KEITH RIDGWAY
Time and space contract into a glinting, watchful eye at the end of both the first and the last of the nine interlocking stories in Keith Ridgway’s novel A Shock. The author allows the reader to peer indiscreetly into private spaces, and throws into the bargain a sharp pair of ears for overhearing intimate conversations and monologues behind closed doors. Guiltily, irresistibly, we are drawn, as if under a spell, into a swirl of mostly troubled lives, listening to the distinct voices of characters who appear and reappear as they tell their simultaneously hyperreal and surreal tales.
Interview by Claudia Steinberg
Claudia Steinberg You claim to have a bad memory, however, all the voices in your book are so authentic, and so varied. How do you construct them?
Keith Ridgway I can just imagine the way people are talking. Sometimes I can’t access my memory, but maybe it’s working through me in a different way. I spent a lot of time thinking about characters, how they might sound and how they might move. I’m not particularly visual, so I don’t really have a clear idea of what somebody will look like, but I have an idea how they might walk, how they might slump over in their seat. And even though I don’t know their faces, I have the full portrait of a person.
CS Apropos of voices: you evoke Muriel Spark, a writer whose typewriter spoke to her in fully formed sentences. What does she mean to you as an author?
KR I’m always dazzled by and envious of her skills – she has such fantastic technique – and she is fearless: doing things that you’re not supposed to, that you’re not allowed to do, like setting up plots and giving away things in advance. She is fascinated by ideas of predestination and fate, and she constantly plays with those things. I don’t write like her at all; I’m just a huge fan. She lived in Camberwell for about 10 years in the late 1950s, early 1960s. I went down there and looked at the neighbourhood. The building where she lived is unchanged and the streets are still the streets that she would walk through. Across the road from where I now live in Camberwell is an old factory, which is now, of course, being converted into apartments. I wonder whether it’s one of the factories that she writes about in The Ballad of Peckham Rye.
CS Reading A Shock, it would have been helpful to the reader to have a layout of David’s apartment, to locate the elusive fifth room that is part of the official apartment description, but does not seem to exist. You gave a rather insistent description of the staircase in his building, but it felt like being trapped in an Escher drawing.
KR It seems important to me to be very definite about the physical space in which certain things happen, and particularly in this book where I am very concerned with the various modes in which people are constrained, including the environment in which they live, and sometimes their very immediate environment. I like the idea of an Escher drawing because even when you describe the layout of an apartment very simply and accurately, it’s almost inevitably confusing, because there’s something about these spaces and the way in which we move through them that seems peculiar, once you actually look at them. I’m relatively new in this flat, for example, and I sometimes wonder whether the wall in my bedroom is too near, suggesting that there’s a bigger room behind it. It seems to be slightly in the wrong place.
CS Maybe it’s a typically Manhattan dream, but the discovery of a hitherto unknown room, or even a suite of rooms, happens in my sleep all the time. Beyond real or imagined architectural oddities, the theme of claustrophobic compression followed by an ecstatic opening runs through your book. One character, Tommy, sums up happiness as going through a painfully tight tunnel and then reaching the light in a space as big as cathedral: “A beautiful shock!” he says. Is happiness foremost a relief from pressure?
KR I think it’s the change from one thing to another that is crucial; it’s the difference that makes for the beautiful shock. Squeezing through a tunnel deep in the earth is an illustration of that, but it could be any situation in which a sudden change of environment comes like a shock. I’m not even sure that happiness exists beyond that moment of change from one condition to another, when we realise that something else is possible. But it’s momentary: you’re in this vast space and thirty seconds later it, too, begins to feel oppressive in a different way. But Tommy never talks about that.
CS In a conversation with himself, he does talk about mentally passing through a very small door, entering another space that makes him well up with the soulful feeling of a body, a person, occupying exactly one’s own shape in the world: a rare moment of harmony, of acceptance of himself in the world. Tommy’s description of just fitting perfectly brought to mind Montaigne asking a dear friend who felt unaccomplished, “Have you not lived?”
