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Hawthorn & Child
Hawthorn and his partner, Child, are called to the scene of a mysterious shooting in North London. The only witness is unreliable, the clues are scarce, and the victim, a young man who lives nearby, swears he was shot by a ghost car. While Hawthorn battles with fatigue and strange dreams, the crime and the narrative slip from his grasp and the stories of other Londoners take over: a young pickpocket on the run from his boss; an editor in possession of a disturbing manuscript; a teenage girl who spends her days at the Tate Modern; and a madman who has been infected by former Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Haunting these disparate lives is the shadowy figure of Mishazzo, an elusive crime magnate who may be running the city, or may not exist at all.
288 pages, Paperback
First published July 5, 2012
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June 27, 2023
Sometimes, I'd rather see a writer be bold and original and not quite do it for me than just play it safe and put me in a nice little comfort zone, where all answers are thrown willy-nilly right in my face, where everything comes together, where resolution is reached, where I, the reader, am not plagued with afterthoughts of what the hell I just read—where certain scenes are not now stuck in my head for all time. The thing is with Hawthorn & Child though, is that we're not talking of a bold and original novel that didn't quite do it for me; where I praise the writer for at least trying, we're talking about one that absolutely did. It really did hit the nail on the head. But not in terms of resolving anything. I was the nail. This book gave me a right good wallop!
Up to about page 50 this reads like your traditional crime story where nothing is really out of the ordinary, where two London detectives are called in to investigate the shooting of a man on his way to work in the early hours of the morning, and where it sets up obvious questions for the reader, like—
Who is the victim?
What, if anything, did he do wrong?
Was he involved in some sort of crime himself?
Who pulled the trigger?
Any witnesses?
Any early leads or possible suspects for the police?
And what's this about a vintage car?
It's going to be riveting to see it all play out, and hopefully tie everything up nicely.
Just like all the other 'whodunit' and 'why' novels/films/ TV crime dramas—I'm going to be gripped right through to it's finale!
Well, you can forget all that right now, as the shooting isn't even mentioned again. Keith Ridgway drops the case. Gone. Kaputt. For the next 200 pages he absolutely does the unexpected. And it's precisely this that made it all work for me—its breathtaking unpredictability. I had to forget the crime: Yes, I can do that. Just go with it, with an open mind: yes again. The rewards will come, you'll see. And didn't they just.
At times shocking, disturbing, and with a level of unease that really got under my skin, the pairing of Hawthorn & Child—one white, one black—one homosexual, one married—are sometimes hinted at, sometimes there in the flesh, sometimes there in a dream; a nightmare, sometimes not even there at all. The atmosphere at times is one of dark, dark, dark—especially a couple of moments involving a quite nasty (presumed) suicide and a shocking moment (still reeling from it) involving a baby—and, although vague, a possible sex killer, but through some cool, if slightly odd, engaging buddy cop dialogue it had its lighter moments too. I would say, despite characters fading in and out of view; in the margins of what is real and what is not, and the fact that it doesn't follow anywhere near the same trajectory as your average Joe detective/mystery/crime novel, with its totally unorthodox narrative, it still ticks certain boxes in the genre.
I was completely immersed from start to finish. Does it always have to make sense to like something? Of course not.
June 6, 2021
-- It's a set-up, said Child.
-- What is?
-- Every single fucking thing.
A seriously impressive, wonderfully off-kilter novel from a special talent. Mesmerising, ultra-modern and as oddly satisfying a 'literary crime novel' (only obliquely is it about crime, although a memorable villain takes up a riveting, terrifying set-piece) as you're likely to find.
-- What is?
-- Every single fucking thing.
A seriously impressive, wonderfully off-kilter novel from a special talent. Mesmerising, ultra-modern and as oddly satisfying a 'literary crime novel' (only obliquely is it about crime, although a memorable villain takes up a riveting, terrifying set-piece) as you're likely to find.
August 30, 2014
For a book I'd wanted to read for so long - and really enjoyed - I'm finding it surprisingly difficult to think of anything to say about Hawthorn & Child. Part of the problem is that it's so difficult to describe: each chapter is totally different to the last, but they aren't really short stories either, more like interconnected vignettes. The characters of the title - two London policemen - appear or are referenced in every chapter, but they are rarely central to what happens and they remain largely elusive. This could, in fact, be said of every character: we only ever glimpse fragments of their stories. Nothing really begins or ends.
There are some brilliant themes and motifs here, but the book is deliberately opaque and disjointed, sometimes even dreamlike, which can be a little bit frustrating. The frustration is amplified because Ridgway's writing is so fantastic, his characters so wonderfully drawn and lifelike, that I desparately wanted a more coherent narrative to emerge, for some of the peripheral characters to reappear, for just about everything to be expanded on. I didn't expect, or even want, clear-cut resolutions and happy endings, I simply wanted more: it felt far, FAR too short. I honestly really like fragmented, weird stories that don't make sense, but I like them to ramble on for ages.
I realise the above sounds more negative than positive, but that's because one week on, I am still mourning the lack of more of this book. What there is of Hawthorn & Child is perfect: there just isn't enough.
There are some brilliant themes and motifs here, but the book is deliberately opaque and disjointed, sometimes even dreamlike, which can be a little bit frustrating. The frustration is amplified because Ridgway's writing is so fantastic, his characters so wonderfully drawn and lifelike, that I desparately wanted a more coherent narrative to emerge, for some of the peripheral characters to reappear, for just about everything to be expanded on. I didn't expect, or even want, clear-cut resolutions and happy endings, I simply wanted more: it felt far, FAR too short. I honestly really like fragmented, weird stories that don't make sense, but I like them to ramble on for ages.
I realise the above sounds more negative than positive, but that's because one week on, I am still mourning the lack of more of this book. What there is of Hawthorn & Child is perfect: there just isn't enough.
October 12, 2012
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:
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.
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.
