In 2012 I became a pest on social media by talking about Keith Ridgway’s novel Hawthorn & Child too much. As one Irish writer – whom I blocked – observed, you’d think I had written the thing myself. Hawthorn & Child is a novel made of loosely connected stories – “a shattered novel in a bag”, Ridgway called it – and Marching Songsis one of the stories. It’s narrated by a man who is clearly not right in the head, who disappears down YouTube rabbit holes toward radical thinking in a way that seems even more familiar now than it did then. But what I love about the story is the poetry of the narrator’s cracked and freewheeling voice, which manages to be idiosyncratic without striking false notes. There are lines in it that hang around in my own head a dozen years later, which is as good a measure of its success as any.
First published in Granta 120, June 2012, where it can be read online, and as part of the novel Hawthorn & Child, Granta, 2012
A Personal Anthology 