A Shock by Keith Ridgway

Review by Eleanor Updegraff

In the opening section of Keith Ridgway’s A Shock, an elderly woman clambers into a wall cavity to spy on her neighbours’ house party. It is absurd, this scene, but it works within Ridgway’s reality: a London that is near and yet far, familiar yet foreign, a vast city comprised of millions upon millions of finely balanced moments. In this novel constructed as a set of linked short stories, people are connected in tangential ways, drifting apart and being drawn back together again, while the same stories and images flash repeatedly into our consciousness, metallic threads glinting through the fabric of the novel. And all the while there is the sense that we, the reader, are on the outside looking in, voyeurs of scenes both ordinary and intimate, the life at the heart of London seen through ‘a tiny hole in a great big wall’.

Of all the motifs that crop up in A Shock, which is a masterful exercise in carefully crafted narrative, two could not be more opposing: butterflies and rodents. The latter appear at unexpected intervals – mice in a pub kitchen, a rat on the kitchen counter of a dilapidated rental – the ‘peripheral vermin’ from which one is said never to be far in a city like London. The scurrying, burrowing, elusive nature of rodents, which doubtless know far more about human lives than we would like them to, is an odd but somehow fitting metaphor for the way in which Ridgway goes about digging into his characters’ lives, offering us telling glimpses that can without warning be taken away again.

A case in point: the remarkable ‘The Flat’, a story that begins with a young man, David, meeting the neighbours in his new building, and which gradually narrows its focus until we are almost trapped within the confines of his few (is it four or five? – we can never be sure) rooms. We observe David reading a book in silence, unpacking his shopping, washing his hair, masturbating to pornography on his laptop – and just when we think we can’t get any closer, we are removed suddenly from the scene: ‘This is private’. It is a shock, coming as it does after such exhaustive detail, but then Ridgway is a master of those, never averse to reminding us that he is the one at the helm of this narrative.

Despite the elements of control – almost painfully realistic dialogue and short, precise sentences in which not a word is out of place – Ridgway now and then lets his characters get the upper hand, allowing his novel to open up into moments of extraordinary elegance. These are the butterfly moments (and butterflies are elsewhere in a more literal sense, too: fluttering through a garden party, the ‘butterfly pains’ in a cyclist’s legs), brief bursts of beauty that suggest what A Shock is really about. The sense of impermanence in the novel is often overwhelming – not only do figures come and go, their housing and incomes are often unstable – but these moments exist for us to hold on to, offering a rare sense of completeness or human connection. In ‘The Sweat’, a drug-fuelled gay hook-up swells with moments of tenderness; in ‘The Party’, the final section which brings the novel right back to its origins, a song and a sense of impossibility make Maria, a regularly recurring character, think in a rush of hope and emotion that ‘maybe people are ok, are good sometimes’.

While the novel’s end is akin to a beginning – perhaps just one more of those eternal loops on which Ridgway so enjoys sending us – A Shock is deeply concerned with the threats to existence that bubble beneath the surface of urban living. Much as one of the characters looks down from the top of Denmark Hill to see ‘all of London suspended in a bowl of hot milk’, A Shock sets out to distil the many sides of this city into the microcosm of the Camberwell–Peckham area. Ridgway turns his attention to poverty and class divides, entrenched racism and ineffectual politicking, writing about Black lives, queer lives, the lives of the disenfranchised with astuteness and compassion.

Though much of this is hard-hitting, the novel is infused with a wry wit that often approaches resignation, an ability to laugh at the absurdities of life which seems driven by the characters themselves, not some omniscient narrator. ‘May your death come as a shock to you,’ one figure is fond of quoting – a line that finds its Ridgwayian echo elsewhere in another act of storytelling – and throughout the novel there is a very strong sense that life is beautiful and absurd and can end without warning, so we may as well all get on with it.

The fragility of the entire structure, not to mention the lives it contains, is perhaps best expressed by an image from ‘The Sweat’, in which narrator Tommy imagines his life as ‘a glass of water carried by a small child across a summer garden’. Startling in its simplicity, it is indicative of Ridgway’s manner of writing the world around him. Not quite a novel, not quite a collection of stories, A Shock is more a series of moments, all exquisitely captured, each with its own profundity. In narrowing his focus to that hole in the wall, casting a vast web across the city and pulling it tight to create the most intimate of perspectives, Ridgway reminds us of something essential: ‘There is only now, in all its perpetual detail, as deep as a well’.

A Shock is published by Picador, 24th June 2021