Review – Hawthorn and Child, by Keith Ridgeway

‘The body is a multitude of ways of coming apart’ writes Keith Ridgeway in his most recent novel Hawthorn & Child. He describes these ways. It can be beaten, broken or burnt. It can fall down stairs or in to deep water. The excoriation of adult skin differs to that of a child’s. Ridgeway begins with not a character but a body, and as the bodies amass – sometimes sexualised as well as pulverised – the novel itself begins to come apart, and everything in it.

Hawthorn and Child are detectives in North London, tasked with finding a crime boss named Mishazzo and solving the shooting with which the novel opens. We view these supposed protagonists through a kind of parallax: they are displaced throughout the novels eight chapters and are themselves broken in to bits across its pages – readers come to recognise them only by their suits, Child’s glasses, Hawthorn’s ‘sleep scars’.