December 20, 2015
Much-fêted in the UK literary blogosphere; less well-rated on Goodreads. The latter seemingly because some readers of crime fiction object to the loose ends.
Having found it easy to read, clever and fun, I'm siding with the bloggers. I picked up H&C because I couldn't read Tolstoy after a poor night's sleep; wondering what to choose, I'd been prompted by this blogger who's also tackling a tsundoku problem, with more single-minded resolve than I am - I had two of the same titles from that list outstanding. The Granta paperback itself is also nicely soft and pliable with well spaced type, which only made it an easier choice. (More rigid books with miniscule type stay unread the longest.)
You could call it an anti-novel or a collection of interlocking short stories. Regardless, like a lot of recently published British and Irish litfic, it uses a succession of different character viewpoints - mostly in close third person, and you don't always know straight away who the next protagonist is going to be. Each, if it's not Hawthorn or Child themselves, has a connection to the two police detectives working some of the less glamorous parts of North London - Wood Green, Tottenham and environs, and often to their investigation of Mishazzo, a discreet fixer for the organised crime world. H&C ignores many of the cliches of police procedural and noir without ever seeming to make a point of doing so.
To quote a jacket quote from the Observer, "Ridgway writes with the keen sense of place and the lucid, pared-down prose of a good crime novel, which makes the more outlandish deviations even more arresting." Yes. The first chapter reads like the beginning of an investigation, only less lurid and better written than a lot of crime fiction, without most of the annoying bits. It made me realise how I'd missed reading procedurals these last few months: seeing into lives more ordinary than a lot of the cast of literary and classic fiction, and the rolling up of sleeves to get some serious work done.
It was all pretty good, but for me there were two outstanding episodes: 'How to Have Fun with a Fat Man', and 'How We Ran the Night'.
'Fat Man' was highly praised by at least one blog, as I recall. About Hawthorn, it at first alternates paragraphs about one of his visits to a gay sauna including group sex, and his thoughts whilst on duty in riot gear, awaiting the signal to charge protestors. Physical and complicated, and anti-stereotypical by virtue of just being itself; not since The Leopard a couple of years ago has a book visited on me such a vivid sense of how it might be to inhabit a different bodily frame. We've seen the guy's pretty tough, but that doesn't mean he doesn't get a few slurs sometimes, from being out at work and to his family (we hear them) and that doesn't mean he's so sensitive he won't insult people himself, as he does to get rid of the advances of a persistent obese man.
'How We Ran the Night' again does something great without seeming to try at all: part of it is a satire on the boom in London-based urban fantasy fiction. No comedy hooters sound to show it's supposed to be funny - it's played totally straight, except that the characters have scorn for a printout manuscript, 'memoir by Estator, Prince of Wolves' which might just be the ramblings of a dodgy garage manager who had a nervous breakdown. The narrator, a seedy literary editor who's vaguely connected to the underworld, reminded me of Samson Young in Martin Amis' London Fields, only more explicitly nasty and more physically mobile. The allusion seemed confirmed at the end of the story .
An episode about a teenage girl who's into art was, due to its simple style and subject, a lot like bits of Ali Smith's How To Be Both. It also made me understand why people might like some art that's never really grabbed me - I can accept people like different things, but it's another matter understanding the feeling of why they might love them.
A couple of things were unconvincing. I'm not sure characters use the internet as much as they would have in 2010, when this appears to be set; they often fumble around with partial information as people did before looking things up online was a worthwhile habit (e.g. the twentysomething couple getting into bondage). Perhaps too many characters write. I'd got the impression from another discussion of the book that it might be derivative of Derek Raymond, whom I've not read; at least H&C doesn't have the prolonged gore I've got the impression Raymond does.
And I initially had doubts about a chapter narrated by someone who has persecutory delusions; I've met a few, and this piece at first used too many phrases like 'I assume that', and 'I believe', indicating the person knows their own subjectivity, and it tended to fulfill Grice's maxims - but then later it got more adamant, stranger, with odd leaps, as if the author had been warming up to the part. I didn't always click with the penultimate 'The Association of Christ Sejunct' - although at the beginning it was as if one of those mid-century existentialist sulkers was being re-cast as a contemporary criminal:...that he was alienated from the community of people and it wasn't his fault. But the truth was cruelty. I hoped the book wasn't going to go downhill at the end; however .
The blurb sounds like things might get inappropriately pretentious for the setting: Two mid-ranking North London detectives, intent on connecting a series of scattered and gruesome events, come to suspect the only certainty is that we've all misunderstood everything. But anything like that is communicated unobtrusively through casual chat.
I'd wondered if the loose ends would bother me - not in the least, it turns out. They did a little in another recent literary crime novel, The Murder of Halland, as it concentrated only on one relatively simple case. Here there are so many players, people in the middle of their lives, that it always seemed quite natural. In some jobs dealing with the public, you get to hear about outcomes, in others you don't, though you wonder what happened. Here, not even that, somehow. I was always interested in what was happening, but it was as if the journey was the point.
Maybe 4.5, but it also makes me tired of being curmudgeonly about stars, so the full five it is.
Having found it easy to read, clever and fun, I'm siding with the bloggers. I picked up H&C because I couldn't read Tolstoy after a poor night's sleep; wondering what to choose, I'd been prompted by this blogger who's also tackling a tsundoku problem, with more single-minded resolve than I am - I had two of the same titles from that list outstanding. The Granta paperback itself is also nicely soft and pliable with well spaced type, which only made it an easier choice. (More rigid books with miniscule type stay unread the longest.)
You could call it an anti-novel or a collection of interlocking short stories. Regardless, like a lot of recently published British and Irish litfic, it uses a succession of different character viewpoints - mostly in close third person, and you don't always know straight away who the next protagonist is going to be. Each, if it's not Hawthorn or Child themselves, has a connection to the two police detectives working some of the less glamorous parts of North London - Wood Green, Tottenham and environs, and often to their investigation of Mishazzo, a discreet fixer for the organised crime world. H&C ignores many of the cliches of police procedural and noir without ever seeming to make a point of doing so.
