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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
5 star review, Metro
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Customer Reviews
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.
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.
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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