KR Tommy expresses his sense that what he is in the world can at times be enough. What he also describes is that every Friday he slips into a weekend of pretty heavy drug use, and it’s there that he finds his sense of being enough. He’s also aware of the fragility of that situation and asks himself whether what he feels might not be totally illusory. And he worries about the damage and the risk involved in taking all that stuff. That little door is the only thing in his life that seems to provide that sense of well-being. So he makes the point that his drug use is an entirely rational response to the lives he and his friends find themselves living and that they’re being asked to battle their way through.
CS There it a sense that the characters are trapped not only in their hardships, but also in their habits, their personalities, and prejudices. Stan, for example, is a leftist organiser, but harbours racist thoughts that are below his own radar. After all, his closest childhood friend, Gary, is Black. Even Stan has been a subject of the collective poisoning.
KR He hasn’t quite realised it yet, but perhaps this confrontation with his friend will cause him to notice it. We’re all familiar with the ways in which our thinking can become degraded by looping around the same thought based on error or some prejudice or religion, which we have probably utterly forgotten. We don’t want to accept that we have a prejudice. I wanted to write about the fact that we are carrying things that we don’t even know we’re carrying.
CS For a while we even cautiously share Stan’s suspicions about Gary. Could he truly snatch an expensive camera from a tourist, so he could become a photographer? We realise how readily available these dark thoughts are – and once we become aware of that poison, we are on Gary’s side. In a later story we see Stan so distraught over the rat in his kitchen and whatever else he may be crying about, and we feel for him, we forgive him. You treat your characters with generosity, and there is not much of that spirit going around these days.
KR I don’t want that to slide into tolerating terrible transgressions, but if you have a friend who fucks up in some way, who reveals a kind of prejudice or makes a mistake in their thinking rather than a mistake in their actions, it is very difficult to make decisions about that. I wanted the characters in my book to be deeply flawed, messed-up people who do all kinds of bad and stupid things, but that doesn’t necessarily take away from their value or potential as decent human beings. None of them are villains.
CS The characters seem intimately familiar, because we watch them in very private moments, but we actually know very little about them; they remain strangers even to you. However, we get to share your non-judgmental attitude toward them.
KR Writers give us eyes with which to see these people doing these private things and thinking these private thoughts. I’m just making the voyeuristic aspect of reading a little bit more explicit, especially in the chapter with David. We see him, we hear him, but we never know what he is thinking.
CS In the chapter about David, you break the fourth wall, so to speak, by commenting – “this is private” – or you dispute what has been told before: “This is not true.” You step in as the author, drawing a line, protecting your character.
KR I wanted to make explicit that you, the reader, are a voyeur, as is any reader of realist fiction. Having done that, I could not resist taking that other step, addressing the reader in tiny ways and giving them the feeling of being in it, and in some way implicating them in what is going on.
CS There is a clear difference between the casual, rather friendly sexual encounters between Tommy and Frank that seem more like snacking than driven by hunger, and David’s restless sexual energy, which conveys a sense of endangerment.
KR David has more of an appetite. I think he is looking for something that he is not quite getting. I don’t really know what it is, what his problem is. Tommy and Frank spend a day together having sex, but what they’re really doing is getting high together and the side effects of getting high are sex and porn, and the bizarre conversations they are having.
CS But when David discovers the photographs of the previous renters having sex, he seems to be abducted into a different realm.
KR I think he begins to see the flat where he just moved as a sexual space.
CS You have described A Shock as an altar of nine panels. The altar is London, though not one of reverence, but a monument to the city that has “poisoned” you, as you put it.
KR For all its horribleness, after 20 years, there is something of London in my blood now. Living in London is a constant battle, it takes all of your resources to manage it, and that is true even more so for the people in my book. And these people will be completely forgotten. So I included this old French anti-fascist song that Michael sings at the party, which is beautiful, but the lyrics are really grim:
“The wind whispers over the graves.Freedom will come again.We will be forgotten.We will disappear into the shadows.”
CS Your novel begins and ends with a party. In a dramaturgical sense, the concluding one also represents a kind of liberation – almost like breaking into that underground cathedral – after we have witnessed all the dramas and troubles that people have gone through. When they all show up at the party, there is a great sense of relief, even joy.
KR I wanted to celebrate these people whose lives might not amount to anything in terms of the official history. They are doing what they can: they struggle, against the city where they live, against the systems in which they live, and sometimes against the sort of poison they have ingested. Their struggle is absolutely worthwhile, and those people are worth everything. ◉