural. It's one of them there genre-benders, which uses the premise of a modern London team of homicide coppers investigating things to revel in a number of stylistically variant vignettes. Yes, there is a shooting. Yes, the shooting is investigated. However, stuff like closed cases, clever killers, stern, hard-boiled ladies' man detectives, and general law-enforcement competence are not at play here. Rather than set down a linear narrative about a case and its ensuing investigation, this experimental novel moves from scene to only marginally related scene unabashedly, starting out with a bloody man claiming he was shot by a ghost of a classic car, and leading into segments on group sex, the complex inner life of a masochistic pickpocket turned rat, and a young, aspiring artist's quest to lose her virginity, connect with her parents, and understand the appeal of Mark Rothko. This is just to name a few. One could almost argue that this is a short story collection, and you may be better served to see it that way in order to avoid the frustration the narrative's lack of resolve affords, but the reoccurring characters and recycled themes of being misunderstood, helpless, and driven by idiosyncratic obsessions thread it all together into something else, something all its own. Something really, really intriguing and great.On the off chance that I am not the only person whose brain has been irreparably scrambled by the years, I just want to clear up that Keith Ridgway is not the Ridgway who killed Mia Zapata. That guy's name is Gary, and he didn't kill Mia Zapata. This one guy just thought he did this one time because Seattle, and somebody mentioned it in some Nirvana documentary I saw this one other time years ago, before the case was solved. Trust me, I googled all this. My brain is a junkyard of broken, sun-warped facts. Fortunately, the occasional internet search helps keep me from sounding like a moron all the time. Just sometimes, which is acceptable. To my admittedly limited knowledge, this author is not a serial killer.The banter is choppy, the humor is dark, the content is terror, the prose is at once dry and cerebral. Also, I learned a cool bit of slang: "numpty". It's an insult, and I would use the crap out of it if doing so wouldn't make me feel like a complete jackass. "Ohhh, lookit me, I'm from Oklahoma, yeehaw, howdydoo, don't be such a numpty, ya bloody tosser." No.In one of its whee meta moments, the book describes itself better than I ever could: It leaps, both logically and chronologically, from one absurd set-up to another, painstakingly mapping out the ground upon which some action then briefly and violently takes place in a blur, without detail. That. If you're good with sinisterly toned books focusing on style over story, I highly recommend this. In fact, after rolling it around in my head a few days, I've bumped it up a star for sheer moxy. It's an admirable accomplishment that will stick in the ole brain for a while to come, I'm guessing.
Hawthorn & Child is just the sort of book I had in mind when I wrote this blog post about coming to appreciate different literary aesthetics; its incoherence would have left me cold a few years ago, but now I can see more clearly what the book is doing. The title characters are police detectives, and therefore characters whom we would generally expect to bring coherence to the world – but Ridgway creates a study of lives refusing to cohere.Structurally, the novel is fragmented: a series of story-chapters linked primarily (sometimes solely) by the presence of Hawthorn and Child, who even then are sometimes only minor characters. The first chapter sets the tone: the detectives investigate the shooting of Daniel Field a young investment bank employee, though Hawthorn’s mind is clearly wandering, and he behaves oddly enough that one has cause to question whether he’s up to the job (when he and Child visit the victim’s home, Hawthorn even ends up climbing into Field’s bed). Hawthorn makes notes, but of seemingly random things (such as ‘pools of light/pools of shadow‘ [p.19], describing street lights shining on the ground), and his other attempts at ‘detection’ also come across as empty rituals. The victim says he saw a car when he got shot, but the search for it comes to nothing, and there’s a strong suggestion that the car exists only in recollections and interviews (‘Just a shape,’ one character remembers seeing. ‘The back of a car. You know. The idea of a car’ [p. 20]). Ultimately, anything on which the investigation may be able to hang evaporates when looked at more closely.For the second chapter, we shift to the viewpoint of a gangster’s driver, and it comes as quite a shock to see Hawthorn appear competent and efficient to the outside world. It creates a nagging sense that we can’t really rely on anything in the novel; for example, perhaps Child (whom we only ever see externally) is putting up a front as much as Hawthorn – we’ll just never know.Throughout Hawthorn & Child, possibilities and realities are glimpsed, then disappear. Attempts to impose some sort of shape on the world – such as one narrator’s paranoid political conspiracy theory, or a manuscript purporting to describe a wainscot society of wolves in the interstices of the city – come to nothing. Even a character like the gangster Mishazzo, who’s in the background of several chapters and whom we see more clearly, is still ultimately elusive. Ridgway tells all in dextrous prose that consists largely of grimy details and sentence-fragments, occasionally bursting into more flowing narratives which evoke different kinds of character.Hawthorn & Child is a tale of mysteries – and lives – unsolved. Its final vision is of the two detectives breakfasting in Child’s house:They ate in silence and the windows rattled as a bus went by, and in the time they shared there was no time. No time at all. [Hawthorn] could remember nothing of what had gone before, and he could think of no possible future. (p. 282)No moment of triumph here, but the world petering out into stasis. It’s a fitting end to Ridgway’s novel – whilst also, of course, being no end at all.
