“The idea of writing a return-to-Dublin novel has been with me for a very long time – almost since I left – but it never took shape,” Keith Ridgway says. “Then, after A Shock was published, the pandemic happened, and I was cut off from Dublin and couldn’t get back for about a year and a half. I found I missed it terribly. I found myself daydreaming about the place. This old idea of a return collided with an imagined version of Dublin that I knew was a bit wonky, was a bit weird, that I liked.”Ridgway is one of Ireland’s most absorbing and entertaining writers, notable for his originality, beautifully modulated style, deeply sympathetic storytelling and moral acuity. His latest novel, Dooneen, sees him return to his home city in a near future, or parallel present, a Dublin on the verge of insurrection.Dooneen, like much of your work, is very funny, but in especially varied ways, encompassing sharp, satirical, tender and some almost slapstick humour. What’s the relationship between your writing and comedy? “I think I would find it very difficult to write an entire novel that, in the writing of it, didn’t make me laugh at some point. And in many ways it may be no stronger than that. No more than me trying to enjoy the business of writing. I think I would find it difficult to write any kind of length of fiction absent of some kind of a laugh, you know? It just seems to naturally occur, so why keep it out?”Dooneen is clearly written in a world in which wars on civilians can be perpetrated, in which there’s climate change and a housing crisis. But it’s also in a historically deeper, recognisable world of Irish politics, with names scattered throughout from radical Irish political traditions: Wolfe Tone, Liam Mellows, James Larkin and more. What did you intend by this?“It is a political book. I was interested in writing about a version of the present that encompassed previous histories of Dublin. It’s also political in the sense of the action of the book. People are on the streets, trying to change things. And so the names that came to me were people who had that drive to transform. “I wanted to highlight that the present in which we try and act is hugely influenced by, and in reaction to, previous, sometimes failed attempts to create change, within which can be found the hope to persist. “There’s also a very simple strand in the book, which is the idea that it’s the entering into community and solidarity with other people that is the real value of living.”Dooneen is a haunted as well as a haunting novel. There’s a striking scene where two of the characters have a terrifying encounter with the ghost of a teenage boy. What is it that interests you about this figure?“The boy is based on a real historical person, Alec George Playfair, who was one of the first casualties of the Easter Rising. He was thought to be a boy of 14, although he was actually a man of 23. At the time I was writing, the genocide of Gaza was at its height, and every day I was reading about the deaths of children. “I couldn’t keep that away from what I was writing, so the absurdity and obscurity of violence found a way into the story. I tried to allow this boy, in a small way, to take on the voice of all these dead children.” [ Keith Ridgway: ‘I was completely content with the idea I would not write again’Opens in new window ]Dooneen is a moving love story of lovers separated, but also a story of love of place, of family and community, all woven together“That’s exactly right. The book is a love letter, really, that’s about all those kinds of love. I wanted to emphasise the loving and caring side of people in struggle. Some of which is the sharing and pushing back against despair.”Elements from genre writing have been part of your writing for a long time: crime and the thriller, supernatural fiction and romance and, now, in a small way, science fiction. To what extent is that intentional? “It’s intentional only in the sense that I often, but not always, recognise what I’m doing. But I think it comes much more from my own reading and the books I become enthused by. I’m not a genre writer. I sometimes wish I was, but I don’t have the kind of discipline and skill they can have in their fields. “As a reader it doesn’t ever occur to me to think: where does this book fit into a genre or whatever? I just read for pleasure. And in the writing that gives me a licence to mix and match and put things together that you’re probably not supposed to.“I have a real love of plot. Whether that’s in John le Carré or Ursula Le Guin. I love gathering the elements of plot, though the resolution almost inevitably interests me less in the end than, say, emotional trajectories. “I have read all of Georges Simenon’s Maigret books, and I love his work. He’s a fantastic writer to read for other writers, because they are all about writing. The ways in which he describes Maigret breaking a case is exactly the way a writer approaches characters and plot, showing that understanding human situations, and solving a case, is a work of imagination.”Is that work of imagination the writer’s or the reader’s?