To quote a jacket quote from the Observer, "Ridgway writes with the keen sense of place and the lucid, pared-down prose of a good crime novel, which makes the more outlandish deviations even more arresting." Yes. The first chapter reads like the beginning of an investigation, only less lurid and better written than a lot of crime fiction, without most of the annoying bits. It made me realise how I'd missed reading procedurals these last few months: seeing into lives more ordinary than a lot of the cast of literary and classic fiction, and the rolling up of sleeves to get some serious work done.
It was all pretty good, but for me there were two outstanding episodes: 'How to Have Fun with a Fat Man', and 'How We Ran the Night'.
'Fat Man' was highly praised by at least one blog, as I recall. About Hawthorn, it at first alternates paragraphs about one of his visits to a gay sauna including group sex, and his thoughts whilst on duty in riot gear, awaiting the signal to charge protestors. Physical and complicated, and anti-stereotypical by virtue of just being itself; not since The Leopard a couple of years ago has a book visited on me such a vivid sense of how it might be to inhabit a different bodily frame. We've seen the guy's pretty tough, but that doesn't mean he doesn't get a few slurs sometimes, from being out at work and to his family (we hear them) and that doesn't mean he's so sensitive he won't insult people himself, as he does to get rid of the advances of a persistent obese man.
'How We Ran the Night' again does something great without seeming to try at all: part of it is a satire on the boom in London-based urban fantasy fiction. No comedy hooters sound to show it's supposed to be funny - it's played totally straight, except that the characters have scorn for a printout manuscript, 'memoir by Estator, Prince of Wolves' which might just be the ramblings of a dodgy garage manager who had a nervous breakdown. The narrator, a seedy literary editor who's vaguely connected to the underworld, reminded me of Samson Young in Martin Amis' London Fields, only more explicitly nasty and more physically mobile. The allusion seemed confirmed at the end of the story .
An episode about a teenage girl who's into art was, due to its simple style and subject, a lot like bits of Ali Smith's How To Be Both. It also made me understand why people might like some art that's never really grabbed me - I can accept people like different things, but it's another matter understanding the feeling of why they might love them.
A couple of things were unconvincing. I'm not sure characters use the internet as much as they would have in 2010, when this appears to be set; they often fumble around with partial information as people did before looking things up online was a worthwhile habit (e.g. the twentysomething couple getting into bondage). Perhaps too many characters write. I'd got the impression from another discussion of the book that it might be derivative of Derek Raymond, whom I've not read; at least H&C doesn't have the prolonged gore I've got the impression Raymond does.
And I initially had doubts about a chapter narrated by someone who has persecutory delusions; I've met a few, and this piece at first used too many phrases like 'I assume that', and 'I believe', indicating the person knows their own subjectivity, and it tended to fulfill Grice's maxims - but then later it got more adamant, stranger, with odd leaps, as if the author had been warming up to the part. I didn't always click with the penultimate 'The Association of Christ Sejunct' - although at the beginning it was as if one of those mid-century existentialist sulkers was being re-cast as a contemporary criminal:...that he was alienated from the community of people and it wasn't his fault. But the truth was cruelty. I hoped the book wasn't going to go downhill at the end; however .
The blurb sounds like things might get inappropriately pretentious for the setting: Two mid-ranking North London detectives, intent on connecting a series of scattered and gruesome events, come to suspect the only certainty is that we've all misunderstood everything. But anything like that is communicated unobtrusively through casual chat.
I'd wondered if the loose ends would bother me - not in the least, it turns out. They did a little in another recent literary crime novel, The Murder of Halland, as it concentrated only on one relatively simple case. Here there are so many players, people in the middle of their lives, that it always seemed quite natural. In some jobs dealing with the public, you get to hear about outcomes, in others you don't, though you wonder what happened. Here, not even that, somehow. I was always interested in what was happening, but it was as if the journey was the point.
Maybe 4.5, but it also makes me tired of being curmudgeonly about stars, so the full five it is.
November 1, 2021
Reading Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn & Child was an experience of shifting reactions and emotions: rueful chuckles; eagerness to move to a next page, sometimes due to old guy heteronormative distaste at gay sex scenes (or were they fantasies?) and sometimes due to eagerness to learn what comes next; and occasional confusion. Hawthorn and Child are cops unlike any others that I’ve been introduced to in a lifetime of reading police procedurals, and Hawthorn & Child is a police procedural unlike any other I’ve ever read. It’s a credit to Keith Ridgway that Hawthorn & Child is unclassifiable, and shoving it into the police procedural genre does both Ridgeway and this novel a disservice. Hawthorn & Child is a novel to puzzle over, to reread for the joy of its language and the sheer weirdness of its characters and situations.
“The Spectacular,” the metafictional coda to Hawthorn & Child, can stand alone as fine short form fiction. It’s more conventional in form and less confusing that its parent novel, but equally wry and even more compelling. ”I am a writer. I have no money. / There you are. That explains most things.” And then we move on from those starting sentences as “The Spectacular” wending its way through the writer’s failed marriage; his reflections on his lack of popular success (”The books I write are well reviewed. Nobody buys them”); his down-market digs; his meeting with his agent (”There isn’t a paragraph of bad writing in any of the four novels for which I am your humble agent” and his agent’s suggestion that the writer ". . . get a job”, ”something to tide you over”); and then the writer’s declaration that ”I decided to write a bestseller.”. The wonderful Kafkaesque plot moves on from there to the 2012 London Olympics and terrorism and antiterrorism mania, with metafictional tie-ins to Detectives Hawthorn and Child.
5 stars for “The Spectacular” and 3.5 stars for Hawthorn & Child
“The Spectacular,” the metafictional coda to Hawthorn & Child, can stand alone as fine short form fiction. It’s more conventional in form and less confusing that its parent novel, but equally wry and even more compelling. ”I am a writer. I have no money. / There you are. That explains most things.” And then we move on from those starting sentences as “The Spectacular” wending its way through the writer’s failed marriage; his reflections on his lack of popular success (”The books I write are well reviewed. Nobody buys them”); his down-market digs; his meeting with his agent (”There isn’t a paragraph of bad writing in any of the four novels for which I am your humble agent” and his agent’s suggestion that the writer ". . . get a job”, ”something to tide you over”); and then the writer’s declaration that ”I decided to write a bestseller.”. The wonderful Kafkaesque plot moves on from there to the 2012 London Olympics and terrorism and antiterrorism mania, with metafictional tie-ins to Detectives Hawthorn and Child.
5 stars for “The Spectacular” and 3.5 stars for Hawthorn & Child
April 7, 2013
I enjoyed the beginning of this book, but by half way through I had lost patience, and just wanted to get to the end. By two thirds of the way through I didn't care if I finished it at all. Perhaps I am not clever enough to appreciate the nuances and style of writing. I like a book to be challenging, but I don't like to be left feeling unfulfilled and bewildered.
December 4, 2013
incredible noir capturing modern day crime and detection and the "why bother, it;s all going to shit anyway?" situations many find themselves in, during these times. a new directions book, perhaps a first for them? a detective novel. like these great reads An Occasional Dream and The Black Minutes and Beautiful, Naked & Dead and bolano books
i forgot to add, no crimes are solved
i forgot to add, no crimes are solved
February 7, 2013
I can't decide if this is a work of genius or a case of the Emperors new clothes. It's deliberately fragmentary and there were fragments that really hooked me. But there were too many other fragments that left me cold and in the end I didn't care whether I finished it or not.
December 23, 2012
Some books you wish you'd written yourself and this is one of them. When an author so easily articulates what has been spinning around in your mind for so long, in the form of a novel that is so uniquely his own - well then, you can only sit back and be grateful.
There are many things to admire in this novel but I'm going to include here two quotes that get right to the heart of what I wish I could achieve as a writer:
'I am not a stakeholder. I hold no stake. I pay my taxes. My taxes buy weapons and arm soldiers. My taxes send the soldiers to Afghanistan and formerly Iraq to be terrified and traumatized, and to inflict terror and trauma upon others, including the killing and maiming of others, and I do not support Our Boys, it is a volunteer army and I believe that every one of those volunteers is misguided and that their innate, childish, boyish attraction to aggression and adventure and camaraderie is being perverted by malign and morally vacant politicians who are not even clever enough to be operating to anyone’s advantage, not even their own, who are merely drunk on narrative and who see themselves as part of something bigger, such as the delusion of History, and who are impressive only in the scope and depth and profundity of their stupidity.'
And a few pages later:
'Mr Blair is not the owner of his own evil. He is the host if you like – if you want to use the sort of terminology that he has adapted into his own life and heart, the vocabulary of the groping church – he is the possessed corpse of a former human, animated entirely by the spittle-flecked priests of Rome and by miserable justifications, by ointments of the sagging flesh, the night-time coldness of the awful touch. His skin is a manila envelope. It contains an argument, not a heart. But he has made choices and the choices are owned by him, and he owns those choices and he is the chooser of death. He is the chooser of death. He has chosen death and he has chosen to visit it on others when no such choice was necessary. He is the progenitor of the crushed skulls of baby girls. He is the father of the dead bodies of children and the raped mothers and the bludgeoned fathers. He has embraced the murder of his lord, and he has used the people to enact his fantasy and his perversions. He has masturbated over the Euphrates. He has rubbed History against his cold chest like a feeler in the crowd. Like a breather, interferer. Slack muscle of pornography, piece of shit.'
I hope it's okay to quote so extensively from the book here.
There are many things to admire in this novel but I'm going to include here two quotes that get right to the heart of what I wish I could achieve as a writer:
'I am not a stakeholder. I hold no stake. I pay my taxes. My taxes buy weapons and arm soldiers. My taxes send the soldiers to Afghanistan and formerly Iraq to be terrified and traumatized, and to inflict terror and trauma upon others, including the killing and maiming of others, and I do not support Our Boys, it is a volunteer army and I believe that every one of those volunteers is misguided and that their innate, childish, boyish attraction to aggression and adventure and camaraderie is being perverted by malign and morally vacant politicians who are not even clever enough to be operating to anyone’s advantage, not even their own, who are merely drunk on narrative and who see themselves as part of something bigger, such as the delusion of History, and who are impressive only in the scope and depth and profundity of their stupidity.'
And a few pages later:
'Mr Blair is not the owner of his own evil. He is the host if you like – if you want to use the sort of terminology that he has adapted into his own life and heart, the vocabulary of the groping church – he is the possessed corpse of a former human, animated entirely by the spittle-flecked priests of Rome and by miserable justifications, by ointments of the sagging flesh, the night-time coldness of the awful touch. His skin is a manila envelope. It contains an argument, not a heart. But he has made choices and the choices are owned by him, and he owns those choices and he is the chooser of death. He is the chooser of death. He has chosen death and he has chosen to visit it on others when no such choice was necessary. He is the progenitor of the crushed skulls of baby girls. He is the father of the dead bodies of children and the raped mothers and the bludgeoned fathers. He has embraced the murder of his lord, and he has used the people to enact his fantasy and his perversions. He has masturbated over the Euphrates. He has rubbed History against his cold chest like a feeler in the crowd. Like a breather, interferer. Slack muscle of pornography, piece of shit.'
I hope it's okay to quote so extensively from the book here.
July 4, 2013
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.
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.
March 30, 2013
This book is so hard to describe and very hard to rate. Bits of it were fantastic, and it could easily have been a refreshing and brilliant way of writing a book.
