Dooneen
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
Bartholomew Port, known to all as Mew, steps into the bushes in a London park and steps out of the bushes in a Dublin one. Not only that – there are no cars; there are moving footpaths; there is no church; everything seems quite queer. Mew has arrived in a Dublin that is alive with song, with rumour, with ghosts, and with an unmistakable sense of insurgency. In this suspiciously timeless city that breathes an old revolutionary air, Mew fiercely misses his beloved Mootie, back home in London. An unravelling, an impossibility, a gathering of voices and a single dream, Dooneen is the layered, allusive and wildly original new novel from Keith Ridgway, 'one of Ireland's best writers, in a country with no shortage of them' (The Times).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An Irish writer named Bartholomew "Mew" Port walks magically from a London park into his native Dublin, where he finds the city abuzz with a mysterious leftist revolt, in Ridgway's scintillating and dreamlike latest (after A Shock), which teems with big ideas about the complex legacy of the Troubles in a country transformed by immigration and wealth. Mew deeply misses his lover, Mahmoud "Mootie" Habib, but for the time being he'll have to settle for the company of two hotel porters whom he befriends after expressing sympathy for their planned strike in the futuristic city, which has banned cars and replaced them with trams and pedestrian conveyer belts but is riven with income inequality. It turns out the porters are part of the Dublin Initiative for Socialist Housing, described in the xenophobic press as "verging on the terroristic." Soon, Mew learns about an alphabet soup of opposing groups including the reactionary paramilitary IPRO and the pro-landlord RDC. These, along with glimpses of DISH members speaking to each other in huddled whispers after a meeting, evoke the Troubles' partisanship and secrecy, while the government's violent crackdown and extrajudicial detentions recall Britain's anti-republican repression. As the body count rises, Mew wonders if he's dead or dreaming, but Ridgway never abandons his marvelous fantastical conceit, leaving Mew to grapple with the limits of his devotion to Mootie and to the cause he's become swept up in. It's a bracing and singular state-of-the-nation novel.