“Both. Fiction doesn’t come alive at my desk but in the imagination of the reader. That’s where the artifice becomes the fiction. Recognising that, and allowing the reader to have as much power over the work as I can, is the way I like to write. The book is open to different readings, certainly, and I welcome all of them.”Much of the novel is written in the form of handwritten letters. Does the fact that far fewer people write physical letters today give these a different emotional value?“I was having trouble getting into the writing of the book in my default of third person and switched to a first-person voice. But I kept on running into that problem that is not really a problem, that I kept asking myself: who is he talking to? And it was only when I hit upon the idea of him writing letters to his partner that everything fell into place, because it allowed the emotions to come through. It just completely freed me up.”[ Keith Ridgway: 'I write because I don't quite know how to live'Opens in new window ]Dooneen might be seen as in the tradition of the novel of the city, like Andrei Bely’s Petersburg or Alasdair Gray’s Glasgow in Lanark. How do you think a writer makes a city come to life?“Lanark is a fantastic book that, I think, has had an influence on me ... I don’t know if there’s a ‘how’ to it. In the pandemic, when I couldn’t get back to Dublin, the place became very alive in my imagination in a peculiar sort of way that I tried to capture on the page. “The city that I grew up in – and this is not a complaint – that I knew and loved when I left at the turn of the century, that city is gone. A passed city that has left its imprint. “What’s being brought to life is not the real city, as such, but a written city that can become alive in its own ways. I found that once I removed from myself the perceived pressure of ‘Oh, I haven’t lived there in so long: how could I be accurate or authentic?’, I could allow myself to focus on the city as I remember and imagine and love it. “And that’s the city that’s in the book. Never just one thing but always a multitude of different things made up, and made sense of, out of my imagination.”The action of Dooneen is mostly in Dublin, but most of the story is told from a strange and beautifully described west of Ireland. What’s your relationship with that part of the country?“I love the west coast generally, but I know west Clare particularly well. My entire family would decamp to Kilkee every summer and stay there for as long as we could manage. There’s a very strong argument to be made for the high, dramatic cliffs nearby being the site of the Jack McAuliffe song [Cliffs of Dooneen]. It’s there where I’m imagining the narrator is writing from. It’s the most beautiful place on Earth, as far as I’m concerned.” There’s a whole musical’s worth of song lyrics in Dooneen, with a ballad-like mixture of sentiment, humour and violence. Do they have tunes?“They’re very much songs, and they all have melodies. I’m one of those people who gets up in the morning and sings in the shower and sings making my coffee, and, you know, nonsense verses will pop up and attach themselves to borrowed melodies. “They’re all in my head, but they had to be recorded for the audiobook, with a professional reading and singing, who has a much better voice than I do, but you will hear more or less the kinds of melodies that came to me for these.”What have you read lately that you’ve enjoyed?“Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume novels are just fantastic. They’re at once weighty, philosophical and compulsive reading. Han Kang’s books We Do Not Part and Human Acts are powerful pieces of writing. Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child is terrific, an earthy, sensual work of imagination.”Back catalogueKeith Ridgway’s restless, inimitable style and powerful imagination have made him one of Ireland’s most admired writers. His first novel, The Long Falling, from 1998, which is told from the perspective of a middle-aged woman, within the background of the 1992 X case, won France’s Prix Femina Étranger. Published only five years after the decriminalisation of homosexuality, it was a groundbreaking picture of gay life in Ireland. The Parts, published in 2003, is a multivoiced Dublin novel of the Celtic Tiger years. Animals, from 2006, marks Ridgway’s transition to a bold, intensely interior and often fragmentary style. Hawthorn and Child, from 2012, is a radical and compelling reworking of the crime novel. A Shock, from 2021, along with its predecessor, joins the company of the greatest novels of London. A memorably uncanny novel, it won Britain’s oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Ridgway is also one of Ireland’s finest short-story writers. His first collection, Standard Time, won the Rooney Prize. He has also won the prestigious O Henry Award and has had stories published in the New Yorker. Dooneen is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions