“I fell in love,” is the Scottish novelist David Keenan’s answer to my first question when we speak via Zoom to discuss his new novel, Boyhood. The question was, why did he move to London, after living in Glasgow for years? He tells me he moved to Islington last year with his girlfriend.
“I’d lived in London for about five years in the 1990s. I was living in Stoke Newington and Clapton [both in the borough of Hackney] and it was mental. And I moved back to Glasgow because it seemed less mental, which seems a bad thing to say.”
Maybe, but it also makes sense. Keenan’s books are – if not “mental” – far outside the norms of literary fiction. Since his debut This is Memorial Device (2017), set in Airdrie, the town near Glasgow where he grew up, Keenan’s books have blended dark realism (such as the Troubles, in his 2019 second novel For the Good Times) with cultural esoterica, from Freemasonry to psychogeography.
Indeed, for a writer who previously described himself as a “romantic”, and is now in love, we don’t see much of this softer side in his work. Boyhood is no exception. It’s set in Glasgow, Derry, Mexico City and elsewhere, and framed around the disappearance of a young boy called Nemo in the 1970s.
RM Block
But that doesn’t touch on the experience of reading the book, which is a bombardment of eccentric characters and motifs. These include psychic “remote viewers” during the Troubles; the writings of Greek philosopher Xenophon and French poet Saint-John Perse; the Maya civilisation; and cultural figures from Terry Wogan to glamour model Linda Lusardi rubbing shoulders on the page. It’s quite the adventure. So where did Boyhood begin?
[ For the Good Times by David Keenan review: Troubling truthsOpens in new window ]
“The way I’ve always written books is to start with the first sentence and end with the last. There’s not a lot of self-conscious conception that happens. I just had the [opening] scene with [the character called] The Precious Gift running the world.” The Precious Gift is a remote viewer: that is, someone who has the psychic ability to see distant places. If this doesn’t make sense, don’t worry, all will become clear – or not – in the ensuing 300-odd pages.
“It struck me that remote viewing is a good metaphor for what you do as a writer. When I’m writing, I’m taking down something that I’m seeing and I’m travelling somewhere in my mind to do that.
“I don’t really know what my novels are about until they’re finished, and I step back. I couldn’t have much motivation if I had it all plotted out and knew where it was going to go. I wanted to write a book that situated Glasgow at the centre of the world. But perhaps the biggest theme [that] strikes me now is, is it possible to redeem suffering through art?”
My father and his brothers were all illiterate. And yet they had such faith in language
— David Keenan
Keenan’s description of how he writes reminds me, I say, of the Romanian novelist Mircea Cartarescu, who won the Dublin Literary Award in 2024 for Solenoid. He writes without knowing what’s next, and never edits, saying that if he doesn’t surprise himself then he – and the reader – will be bored. His books, like Keenan’s, also blend place-informed realism with grand esoterica.
“I absolutely fucking love Cartarescu,” says Keenan. “And I do see the relation between what we do. Cartarescu never points to something and says, ‘I’m talking about this.’ He presents it. When people ask me, ‘What are your books about?’ my first response is to say, ‘Boyhood is about the experience of reading Boyhood.’ It does not point to anywhere else but itself.”
What about Derry in the book? Keenan gave the Troubles a pretty good going over in For the Good Times, so why return to the North? Does he have unfinished business?
“Perhaps, with my father.” Keenan’s father was from Ardoyne in north Belfast, and moved to Scotland before he and his wife adopted Keenan. “It’s so key to me as a writer that my father and his brothers were all illiterate. And yet they had such faith in language. They would tell a tale of the most horrifying thing that went on in Belfast or Derry, and they would compete to tell it in the funniest way ever.” This, he adds, goes back to “the ability to tell a story in a way that would redeem suffering”.
“And in a way, for me, just the names of places in Northern Ireland, the names of streets, have such incredible magic to them. Because so much has happened, so much adventure and joy and suffering, and they’re places I have visited and been, not some far-off exotic place.”
