Dooneen

Paperback · 323 pages · Fitzcarraldo Editions · 2026

A love letter in the walls

Bartholomew Port, called Mew, writes to his partner, Mahmoud Habib, Mootie, from a room cut into a west-coast cliff. He is wounded and hidden, unsure whether his pages can reach London.

The first rupture in the novel's space has little to do with politics, at least at first. Mew steps into a hedge in a London park and steps out into Dublin, unexplained, climbing from the undergrowth at a city reservoir. The novel breaks its own physics before it breaks its own politics, but one is already leaking into the other.

Keith Ridgway's Dooneen starts with one man writing to another, then pushes that private act into a Dublin run by rumour and watched by the state, into a failed uprising that begins in a housing dispute over landlord ownership and ends under military force. Comic dislocation hardens into massacre, and a love letter is forced to carry the record of a damaged city. Mootie stays absent from Dublin, but not from the page: Mew still writes each scene back to him anyway.

Ridgway's handling of space gives the novel its argument. The hotel has guest space above and worker passages beneath; the Shelbourne's corridors, which Hannah leads Mew through, turn labour knowledge into survival. A room can protect a body or end up as evidence. The question stays spatial: who may enter, and who is punished for making shelter.

The connected houses at Blackpitts turn that method into architecture. Holes in the walls join the houses, and the gardens behind them form one shared field: food, children, song and dispute sitting next to plans for when the Gardaí come. Ridgway does not need to make a speech about housing; he builds the argument into the breached wall between two kitchens. The state calls it terror and infestation. The people living inside it call it survival.

Police move through Dublin alongside soldiers and hired enforcers, all of it one body: the state, misreading as it moves. Once it decides who counts as a threat, a pen can be read as a weapon: El Masry reaches for one at the horse track behind the barracks and is shot. What the fugitives first imagine as a beast turns out to be an armoured vehicle. The terror does not lift once the monster is explained: it has a manufacturer. The state kills, then records the killing in language that protects itself.

The novel's form follows that damage. One strand starts inside the movement's own Lock Committee, where a hotel report flags Mew as a factor before he understands he has been placed under observation. Another surfaces later as testimony from inside the same movement, reframing him as a witness selected for use. The operation's tunnel reaches a fork, and the group splits into separate routes. After that, no single account contains the event. The record comes through press reports and tribunal statements, each with a different stake.

The record fragments; the bodies in it do not. Vincent Byrne and Charles Dalton, Vinny and Charlie to the rest of the group, first appear as comic hotel figures before carrying Mew bodily out of the massacre, while Fatima dresses his wounds and talks him through it. The ordinary will not stay out: bad singing, toffees, crisps, a pen, Vinny and Charlie talking Mew through terror. The comedy does not soften the violence; it keeps the dead from turning into symbols too quickly.

Blackpitts is already burning when the group breaks apart on Church Street. Mew separates, believing he will be safer alone; the city disproves him within minutes. A door cracks open and offers him shelter. He goes the other way and is shot on Lurgan Street. He wakes at St Mary of the Angels, a church now doing a hospital's work and a prison's, where, concussed, he may have started naming names. Ridgway will not let him stay innocent.

The book strains under its own density. In the final third, the record jumps between witness accounts, press reports, tribunal and military statements, and detainee testimony. Each fragment brings a new speaker and political stance. The reader must work out who is speaking and which side they serve before the sentence even gets to what has happened to Mew. The result is frantic. It works best tied to one body or one site.

St Michan's Park is where the book closes its case. Mew is sent across first and told not to look back. He looks back: Hannah, Fatima and the rest of the group are still behind him, keeping their word. Then the shooting starts. By the time Vinny and Charlie reach him, most of the group is dead or dying.

That is where Dooneen convinces, in two plain images rather than an argument. The cliff room shelters Mew; Vinny and Charlie carrying him gets him out alive. Neither needs to mean anything beyond that.

At the cliff, Mew's hands are weakening, and he still does not know where Mootie is. Out on the ocean he picks out shapes and chooses to call them ships. Dublin remains broken, and the dead go ungathered. The pages cannot give him back the world, or Mootie. They survive as writing sent across distance, not as reunion.