There is a common expression that every person has a novel in them. There is a corollary that every Irish person has a Ulysses in them, and in the novel Dooneen, Keith Ridgway appears to have realised his. There is hardly a metaphorical cobblestone in Dublin that is not explored by Ridgeway’s Bloom: a Dubliner named Mew living with his partner Mootie in London. We see a brief splash of the close relationship between the two before Mootie packs a bag for Mew and sends him off on his way to Dublin. From here, leave all your sensibilities and rationale behind.
Mew follows another man into a bush in a London park and emerges, disoriented and dirtied, out of a bush in a Dublin park. Only this is a Dublin not of past, present or future but a weird fusion of all three and something else totally different. Historical trams criss-cross the city and carts are everywhere; so too are travellators, moving pavements called “clickers”, as well as more Dublin-London gateways known as “spinners” because of the disorienting effect.
Also somewhat disorienting is the style and language of the book which is partly, it seems, a twenty-first century homage to the modernism and absurdism of Joyce and Beckett. It is written ostensibly as a letter from Mew to Mootie, a kind of love letter regretting every moment he is away, but also struggling to make sense of the kaleidoscope of characters and events and clothing changes that flash by him. In the footsteps of Bloom, Mew visits well known pubs, graveyards and neighbourhoods across Dublin and encounters many characters who entertain him, regale him or sometimes attack him without apparent motive.
Dooneen: A Dark Dublin
For this is a dark Dublin, an obsessive and paranoid Dublin where repeating the wrong rumour to the wrong person can end up inciting a violent or lethal attack. Numerous shadowy groups, seemingly loosely modelled on organisations associated with the Dublin Lockout and the Rising, are planning strikes and demonstrations. Mew finds himself caught up with a committee that initiate an attack of some sort, sneaking through tunnels towards the Magazine Fort in Phoenix Park only to be ambushed by soldiers and pursued by a beast, or possibly an armoured car.
Long passages of transcription posing as newspaper articles or submissions to investigations are inserted into the middle of Mew’s letters which serve to broaden the scope of the narrative, but bring only scant clarity or diversity.
There’s a long section that is surely an echo of the violence of the Troubles, though the tapestry the narrative weaves is as uncertain and fluid as a Jack Yeat’s painting.
Reading this novel, the reader is tossed about in the wind like a leaf in a storm, allowed to zip through a miasma of the past, present and future of the city, and of all its beauty and energy and violence. You have to park your consciousness at the door and let Mew lead you where he may in this most fantastic and sensual of cities towards an ending that will both surprise and soothe the unease of the rest of the story.
(c) Kieran Marsh
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