I wasn't warned/told about the concept before I read - that each chapter is a small portion of a story, left unfinished, with some overlapping characters - which actually made it far less enjoyable. I was waiting for some sort of major plot wrap-up the whole way through, and was always expecting a new chapter to revisit an old story.
I can't give it more than three stars. In fact I nearly gave it two.
Maybe I need to read more "proper" books to really understand how superb the author's use of language is (I found it overly long-winded at times), and appreciate the various glimpses of stories he gives.
Sadly with my non-highbrow head on I found a lot of the writing impenetrable and frustrating, and some parts superfluous: the significance of the wolf story was interesting enough but the inclusion of parts of it were dull and strange.
The more I write the more I'm leaning back to two stars, so I'd better stop before I get too miserly!
At the very least a book that needs more than one read for me to really like it.
I wasn't warned/told about the concept before I read - that each chapter is a small portion of a story, left unfinished, with some overlapping characters - which actually made it far less enjoyable. I was waiting for some sort of major plot wrap-up the whole way through, and was always expecting a new chapter to revisit an old story.
I can't give it more than three stars. In fact I nearly gave it two.
Maybe I need to read more "proper" books to really understand how superb the author's use of language is (I found it overly long-winded at times), and appreciate the various glimpses of stories he gives.
Sadly with my non-highbrow head on I found a lot of the writing impenetrable and frustrating, and some parts superfluous: the significance of the wolf story was interesting enough but the inclusion of parts of it were dull and strange.
The more I write the more I'm leaning back to two stars, so I'd better stop before I get too miserly!
At the very least a book that needs more than one read for me to really like it.
February 23, 2016
fucking brilliant, just don't expect closure/crimes being solved even though it's a kind of detective novel. 'Kind of' in that it features the two eponymous detectives, and that crimes are committed. Some very brutal, some bizarre. Motives are not explored. Sexual fantasies and dreams are given as much reality as 'reality'. The writing is incredibly detailed and strong, with a beautiful control that the characters certainly don't have. It's more like a book of stories than a novel, in that the narratives go off at a 90 degree angle to the preceding chapters often involving different characters, sometimes only tenuously connected to what has happened before. Thrilling.
January 20, 2023
Liked parts of this a lot—always a little ominous, a little weird— but I came to it as a fan of Keith Ridgway’s follow-up book, A Shock, which takes the same form of interconnected short stories, and that was just sooo much better. A Shock blew me away and this didn’t have the same emotional punch as it, and a few stories just didn’t really feel like they went anywhere. Maybe that’s a lazy critique because the whole idea is that they all have Raymond Carver-y endings with no resolution, but I dunno a story can still be satisfying even without resolution! Still enjoyed enough and glad I read it, excited for his next book. 🥸🥸🥸🥸
November 27, 2012
There's a lot of buzz about this book currently so I thought I'd check it out. The Titular Hawthorn and Child are two CID Detectives who have links to every one of the somewhat disparate chapters. Chapter 1 starts off with a non-lethal shooting they investigate, but none of the succeeding chapters returns to this particular crime. The way they fade in and out of the stories reminded me partly of Norwegian Noir writer Karin Fossum's detective pair Sejer and Skarre who are at times almost ethereal presences as she focuses in on the psychology of the guilty and victims alike, which is not dissimilar to what Ridgway is doing here, although this book is less about solving a single crime. The other book this reminded me of was Jennifer Egan's excellent "A Visit From The Goon Squad" as it wove around a cast of characters all loosely tied together by a rock and roll theme, though in Ridgway's book the theme is crime and criminals.
There are some very interesting characters and chapters, but does it hold together as a whole seeing as the narrative links between chapters are so diffuse? I don't really think it does, but the only way I can tackle the rest of this review is to rate the wildly varying chapters in terms of their quality, rather than talk any further about the whole.
Chapter 1 introduces the crime and the detective pair. It was very one paced and not terribly enlightening.
Chapter 2 centres around a guy who becomes a driver for a criminal fixer and suspect behind the shooting in Chapter 1. This is one of the stronger chapter in terms of him being a fascinating character, both in the relationship with his girlfriend which is beautifully portrayed and also in his mounting paranoia as the gangsters and police begin to close in on him and corrode his sense of security
Chapter 3 for me ultimately made the price of buying this book worth it just for the writing in this as well. It intercuts a riot scene from the perspective of one of Hawthorn behind his riot gear, with a description of the feelings aroused during anonymous group sex. All this while the gay Hawthorn is visiting his father and happily married brother. Simply stunning.
Chapter 4 and back to the the misfiring with a story about an editor coming into receipt of a strange manuscript that appears to be a tale told by a wolf leading his brethren into battle with other animal foes in the hinterlands of London. It's suggested that it's really just code for the actual criminals in London, including the suspects from Chapters 1 and 2, and the editor trying to do some investigating himself gets locked into a garage-workshop owned by the criminals, but this didn't really work at all for me as a concept or in execution.
Chapter 5 Sees a more senior policeman to the titular pair called Rivers having his visiting rights meeting with his daughter who is fumbling towards the first love of her life. It's a bit twee really. When the author drops some 'teen speak' in italics, in the form of the word 'bare' (means really or proper, used for emphasis) it just stands out and screams arch and clumsy at me.
Chapter 6 is about a man with paranoid fantasies who believes he has been infected after a handshake with Tony Blair, because he was opposed to british foreign intervention in wars abroad. there were some nice details depicting his madness, but this sort of thing is so hard to pull off and in the end he lost my sympathy because I was unconvinced by the portrayal of the whole character.
Chapter 7 Is about another nutter, this time a man who is obsessed with Jesus Christ, the lost teenage rebellion years. This one utterly didn't work for me, though the final payoff was heart-rending.
