Horses - Keith Ridgway

Amongst the folds of tension and intensity that Ridgway builds there is something hiding.

pp. 83

Published: Faber and Faber, 2003 (1997)

You could describe it as a crime thriller, though I can’t imagine a more reductive categorisation. Horses is one of those rare texts that has a taut, compelling plot alongside an enduring literary stance. The plot acts as the foundation upon which Ridgway builds his exploration of the complexities of grief, human relationships and criminality, and he does so with an impressive and shattering insightfulness into humanity.

We enter the narrative after a number of arsons have left an unnamed Irish town in a state of turmoil. The last of these fires has resulted in the death of three horses belonging to Helen Brooks, the daughter of Dr Brooks. The priest, Father Devoy, while offering refuge to the developmentally challenged Mathew, discovers that Mathew knows the identities of the arsonists, and when Mathew turns up later on having been the victim of an attempted murder, it becomes suddenly a matter of vital importance to find the culprit. All of this takes place in the midst of a soul-destroying storm that intensifies even the smallest of actions. 

Probably the highest achievement of Horses is its characterisations. The priest, the doctor and the policeman are fantastically drawn, each tackling their own personal issues surrounding the arsons and the attempted murder of Mathew. The priest suffers quietly with his faltering faith; the doctor maintains his moral certainties in the face of his daughter’s grief; and the policeman tries again and again to reconcile his methodical, investigatory cynicism with the events that unfold right beneath their feet, rendering him helpless. The stretches of dialogue are finely tuned to each character’s personality and state of mind.

But the devastatingly childlike Mathew steals the show. Caught up by chance in a series of events much larger than he is capable of comprehending, he is the novella’s overwhelmingly sympathetic character. Like a child, he is frightened by his central position in the events that unfold. Yet he is infinitely more interesting than we could have imagined, given his intelligence. It is said by a periphery character that, like ‘no other town in Ireland … our village idiot is a genius’, and this is the way Mathew is seen by the townspeople, who feel ‘protective and proud’ when it comes to this young man. He is homeless and he talks to walls, yet the things he talks about are intellectually challenging points of history (‘’It was a good century for the church’ he had been saying, ‘but not a good one for God’’), and Father Devoy ruminates that there is ‘a good mind in there somewhere’.  

Horses is one of those texts whose opening promises so much, and delivers on most of that promise. But it doesn't ever quite seem to reach its true potential. It seems that amongst the folds of tension and intensity that Ridgway builds there is something hiding, something deeper and more vital to the reader. The author never quite manages to locate this vague and indefinable thing, which is a shame. The work is, nevertheless, a strong debut from a skilled writer. 

   

In Between the Sheets - Ian McEwan

He sets us up for some fairly rewarding glimpses into the unconscious mind.

pp.134

Published: Vintage, 2006 (1978)

In his days as a writer of short stories, Ian McEwan’s now familiar style – the restrained clarity, the sensitivity, the subtlety – was in its adolescent phase, had an altogether sinister quality to it. One can see why he was accused of merely trying to shock readers. Yet the stories in his second collection, while frequently trembling on the edge of sensationalism, are rescued again and again by some unfathomable psychological depth which will leave the reader dumbfounded.

The one story for which this last remark does not hold true is actually the first, ‘Pornography’. Comically following the day-to-day shenanigans of O’Byrne and his porn-shop-owning brother Harold, the piece deteriorates into a sexual castration fantasy when O’Byrne’s two girlfriends discover that he has been cheating. The denouement is pure over-indulgence in horror with virtually no literary ambitions.

Conversely, the other stories seem thoroughly well-crafted, and put the reader on more purposeful ground. We must therefore read the opening piece as a kind of plunge into the freezing waters of the young McEwan’s overactive and frightening imagination as he sets us up for some fairly rewarding glimpses into the unconscious mind.

The stories most worthy of mention are ‘Reflections of a Kept Ape’ and the title piece, ‘In Between the Sheets’. In the former, a pet monkey with an extraordinary level of sentience is taken as the lover of a female novelist, Sally Klee, who is struggling with the follow-up to her first-published novel. This strange narrative deals with their short sex life, where ‘the friction of our bodies brought her out in a rash, and … my alien seed … was aggravating her thrush’, through to the ape’s maddening sense of loneliness and rejection as Sally Klee struggles with her writer’s block. When the ape discovers what she has been writing all this time, interesting questions are asked about what the creative process actually means and what its purpose is. The latterly mentioned title piece has a depressed ex-husband and father, Stephen Cooke, at its core. When his daughter comes to stay with him for the holidays, she brings her friend Charmian, who is a dwarf and who has a strange allure for Stephen, though it is not clear what the nature of this is.

It has to be said that the story with the most familiar McEwan voice (familiar to us now, looking back from so late on in his career), is ‘Two Fragments: March 199-‘. In this, a politically and socially desolate future world is the setting in which Henry lives with his daughter, Marie. Marie is a very funny and realistic depiction of an inquisitive child, and together they witness a horrifying spectacle. Henry visits an old lover, Diane, in the second part to this piece, and they reminisce about ‘the old times’ and argue about the usefulness of collecting things. Henry’s oblique contact with a Chinese family at the end is difficult to place within the rest of the narrative. Nevertheless, this piece has a particularly subtle quality that sets it back from the rest of the collection, and demonstrates shades of the later, more mature McEwan.

McEwan’s second published book is largely a success, with some slightly deflating features which indicate a lack of maturity, a lack of the refined, surgeon-like skill of his later work. In Kafkaesque manner, these stories are insular, floating free of any historical or political context. It is an important collection, interesting as a retrospective look at the early part of the author’s career, and in its own right as a detailed exploration into the more depraved areas of human existence.