Before dawn one day in midwinter, a man in flight from a crisis returns to a city he lived in long ago. He has lost everything — his home, his security, his sense of self — and now he sets off on foot through the streets as he prepares to knock on the door of an old friend, to swallow his pride and ask for a place to stay. But something unnameable interferes with his plans. He takes a turn around a corner. Then he turns again, and again, and again. He wanders off on tangents, re-crosses paths he has already followed, and moves in ever expanding circles, aimlessly pivoting around an invisible centre. He hesitates. He prevaricates. He can’t walk towards the shame of doing what he must. He stops, lingers, tarries. He touches the surfaces of the city, opens himself to its tones and textures. He delves into the past, his own past and the past of the place, bringing to mind his bygone encounters with life on the edge of solvency. His is a record of borderline squalor, of exploitation, of begging to maintain the status of even a precarious existence; a history of minor humiliations, of frustrated ambitions, of friendships with the marginalised and kinship with the dispossessed.
In his follow-up to the novella Unspeakable, Daniel Davis Wood embarks on a psychogeography of Edinburgh which takes form as a dance between movement and stasis, exhaustion and relief, otherness and selfhood. Part prose poem, part autofiction, In Ruins strings a series of minor narratives along the coiling, looping pathways of an itinerant mind, a lost soul. The result is a story that purposefully goes nowhere — a story that in fact revels in its refusal to conclude, using words to postpone an imminent return to a reality both alienating and utterly without pity.
Media Reviews
Repetition is one of the hallmarks of Davis Wood’s writing, with the story circling around continuously in a complex series of thematic variations. The protagonist of In Ruins thus finds himself at the top of a repetitious cycle, his third such iteration in this city. … For Davis Wood, the true author exists in ruins, “without a home, without a grounding, without a sense of my possible selves, starting everything over again for the third time in my life.” In Ruins is utterly compelling in the relentlessness of this artistic vision.
Peter J. Matthews
Westerly
Daniel Davis Wood 