This dreamlike work unfolds in mists of obscurity. Mr. Ridgway combines an exact sense of setting—one could take a walking tour of the streets he names—with the spare, unreal atmosphere of an allegory ... While his narration is filled with rather precious declarations of love and lament, it sheds no light on his thoughts about the protests, or the reasons the activists want him around. His naiveté begins to feel contrived, a way to preserve a hazy aura of romance and menace. Dooneen calls up the strange horizons of J.G. Ballard, but without the edge.
Compelling ... Ridgway captures the chaotic intimacy of family life, the joshing, the sudden concern and the long tail of remembered slights ... Visceral and unvarnished ... Powerfully imagined.
The first half of the novel does something quite wonderful, using Port’s disorientation to create a Kafkaesque atmosphere ... Ridgway is highly adept at conveying the lived realities of being human, like how our fearful minds boomerang back to the people and memories that make us feel safest ... A very timely exploration of what it means to be a citizen of this world–whether your eyes are open, closed, or blurred by an ignorance you’ve either willingly adopted or had foisted upon you by those in power.
Reproducing ambivalence on the page in this way might be a risky and potentially alienating strategy for the reader. But it’s thrilling to watch Ridgway play with clarity and certainty; the linguistic energy and variety of the prose gives us plenty of sustenance to keep going as we clamber through the shadows. And there are laughs too ... Lucid and affecting.
An excessively sentimental novel, but it successfully expresses the anger of an Ireland that lies behind its image as a confident country of creative genius.
Whether you like this book depends on whether you prefer your fiction to provide answers or to pose interesting questions. Most things go unexplained ... This can be frustrating, and if it were my first Keith Ridgway novel, I wouldn’t have chased down the rest of his books as I did. But it has an immersive quality that is hard to shake once you’ve emerged.
When I think of undervalued great writers, Keith Ridgway is one of the first names on my list ... Some will be frustrated by Dooneen’s unwillingness to divulge its mysteries. I found myself admiring its determination to leave the questions it poses unanswered – as well as casting doubt over what those questions could be.
