[In the following review, Patterson notes the narrative voice, imagery, symbolism and warnings of hypocrisy in The Long Falling, but is leery of Ridgway's attempt to "link" the "disparate worlds" of old Irish tradition and new Irish freedom.]

It is not unusual for novels set in rural Ireland to depict drunken, violent, abusive husbands, but it is perhaps less common for the wife on the receiving end of such treatment to retaliate with murder. This is precisely what happens in Keith Ridgway's first novel, The Long Falling, and it's an act of apparent liberation that inevitably becomes a prison of its own.

From the opening descriptions on the first page of The Long Falling, it is clear that there is no room here for nostalgic notions of an Emerald Isle full of rosy-faced country folk in tune with the rhythms of nature. This is a harsh, brutal landscape, suited only to bad weather. The 'places of the country look different in the sun … as if brought by the clouds and dropped like litter … only in the rain can they hide'.

The reasons for this implied pathetic fallacy—a world shrouded in a mist of tears—soon become all too apparent, as we are introduced to downtrodden farmer's wife, Grace Quinn. An English woman who has never fully been accepted by the hostile local community, Grace leads a life of unremitting gloom. Her three-year-old son, Sean, drowned in a ditch one night as she was hanging out the washing.

Her lumbering husband, Michael, blames her, but he soon becomes a child-killer himself, knocking over a young girl on his way home from a drunken night at the pub. Now out of jail, he exercises his demons with vicious blows that send Grace flying across the bedroom. Neither thinks to mention it over the daily chop and two veg.

It's not difficult to see why Grace finds the sight of her husband kneeling at the roadside one night as she's driving home an irresistible temptation, but it's perhaps a little surprising that after doing the deed, which is far from instantaneous, she went home and 'had a bath and sang'. Within days of the funeral, Grace has gone to Dublin to stay with her now only son, Martin.

Martin has barely been home since his announcement, at 19, that he was gay provoked the assertion that: 'Your mother killed the wrong fucking one.' From that time, 'the circumstances of his life have flowed from the way he wished to make love' and Martin has in startling contrast to the brutal rural life that he grew up with, created a comfortable, metropolitan existence, full of gay friends, cafés and bars.

Sitting in a bar surrounded by gay couples snogging and homoerotic pictures, Grace finds herself unexpectedly animated and is invited to join the boys for further evenings in the pub. However, her new-found confidence is soon under threat as Martin's journalist friend, Sean, begins to reveal a disturbing interest in the circumstances surrounding her husband's death.

In Ridgway's cool, assured voice, this unlikely train of events is more convincing than a bald summary can imply, but a number of questions remain. Grace's extraordinary passivity extends to not finding out precisely where her son is buried and continuing to drive the bashed-up car that killed their neighbour's daughter. Even for someone in a state of severe depression, this stretches credulity, as does her sudden transition, in the presence of her son's friends, to urbane raconteur.

However, there is a hypnotic quality to the despair that drives Grace that ensures that the reader is caught up in her 'long falling' from numb half-life into liberation and then rude reality.

The relationship between her and Martin is well done, full of anxious affection and awkwardness: 'All that oddness and that awful love'. The narrative voice is precise, rhythmic and peppered with striking poetic images: Grace remembers the smell of her husband in bed, 'like a cloth soaked in the dead water of old flowers'.

In his phone-calls with his lover, Henry, Martin 'felt his mind and his heart rise and fall in a kind of self-generated graph of potential betrayals'. Martin's desperate, suspicious love for Henry is also well done, his furtive, guilt-ridden trip to the sauna and frantic, tender sex when they're together again offering glimpses of a sexual world not exactly over-represented in Irish writing.

The Long Falling is, in many different ways, a novel about 'coming out'. It's about coming out of the old and into the new, but in the messy complexity of contemporary Ireland, Ridgway implies, such truth-telling will always carry a price. In his striking juxtaposition of two such different worlds, there's a strong sense that the personal and the political are profoundly intermingled.

The rural scenes represent old Ireland, a stifling world where there is no escape from violent, loveless marriages, Dublin a vibrant, cosmopolitan world where people are free to pursue their own sexual preferences, but a rape victim still can't have an abortion. Tradition lives on in the form of blind religious faith and archaic laws.

In the end, Ridgway's attempt to link these disparate worlds doesn't quite work, but this otherwise impressive debut remains a disturbing reminder of how easy it is 'to kill or destroy or unhinge a life'. As journalist Sean notes dryly: 'It happened all the time.'