There is a special kind of reading pleasure in books that feature seemingly disconnected stories of interlocking lives ... Ridgway has returned to interlinked stories for his clever and provocative seventh novel, which has interesting things to say about loss and survival ... Readers are instantly involved in the action of Ridgway’s worlds, the characters he writes with great compassion and clarity ... A Shock is a more postmodern affair than his previous books ... To give too much away about the characters and scenarios detracts from the art of the book. The delights are in the surprises and shocks, the connections that may or may not be there ... A book like this hinges on the power of the connections, and Ridgway puts his
own stamp on the genre by surprising the reader. There are crumbs that don’t lead anywhere. There are forests with no way out.
... like Finnegans Wake, only readable ... Ridgway’s trick — no, his skill — is that the stories combine down-to-earth realism with an incremental sense of strangeness. He seduces you, then smacks you over the head, abandoning you miles from where you thought you’d be ... He has all the other skills too, such as pinpoint descriptive writing ... what really holds the book together are the people, a bunch of slightly messed-up but deeply loveable characters that show Ridgway’s greatest talent. He gets into people’s minds so effectively that even a reader like me, who doesn’t normally mind whether characters are likeable or not, can’t help but really root for them ... This care comes from seeing into these characters’ lives nonjudgmentally. Seeing and understanding other people is, after all, what fiction is about. It’s an empathy that extends to the title, which appears several times in the text ... surprising and empathetic, which sums up the book generally ... But fiction is also about telling a story, and Ridgway has stories to burn: not just the nine chapters that make up A Shock, but stories within these that people tell one another to make sense of their lives. It’s enough to make you believe that nonsense certain writers come out with, about how 'we need stories'. Not quite, but we definitely want them, if they’re as good as this.
... ingeniously slippery ... What initially looks like a collection of loosely linked short stories reveals itself to be an expertly constructed house of mirrors ... Reading A Shock feels a little like being a regular at the Arms, your attention momentarily grabbed by a snippet of someone else’s conversation as a voice drifts across the bar, a name or a turn of phrase tugging at something half-remembered, so that you strain to tune in to hear the rest. It’s the kind of novel that rewards multiple readings, new echoes and connections revealing themselves each time. And, in the same way that one character describes the unsettling, near-hallucinatory side effects of doing certain drugs — 'it’s just peripheral, corner of the eye stuff, movements' — you get the sense of myriad other lives unfolding around those described here, all tantalizingly out of sight.
A Shock is pretty much a microcosm of Ridgway’s career, with the battle between his narrative strengths and his antinarrative anxieties ultimately won by the anxieties. What makes their victory especially vexing in this case is that the strengths put up such a good fight that for a while Ridgway looks to have at last found a way to maintain an equilibrium between the two factions ... it’s at [the] halfway mark, I’d suggest, that Ridgway’s antinarrative impulses begin their march to victory. From here on, A Shock no longer feels like the book that will finally reconcile his early coherence and later fragmentation, won’t strain too hard for its strangeness, and will have enough regard for its readers not to leave us feeling at times trapped in a tunnel longing for a sudden bursting into light. Instead, we seem to be back in the presence of a writer who sees it as his primary task to challenge both us and the customary satisfactions of fiction—largely by banishing them in favor of literary tricksiness ... the willfully boring is still boring ... True Ridgway believers will no doubt simply enjoy the vivid wildness ... Readers less sure about him may find themselves stuck with the troublesome business of striving for meaning ... Ridgway’s prizing of authorial uncertainty as a badge of authenticity now seems in some danger of leading him to a dead end. After all, using his abundant talents to butt up with such determination against the limitations of fiction has so far succeeded mainly in suggesting that some of those limitations are annoyingly real.
A Shock is distinguished from Ridgway’s earlier efforts by a marked interest in socialist politics, which sits alongside his typically sensitive expositions of the London queer scene ... A Shock’s separate storylines often fail to intersect, yet a progressive political discourse runs through each of them. While the novel’s form resists unity, its themes gesture towards it ... Ridgway’s narration seems to falter when his characters are alone, becoming sparse, repetitive, monochromatic, while his group scenes remain varied and energetic. While this technique accords with the novel’s conceptual framework, it makes the quality of the prose uneven. Ridgway’s depictions of isolation are a slog ... In the end, no master narrative is sufficiently powerful to turn the subtle correspondences between the chapters into one coherent arc ... Whether you read this lack of solidarity as a form of healthy scepticism or a political retreat, on a narrative level the result is frustration and flatness.