Chapter 8 Starts hinting at the awfulness of the detective's lot seeing all these terrible crimes and how humanity predates upon one another, even as Hawthorn seems to have found a partner in love, a Premiership football referee! Something about the specificity of that and its reference to the real world bothered me more than Tony Blair even - the Blair thing one could believe of a fantasist, yet hunkering down with one of only 20 referees of the world, I don't know it jarred with me. The very final ending was quite nice though, it was clever in its downbeat light cast across the rest of the book.
So overall, this was almost a series of vignettes rather than a coherent whole novel. It's certainly brave and experimental and not without some fine writing. But it didn't work for me. I felt any overall themes it was making didn't really get their due. But because one or two of the sections I gave it 4 stars, but it's not done with a confidence behind any recommendations to others.
Chapter 5
There are some very interesting characters and chapters, but does it hold together as a whole seeing as the narrative links between chapters are so diffuse? I don't really think it does, but the only way I can tackle the rest of this review is to rate the wildly varying chapters in terms of their quality, rather than talk any further about the whole.
Chapter 1 introduces the crime and the detective pair. It was very one paced and not terribly enlightening.
Chapter 2 centres around a guy who becomes a driver for a criminal fixer and suspect behind the shooting in Chapter 1. This is one of the stronger chapter in terms of him being a fascinating character, both in the relationship with his girlfriend which is beautifully portrayed and also in his mounting paranoia as the gangsters and police begin to close in on him and corrode his sense of security
Chapter 3 for me ultimately made the price of buying this book worth it just for the writing in this as well. It intercuts a riot scene from the perspective of one of Hawthorn behind his riot gear, with a description of the feelings aroused during anonymous group sex. All this while the gay Hawthorn is visiting his father and happily married brother. Simply stunning.
Chapter 4 and back to the the misfiring with a story about an editor coming into receipt of a strange manuscript that appears to be a tale told by a wolf leading his brethren into battle with other animal foes in the hinterlands of London. It's suggested that it's really just code for the actual criminals in London, including the suspects from Chapters 1 and 2, and the editor trying to do some investigating himself gets locked into a garage-workshop owned by the criminals, but this didn't really work at all for me as a concept or in execution.
Chapter 5 Sees a more senior policeman to the titular pair called Rivers having his visiting rights meeting with his daughter who is fumbling towards the first love of her life. It's a bit twee really. When the author drops some 'teen speak' in italics, in the form of the word 'bare' (means really or proper, used for emphasis) it just stands out and screams arch and clumsy at me.
Chapter 6 is about a man with paranoid fantasies who believes he has been infected after a handshake with Tony Blair, because he was opposed to british foreign intervention in wars abroad. there were some nice details depicting his madness, but this sort of thing is so hard to pull off and in the end he lost my sympathy because I was unconvinced by the portrayal of the whole character.
Chapter 7 Is about another nutter, this time a man who is obsessed with Jesus Christ, the lost teenage rebellion years. This one utterly didn't work for me, though the final payoff was heart-rending.
Chapter 8 Starts hinting at the awfulness of the detective's lot seeing all these terrible crimes and how humanity predates upon one another, even as Hawthorn seems to have found a partner in love, a Premiership football referee! Something about the specificity of that and its reference to the real world bothered me more than Tony Blair even - the Blair thing one could believe of a fantasist, yet hunkering down with one of only 20 referees of the world, I don't know it jarred with me. The very final ending was quite nice though, it was clever in its downbeat light cast across the rest of the book.
So overall, this was almost a series of vignettes rather than a coherent whole novel. It's certainly brave and experimental and not without some fine writing. But it didn't work for me. I felt any overall themes it was making didn't really get their due. But because one or two of the sections I gave it 4 stars, but it's not done with a confidence behind any recommendations to others.
Chapter 5
August 25, 2012
I started reading Keith Ridgway's Hawthorn and Child on the recommendation of John Self, who was at the time embarking on an experiment to see how effectively a book could be drawn to people's attention through social media. John's enthusiastic championing of the book meant my expectations were high; equally, he'd been very clear about the type of book Hawthorn and Child is, so I knew roughly what to expect: an unconventional narrative structure, a lack, by most definitions, of discernible plot, and a book full of hints, allusions and clues that will have you endlessly pondering their significance. On the other hand, they might not be significant at all. In one chapter, a character eavesdropping on a conversation, remarks: "This banal banter seems so completely unconnected to anything I know about that I wonder if it's coded. Why would it be coded, you idiot? They've just just drifted off into life," a remark which rather mirrors my experience of reading the book at times.
If Hawthorn and Child reminds me of anything, it's Nicola Barker's Darkmans. Darkmans has more plot (to be frank, most books do) but, like Hawthorn and Child, it was a book I kept wanting to re-read so I could piece together more of the oblique references, the throwaway remarks and word choices that you suddenly realise might be meaningful - in Hawthorn and Child, there is a recurrent theme of confusion over words, of mishearing, of not being able to find quite the right terms. Hawthorn and Child also shares a similarly mundane setting, in which odd things happen. In the opening chapter, for instance, there is the odd suggestion that a man may possibly have been shot by a ghost car. Hawthorn and Child themselves are police officers who are pursuing a mysterious gangster, Mishazzo, but this is a million miles from a crime novel. In crime novels, everything is explained, everything neatly resolved, so that the solution to the mystery becomes the point. In Hawthorn and Child, almost nothing is resolved or explained. We're not even sure what crimes Mishazzo has committed, as most of what we see him and his sidekicks doing in the book has nothing to do with their criminal activity - driving from place to place, for instance, or making small talk.
"There are millions of explanations. There's an infinite number of explanations," Hawthorn points out, for it's Hawthorn who seems the more creative thinker of the two policemen, the more willing to explore the unlikely or the impossible and whose grip on reality isn't always firm. Child is the more pragmatic of the pair - if there are millions of explanations for things, he says, then he's not going to get roped into doing the paperwork.
