Hawthorne and Child

A speculative purchase by Dad and lent to me with no obligation to return. Perhaps the warning signs were there then, although Ridgway seemingly has a cult reputation in Ireland, his home country. The novel ostensibly concerns the two eponymous policemen of the work's title, Hawthorne and Child. It certainly begins promisingly with the detectives sent to investigate a seemingly random murder. The next section of the novel features a small-time gangster obliquely referenced in the previous chapter. The reader necessarily starts to join the dots, but the frustration of Hawthorne and Child is simply that the purpose of the plot is that there is no plot. Some critics likened Ridgway to Murakami — an overgenerous and inaccurate comparison, perhaps made only because of the inexplicable. A better approach might be to liken Ridgway to Joyce (impenetrability), or Beckett (absurdism, pointlessness). I found parts of the novel, the violence especially, quite gratuitous. There is potential in how Ridgway writes, but this work was over-elaborate and therefore quite disappointing. 5 out of 10.

By Keith Ridgway