Samuel Beckett didn’t make life easy for writers who followed him. Where to go after the author of The End, ‘Enough’ and ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ had emptied fiction of nearly all of its usual pleasures? The modern novel, once so full of adventure, drama and sparkling real-life detail, appeared to come to a stop inside the curious spaces in which the likes of Molloy and Malone were confined. Fictional narratives, or so those immobile, endlessly self-negating protagonists seemed to suggest, habitually overstated the possibility of anything happening in the world. 

Keith Ridgway has grappled with Beckett’s legacy for much of his career. He has acknowledged his admiration for Mercier and Camier (1946), and its influence is clear in his fourth novel, Hawthorn & Child (2012); both are circumlocutory detective tales that refuse to offer the genre’s usual tightly plotted satisfactions. Beckett isn’t named in Dooneen, Ridgway’s latest novel, but his voice is powerfully present throughout. 

Dooneen is prefaced by the lyrics to ‘Cliffs of Dooneen’, a folk song celebrating the rugged beauty of Dooneen Point on the west coast of Ireland. The novel’s principal narrator, Bartholomew Port (known as Mew), has washed up thereabouts, apparently stranded in a clifftop refuge: ‘This view. These walls. This