More like a collection of inter-related short stories than a novel in many ways, Hawthorn and Child answers few questions, and leaves much unexplained, and yet each story, each baffling incident, seems complete and satisfying and yet often vaguely unsettling at the same time. The odd awkwardness, the sense of something strange unfolding, is rendered even more bizarre by Ridgway's sparse, matter-of-face prose style. If, like me, you're sometimes attracted to odd books that raise more questions than they ask, this is a novel for you. Read it, ponder it, read it again and spend endless hours trying to unpick it.
If Hawthorn and Child reminds me of anything, it's Nicola Barker's Darkmans. Darkmans has more plot (to be frank, most books do) but, like Hawthorn and Child, it was a book I kept wanting to re-read so I could piece together more of the oblique references, the throwaway remarks and word choices that you suddenly realise might be meaningful - in Hawthorn and Child, there is a recurrent theme of confusion over words, of mishearing, of not being able to find quite the right terms. Hawthorn and Child also shares a similarly mundane setting, in which odd things happen. In the opening chapter, for instance, there is the odd suggestion that a man may possibly have been shot by a ghost car. Hawthorn and Child themselves are police officers who are pursuing a mysterious gangster, Mishazzo, but this is a million miles from a crime novel. In crime novels, everything is explained, everything neatly resolved, so that the solution to the mystery becomes the point. In Hawthorn and Child, almost nothing is resolved or explained. We're not even sure what crimes Mishazzo has committed, as most of what we see him and his sidekicks doing in the book has nothing to do with their criminal activity - driving from place to place, for instance, or making small talk.
"There are millions of explanations. There's an infinite number of explanations," Hawthorn points out, for it's Hawthorn who seems the more creative thinker of the two policemen, the more willing to explore the unlikely or the impossible and whose grip on reality isn't always firm. Child is the more pragmatic of the pair - if there are millions of explanations for things, he says, then he's not going to get roped into doing the paperwork.
More like a collection of inter-related short stories than a novel in many ways, Hawthorn and Child answers few questions, and leaves much unexplained, and yet each story, each baffling incident, seems complete and satisfying and yet often vaguely unsettling at the same time. The odd awkwardness, the sense of something strange unfolding, is rendered even more bizarre by Ridgway's sparse, matter-of-face prose style. If, like me, you're sometimes attracted to odd books that raise more questions than they ask, this is a novel for you. Read it, ponder it, read it again and spend endless hours trying to unpick it.
June 24, 2013
keith ridgway's hawthorn & child is a curious, strange, often delightful work that cannot really be described as a novel in any traditional sense of the word. more a collection of stories or vignettes connected by the two titular characters, the irish author's ambitious work is humorous, imaginative, and, at times, surprisingly moving. focusing on the professional and personal lives of a pair of english police detectives (also of different races and sexual orientations), hawthorn & child delves into the seedy world of crime, conspiracy, and death - but also geopolitics, love, and relationships. it's a police drama (sans the usual procedural asides but with plenty of the requisite violence and heinousness), but also a story of friends, colleagues, and their lives outside of the beat. ridgway's prose is staccato and unadorned, but possesses a rhythmic or cadenced quality to it. his imagination is surely a productive one and some of the book's scenes and settings are entirely unexpected. while not a perfect work, hawthorn & child makes up for in charm, creativity, and originality whatever it may lack in cohesiveness and consistency.
let me level with you. level best and utmost. let me be as honest as i can be. i know that something has gone wrong. i know that the fault is visible. you can discern it in everything i say to you. in most of what i say to you. in how i say it. i know this. i am cracked like ice. i know this. but listen. listen to me. this is important. beneath the fault there is solid ground. beneath the ice. under all the cracks. under all the cracks there is something that is not broken.
September 20, 2020
What the hell did I just read? Who were these people, and what were they doing? Who was talking at any one time, and did some or all the chapters / chunks connect, and was I expected to understand how? My feeble, tired mind could not, and I'm fully prepared to take responsibility. I just... I didn't... I mean... Just, what?!
January 30, 2016
Wonderful, eccentric, experimental, violent, authentic, moving, rich characterization, disturbing, anecd..., no, fragmented... respectful of the reader...from murder to Rothko..., from orgies to doubt.
March 17, 2021
I am just a real big fan of this book
I can't explain why, I just really really like it
I can't explain why, I just really really like it
May 30, 2013
This is a difficult book to review. It's written in fragments - each chapter is a piece of a story, some more connected than others with several recurring characters - in particular the police team of Hawthorn and Child. Many of the storylines are not resolved so be prepared to walk away with more questions than answers. If you like your novels tied up with a bow, this book is not for you. While I found this style frustrating at times, the writing kept me engaged. Some fragments (I can't even call them chapters because that implies more continuity than there is) worked better than others. But something about the tone and stilted sentences made the book feel dark and raw like I could really see inside these characters. That's pretty great writing.
I'm always hesitant to write quotes in these reviews because I wonder if the quotes I like will mean anything to anyone else but there were several that really struck me.
"There were things he could say. There were things he could not say but could write in the book. And now there were things he could not say nor write and they pressed up against the others like they wanted a fight."
One of the more confusing sections was a complex juxtaposition of a police raid and a night in a gay club - it was worth rereading over and over to understand what was going on but it was worth the effort. And one section where Child goes home for a family dinner had me laughing out loud. This book took me out of my reading comfort zone but in a good and interesting way.
I'm always hesitant to write quotes in these reviews because I wonder if the quotes I like will mean anything to anyone else but there were several that really struck me.
"There were things he could say. There were things he could not say but could write in the book. And now there were things he could not say nor write and they pressed up against the others like they wanted a fight."
One of the more confusing sections was a complex juxtaposition of a police raid and a night in a gay club - it was worth rereading over and over to understand what was going on but it was worth the effort. And one section where Child goes home for a family dinner had me laughing out loud. This book took me out of my reading comfort zone but in a good and interesting way.
January 15, 2013
I loved this book. Once I finished it I wanted to just start from the beginning and read it all over again.