What do You think about Hawthorn & Child (2012)?
Hawthorn and Child are London detectives diligently investigating crimes, yet they are a distinctly odd pair. The entire book has an overwhelming feeling of strangeness; even the secondary characters are peculiar and eccentric. Ridgway pushes a lot of boundaries, but he does it exceedingly well. Reading this, I had the feeling of being dropped into an already existing scenario -- nothing is explained, only experienced. While unsettling, the format lends itself to the unfolding of surprise after surprise in an innovative way. Each chapter has the clear sense of being inside the narrator's head, with the action being a blend of the character's perspective and the actual truth. The result is more a feeling of "experiencing" this book, rather than reading it. I almost wonder if Ridgway knew where this book was going when he started writing; it seems that fresh and unexpected.It feels more like a collection of short stories, with central characters running throughout, rather than a straight-up novel. The "chapters" are not really connected to each other, but, as much as I hate short stories, that isn't an issue here. There is a real depth to Hawthorn's character; the book glides along quickly and feels hefty enough to be classified as a novel.Not for the squeamish, parts of "Hawthorn & Child" are as dark as anything I've come across. But, for a purely novel experience -- one that is seriously well done, if slightly bizarre -- this is your book.
—Dianah
It's pretty on mark to call Hawthorn & Child an anti-novel. And the British author Keith Ridgway nailed it, superbly.He once put it that it is "a book of fragments". "The mysteries are everywhere, but the biggest of all is our mysterious compulsion to solve them. In Hawthorn & Child, the only certainty is that we've all misunderstood everything," the back of the book says.I read his interview at Asylum (LINK: http://theasylum.wordpress.com/2012/0...) before reading his book, so I knew I would be reading something seemingly illogical, gaps should be everywhere. But still, I couldn't help and constantly thought to myself: "Is it a hint?" or "Does that mean he killed her?"The story is so patchy that some critics even asked: "Is there a plot at all?"Mind you there is no answer in the book, because it doesn't intend to. Unlike mainstream novels, which usually dare to leave room for imagination only toward the end, Mr. Ridgway leaves gap all the way along, seamlessly connected by his engaging and graphic prose.It was a very new experience to me. I had no clue what was going on, but I didn't want to put it down. Didn't want it to end. Didn't grunt at all.It was weird -- wonderfully weird.
—Aries Poon
Meh. I knew I was in for it when I saw that one of the main characters referenced his erection like five times in his first seven pages of stream-of-consciousness. Pretty good indicator that this was not going to be my jam. This was allegedly innovative! And experimental! But really, it was just a collection of short stories that were held together by the same two characters appearing somewhere in each story. Some of the stories were better than others, but if there was a larger point in there somewhere, it never became evident. Short stories that lack any sort of context aren't so much groundbreaking as frustrating. Making your message super esoteric and difficult to ascertain doesn't make you smarter than everyone else, but it does make you kind of an irritating writer. Also, including a chapter where a teenage girl monologues about art in a way that makes it super clear that she is actually talking about your awesome experimental novel is both meta and very, very ridiculous. Thanks for telling me how to appreciate your book, dude! Pass.
—Jenny