... if Hawthorn & Child was consciously quirky, A Shock reads more as a subversive take on realism that knows how weird reality can feel. Throughout, Ridgway shows a radical dedication to his characters’ viewpoints, while retaining a wry comedy and compassion. From gay hookups to Labour party meetings, pub banter to insecure housing, the result is witty, precise, political. His sentences effortlessly encompass the humdrum and the metaphysical alike; the ordinariness feels fresh, while the oddity rings true ... From a subtle exploration of how racism can intrude on a friendship to the burning anger of inequality, A Shock pays close attention to contemporary London’s political and geographical fabric ... In this playful yet deeply sincere novel, Ridgway squeezes into the gaps of realism and makes something beautifully new.
... [a] shattered series of surreal and sinisterly comic south London scenes, peopled by a shadowy cast of characters who wander haphazardly in and out of view ... Shifting between a range of styles and perspectives, the minimally signposted narration, twinned with Ridgway’s delicious ear for dialogue, lends a voyeuristic quality to much of A Shock, as if we’re somehow present where we shouldn’t be ... floats free from expectations of any kind, which makes for pretty gnomic reading ... As for what it all amounts to, well, look to the title: it may be the one thing this endlessly interesting novel actually spells out.
Ridgway’s use of close third-person narration to convey the protagonist’s thoughts, and hint at her repressed desire for another woman, makes for something timeless ... a polyphonic portrait of contemporary south London in overlapping stories, conjuring its glorious grind of possibility, pubs, politics, sex and rats ... Ridgway uses free indirect style to take us deep inside characters’ minds ... The pay-off isn’t always immediately apparent, but Ridgway’s artistry keeps you engaged ... Traditionalists may argue that A Shock isn’t a novel, but the line is increasingly blurred. Ideas and images echo through the chapters, with the protagonist of one reappearing at the edges of another, giving A Shock a novel’s thematic unity and formal patterning ... Or perhaps it’s none of these things. This is a novel that lends itself to interpretation—and is all the more profound and democratic for it.
Ridgway draws in the reader with signs that a linking truth runs through these fragmentary episodes, not so much a thread as a buried cable, a current beneath the surface of the city ... a book of silences and incomprehension between people who nonetheless believe they know and are communicating with each other ... We have access to the characters’ rich, funny thought-lives, but they can’t access one another’s ... Ridgway’s work turns on the ambiguity of the concept of the wrongly seen—both what is seen but wrongly characterised by the seer, and what, in the consciousness of the seen, should not be seen at all ... A Shock raises the possibility that our usual discrimination between ‘real’ and ‘fantastical’ ways out of social or personal stagnation might miss the point.
This is a book about houses, flats, rooms, and the people who occupy them, the traces we leave on temporary spaces. It could be described as a ghost story, where everyone is a ghost, but the ghostliness is mostly dictated by economic conditions. It’s a book that’s ruled, refreshingly, by its characters’ circumstances: London-based, renters mostly, lost in clouds of confusion or depression or loneliness ... this isn’t disinfected, hygienic prose ... Ridgway is artistically serious but always funny, never professional. A Shock could be described as frustrating but it’s like life: you might make sense of it if you give it your total attention. The possibility is what is interesting ... I’ve had conversations about the greatest Irish writers ... someone will always say Keith Ridgway. They will say it with total conviction like they’ve finally hit upon the right answer, and that’s because they have. A Shock makes that perfectly clear.
Confinement of many kinds, then, and as the characters rattle their cages, Ridgway’s impish asides...draw the reader into the role of voyeur, a simultaneously discomfiting and alluring proposition ... Though some rather haphazard psycho-emotional theories may lurk beneath it, the world of A Shock is a meticulously crafted diorama, built on a scale that’s at once claustrophobic and expansive, running through cycles that are by turns bleak, hilarious, chilling and hopeful, and culminating in an ingenious finale that sees it consume its own tale.
...a sultry, steamy shock of a novel ... a provocative collection of nine interlinked stories, jostled together like neighbours on a London street or regulars in a pub, which is where most of his characters cross paths ... Ridgway is a master at manipulating emotions. One minute he’ll have you smiling in wry recognition at the absurdity of London life, the next wincing at how the cops treat a kid in Peckham who’s smashed his kneecap after crashing a stolen moped...Like everyone in A Shock, that kid would also have a story to tell if only someone would listen. It will help if Ridgway keeps writing them.
A Shock is a fascinating, marvelously accomplished, and even haunting piece of work, and a worthy addition to anyone’s list of things that make life worth living in 2021.
Where this novel excels in particular is in Ridgway’s ability to evoke the mental states of his characters, especially when they pass outside of lucidity. That the novel opens with a section centered around an aging widow whose memory isn’t as reliable as it once was and who’s struggling with paranoia and depression in the wake of her husband’s death does a fine job of preparing the reader for what’s coming ... Once this novel clicks into place, its blend of the heady and the visceral is immersive and compelling.