This is not a standard cop whodunit book though. If you are looking for a mystery where at the end of the day everything is all tied up and solved, this is not the book for you. This is more like tiny little capsules of peoples lives and actions strung together, sometimes with the barest of threads. When I finished the last page I had more questions than when I started the book, but in this case, that was okay.
The writing is just gorgeous, expressive, and amazingly descriptive. Even when describing something you would rather *not* have down to the last detail, it is still so clear and well written that it blunts the horror.
Books like this make me so happy I'm a reader.
This is not a standard cop whodunit book though. If you are looking for a mystery where at the end of the day everything is all tied up and solved, this is not the book for you. This is more like tiny little capsules of peoples lives and actions strung together, sometimes with the barest of threads. When I finished the last page I had more questions than when I started the book, but in this case, that was okay.
The writing is just gorgeous, expressive, and amazingly descriptive. Even when describing something you would rather *not* have down to the last detail, it is still so clear and well written that it blunts the horror.
Books like this make me so happy I'm a reader.
May 6, 2014
Hmmm. What the #*$@ did I just read?
I like the way Ridgeway writes, I was gripped by the monologues the characters spouted in each chapter, hoping there would be a dawning moment when they all connected, even if my grip on that connection might not be too coherent.
But no. There are no connections. Either that or I just didn't see them. Which is a shame because, I liked this book, but it baffled the pants off me. Can I explain? Can I review it? Can I recommend it? The answer to these and many other questions is No.
Did I like it? Would I read another Ridgeway novel? Will I remember any of this in 6 months time? The answer to these and many other questions is Yes.
Baffled? Me too.
I like the way Ridgeway writes, I was gripped by the monologues the characters spouted in each chapter, hoping there would be a dawning moment when they all connected, even if my grip on that connection might not be too coherent.
But no. There are no connections. Either that or I just didn't see them. Which is a shame because, I liked this book, but it baffled the pants off me. Can I explain? Can I review it? Can I recommend it? The answer to these and many other questions is No.
Did I like it? Would I read another Ridgeway novel? Will I remember any of this in 6 months time? The answer to these and many other questions is Yes.
Baffled? Me too.
July 9, 2013
The jacket copy is a bit over the top, and I think I'd have to read this a second time to *really* give it 5 stars, but it's definitely the best book I've read over the past few weeks. Strange, engrossing, with some tantalizing ideas about meaning, incompleteness, and knowledge. Definitely worth checking out.
April 7, 2013
This was not the book for me. I thought it was going to be a detective novel but it's not. I have no idea what it was. Or really what happened. It's probably a clever book but give me a book with a storyline over clever every time.
September 25, 2014
this is a book without much of a plot. That are a few characters that appear throughout the book including the 2 title characters, who are cops. There are chapters that I had no idea what they were about. Of course the cover blurbs were glowing...so much for cover quotes.
Read
April 17, 2014BAM! I'm the sleek black sedan of modernism coming to murder your smart phone's post-modernism. N'est pas un crime scene.
August 13, 2014
Definitely in my wheelhouse: begins as a novel of an investigation, and slowly becomes something very different.
February 22, 2021
Confusing, frustrating, upsetting. But also pretty damn brilliant. Will never read again though.
December 23, 2020
What an extraordinary book. I’ve always gravitated towards crime fiction and my Asperger’s diagnosis kind of explained why: all the genre needs to work is a crime or a detective and then you have immense freedom to work in the broadest of parameters
Is Hawthorn and Child a crime novel? Well there are detectives, there are crimes... it might be a series of short stories with a loose connection or a novel whose design is constantly out of our grasp... I think it’s a novel, because there’s a sort of sense of progression here at any rate. But it’s a strange, curious and troubling book and sometimes it disgusts you and sometimes it’s painfully beautiful, but at no time is it boring or conventional
I suspect it’s a crime book with a huge absence in the middle. There are very clever hints and allusions to connections just out of our grasp which almost puts us in the position of the titular detectives: we are searching for a design that may not be there, clinging to hints and clues to make sense of random events or meaning for just awful, awful moments. We become the detectives in many ways - and Ridgway carefully makes both of them elusive in some way - as we try and weave all this together
And maybe there is no design, maybe it’s all dumb fucking luck and coincidence that names and characters shimmy in from one story to another. By occasionally not explicitly giving details on the viewpoint of certain characters the whole book feels more troubling and random than we could ever expect. And it’s beautifully written, Ridgway coaxing us into a web of red herrings and strange climaxes. It’s a brilliant achievement - albeit one hard to actually like at times - and one that really does show that most writers are very conventional beasts at heart. Definitely one of the most original and troubling bits of crime fiction I have ever read
Is Hawthorn and Child a crime novel? Well there are detectives, there are crimes... it might be a series of short stories with a loose connection or a novel whose design is constantly out of our grasp... I think it’s a novel, because there’s a sort of sense of progression here at any rate. But it’s a strange, curious and troubling book and sometimes it disgusts you and sometimes it’s painfully beautiful, but at no time is it boring or conventional
I suspect it’s a crime book with a huge absence in the middle. There are very clever hints and allusions to connections just out of our grasp which almost puts us in the position of the titular detectives: we are searching for a design that may not be there, clinging to hints and clues to make sense of random events or meaning for just awful, awful moments. We become the detectives in many ways - and Ridgway carefully makes both of them elusive in some way - as we try and weave all this together
And maybe there is no design, maybe it’s all dumb fucking luck and coincidence that names and characters shimmy in from one story to another. By occasionally not explicitly giving details on the viewpoint of certain characters the whole book feels more troubling and random than we could ever expect. And it’s beautifully written, Ridgway coaxing us into a web of red herrings and strange climaxes. It’s a brilliant achievement - albeit one hard to actually like at times - and one that really does show that most writers are very conventional beasts at heart. Definitely one of the most original and troubling bits of crime fiction I have ever read
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