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Jump to navigationJump to searchHawthorn and Child by Keith Ridgway (view source)
Revision as of 11:25, 1 September 2020
, 11:25, 1 September 2020no edit summary
The characters are many and varied and we truly are inside the heads of every one of them. This includes the titular Hawthorn, a gay police officer who is struggling with some unspecified trouble. A teenage girl juggling her mother’s breakdown following the suicide of an old friend with her first sexual relationship. An unnamed man who believes he was poisoned by Tony Blair. An editor who may or may not have murdered one or more young prostitutes. And so on and so on. We don’t really stay with any of them long enough to become attached, despite that we keep coming back to Hawthorn. We never enter the mind of Child, oddly, even though finding he and Hawthorn separated is rare.
All in all, Ridgway shows some lurking potential for real genius, but regrettably , he spends too much time trying to be troubled. A lot of the impact is lost through this and it’s the reader that really loses out.
We had similar problems with another stream-of-consciousness novel, [[Greed by Elfriede Jelinek]] but not with [[Gross Margin by Laurent Quintreau]].
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