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Review
‘“Animals” is both a very funny and surprising inspection of the detail of modern life, and an affecting prortait of a man trying to make sense of it.’ Independent on Sunday
‘…the almost stream of consciousness deluge of paranoia and urban myth made real that constitute his recollection of these events is darkly, grimly hilarious…deeply unsettling but utterly absorbing.’ Metro
‘It’s a measure of Keith Ridgway’s stylistic gift that with so little concrete action he manages to sustain a mood of brooding anticipation throughout. The first chapter is one of the most head-tighteningly suspenseful pieces of writing I’ve read in years…Like Beckett, Ridgeway knows the humour in pathos and the pathos in humour…it haunts the reader, insisting that he thinks a little more, be a little more cautious, look a little deeper. To read it, in fact, is to find oneself a little more naked in the world.’ Daily Telegraph
‘He turns people inside out, detailing their quirks and vulnerabilities with engaging perceptiveness…a concatenation of anecdotes and dream revelations…unnerving in their odd accuracy.’ The Times
‘…a bold attempt to convey the fluctuations of a damaged mind.’ Guardian
‘Showing the disintegration of a subject is not an easy task but Ridgway pulls it off. This is not an easy or comforting read but, surrounded by ease and comfort as we are, it is all the more crucial for that.’ The Scotsman
'Only the strongest writer can carry off this daring examination of emptiness at the heart of our global society. Animals is funny, grotesque, absurdly powerful and unsettling, like walking across a room full of trapdoors.' Hugo Hamilton, author of “The Speckled People”
'Not since Evelyn Waugh's “The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold” has a disintegrating consciousness been portrayed so convincingly. Funny and nightmarish by turns, “Animals” is one of those books that one feels compelled to start reading again as soon as one has finished it.' The Times
Praise for Ridgway:
The pleasure this brings is the pleasure of the discovery of a writer whose gifts run deep… His is a multi-faceted talent bursting with writerly intuition and intelligence. The finest debut novel I've read in years.' Scotland on Sunday
'A powerful exposure of the new, reforming, optimistic Irish…In this, it echoes the work to which it recurringly refers, offering an updating of Joyce's penetrating gaze, in The Dead, on the relation between the educated, bourgeois, cosmopolite 'second city of empire' and the stark suffering that lies in that city's barren and insular hinterland.' TLS
5 star review, Metro
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
things fall apart,
By monica (connemara) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Animals (Paperback)
Three and 1/2 stars. The narrator, whose name we never learn, is an illustrator who begins by recounting a very bad day--a dead mouse in the gutter, a friend's tale of a haunted building that inspires an uneasy feeling about Australia, nearly dying in a swimming pool, a stomach-turning encounter with a spider, ending with a possibly homicidally violent encounter with the partner, K., which leads to the narrator packing bags and embarking on a week or so of drifting and disintegration.The narrator is unreliable. sometimes knowingly but always unwillingly: memory and occasionally language itself are disintegrating. This seems to be the result of distance from what's called 'the world': only what is not human is the world, and not a centimetre of a city has no touch of the human in it. The world though is intruding into the protagonist's consciousness, most obviously in the form of phantom-like animals. The writing is very good indeed. There are descriptions I won't soon forget, and passages that could easily have slipped into the sophomoric or polemic are instead simply thought-provoking. The book is also funny: Ridgway has a sharp ear for inane claims of PR people, a good eye for small social embarrassments, and gets in some wonderful digs at the inability to distinguish extreme practical jokes from performance art and at the conventions of fantasy fiction. Even the end of what is a terribly unsettling story of a disoriented descent is very blackly humourous. And that ending slips in neatly with what's gone before, as do all the snippets of clues throughout. I hope I've not made the book sound obscure or, as suggested in another review, heavy going. It could be enjoyed simply as a psychological mystery or horror story despite really being a fair bit more than those. Disturbing, fascinating, striking, provocative.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Madness, it turns out, is normal,
By Minky (Ireland) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Animals (Paperback)
Animals has been reviewed in some places as difficult to read but while it's certainly a challanging book in lots of different ways it is not hard going at all - I stayed up reading until 4am to finish it, not common for me.
It's a beautifully written book, Keith Ridgway's prose is a pure joy to read and for all it's sombre theme it's very, very funny. It is incredibly disconcerting to look at the world from inside the head of someone who has so patently lost the fragile hold we all have on sanity and find that there is precious little going on in there that couldn't go on in your own mind.
5 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It all started with a mouse ...,
By A Customer
This review is from: Animals (Paperback)
... lying dead in the gutter.One could, of course, ignore it. One could take a photo. One could take out one's pen and ... wrent a spreading gash in the wafer-thin ice of human relations. Of a sudden, you are no longer skating through 21st century society, but lightlessly swimming through a seething ativism. It makes for a jolly romp.
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