I loved Keith Ridgway's novel Dooneen, set in an alternative present version of Dublin where housing struggles are intensifying towards some kind of uprising. The story actually starts though in Southwark with two men walking from the River Thames (including a drink at the Angel in Rotherhithe), through Southwark Park and on to their home in Havil Street SE5. The next day the lovers are separated when one of them enters a mysterious portal in Burgess Park and steps out into Blessington Street Basin park in Dublin. There are some other understated fantastical elements, and some comical ones, but this is also a highly believable imagining of revolutionary escalation and state repression, told through a tenderly-drawn cast of characters and mostly from the point of view of a writer never quite understanding what he is caught up in.
It's difficult to write with these kind of themes without coming across as didactic or hectoring, Ridgway pulls it off though he does put some great rants in the mouths of some of his characters:
'Feeling the cold. Feeling the damp. Paying the rent. Tramping home in the rain from Peckham to the Liberties, from Makoko to the Five Lamps, from Paraisópolis to Hardwicke Street, isn't everything ridiculous when you put it next to everything else? And of course we have voted. Of course we have. Some of us have even stood. And campaigned and petitioned and lobbied and leaned in and fell over. We have withdrawn our labour. We have withheld our rent. We have picketed and protested. We have asked politely and impolitely. The letters we've written! We have been eloquent and we have been blunt. Loud and quiet. We've had a word. And we've taken to the streets. And the only fucking thing we've got in return is older. Older and colder and poorer and deader. And what would they have us do now? I can tell you what. Shuffle along the cliff edge to the point of no return and fall to our deaths so they can scold our corpses for not being careful, for not watching where we were going, for not saving, for not investing, for not getting on the ladder, for not thinking ahead, for not being born in the right place, for not getting the right sort of job, for letting a foreigner move in next door, for not understanding how complicated it is, for being idealistic, for being juvenile, for being utopian, for being anything really, for being, just for being'.
The title references the folk song which I got to know through Christy Moore and Planxty, 'the Cliffs of Dooneen', a song from the perspective of somebody leaving and bidding farewell not just to the landscape but 'to all the fine people I'm leaving behind'. There are so many such songs of exile and emigration ('Spancil Hill', also recorded by Christy, being another example), infused with a deep longing for far off places that assume a hazy, visionary quality from a distance of time and place. A similar longing infuses this novel, for Dublin, for the cliffs of the West of Ireland, but also for South London with the narrator dreaming of being back in Havil Street with his lover.
There aren't too many South London references after that opening chapter, though I note that this novel is published by the fine Fitzcarraldo Editions as one of their iconic blue literary volumes. The publisher is now based in the Bussey building at 133 Rye Lane in Peckham having previously had its office in Deptford at 8-12 Creekside London.
 |
| My copy with its Lala bookshop bookmark |