On the question of magic, does he think that Northern Ireland in literature has been overwhelmed by a sort of grey realism because of the things that have happened there? (Though recently writers such as Anna Burns and Jan Carson are adopting a more playful spirit.)
“Yeah, but so is Scotland. One of the things I picked up very early on is that there’s a sort of literature of misery associated with Northern Ireland and Scotland, especially working-class cultures. I never think of myself as a working-class novelist for a second.
“And it was very important to me to have an art that was affirmative, that was always about that big ‘yes’, because for me, saying ‘no’ is so easy and boring and requires nothing. There’s nothing cynical in my books whatsoever.”
Is there a danger of saying ‘yes’ too much? One character in Boyhood, Andrew Lethal, says “my appetites will be the end of me”.
“No, I don’t think you have any option,” Keenan replies firmly. “You can battle against it forever or see the experience given to you as a gift. This is why there’s a character in the book called The Precious Gift. At one point in the book they dare to suggest that suffering might be the precious gift. Would any of us be making art if it wasn’t for suffering?”
But suffering isn’t what Keenan wants in his art. Here’s the romantic aspect mentioned earlier. “I hate protest songs and protest music. I think the most beautiful art ever made is a love song. The great pop and rock love songs of the 20th century are the greatest art.”
One thing that strikes me about Keenan is his productivity. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise – he talks today rapidly and enthusiastically – but he has published six novels in 10 years, one of which (Monument Maker) is 800 pages long. He started relatively late, at the age of 46, so does he write quickly, or did he have all these novels already circling, like planes over an airport?
“I’m always writing,” he says. “And in the past I have written quickly.” Boyhood, however, took three years. But then the surprise. “I don’t believe everything I write requires an audience, So I’ve written many more books than I’ve published. Some books had to be written, but don’t demand anything. Other books, I can really tell this book wants to speak. So it needs to be finished and published.”
And, he adds, “I’m working at a much slower pace than I used to. That’s a new thing. [But] every time I complete a book, I’m like, ‘I’ll give myself some time off here and chill for a bit,’ but it never happens. It never happens because I have to accept that [writing’s] what I like to do best. So there’s no point in saying, ‘Take some time off,’ because what I’d like to do in my time off is sit and potter around on a new book.”
Keenan was a music writer for many years before turning to fiction. Is this key to his style? “Absolutely. For a start, all my novels aspire to the quality of music. And in my music writing, [I tried to] convey the energy and character of the music I was writing about. So I don’t do a lot of describing in my books, but my books are very visual. And if you’re describing something, your reader is reading a description. They’re not in the presence of the thing itself.”
Keenan wrote for most of the UK music papers, but settled at The Wire, which was “a great place of freedom for me. You weren’t massively edited and you could get away with avant-garde text and experimental prose. But I always wanted to be a novelist.”
Among his influences are William Blake and Philip K Dick, writers who found that writing “can be quite psychologically upending and they struggled between madness and religious vision. That’s something that I definitely wrestled with through writing books, but nobody talks about this.” This is not that surprising, given the wide-ranging content of the books, and that Keenan said one of his novels, Xstabeth (2020), “came to me with the inexorability of a dream” and that he has no memory of writing it.
“You don’t go into a creative-writing workshop and the first thing they say is, ‘By the way, you’re going to encounter something that will make you question your own sanity.’ But I think the stakes are that high.”
[ David Keenan: ‘I’ve been quite close to madness writing these books’Opens in new window ]
He warms to his theme, jabbing a finger as he speaks. He laughs, but he’s serious too. “That’s why I always think writers should be dissuaded from writing. There are too many novelists by a mile and too many that are not interesting. So my first advice: if you want to start writing, don’t f**king do it. You have no hope. And the best scenario is you will lose your f**king mind.
“And, see if, despite all that, someone goes ahead and writes, and completes, a novel,” he concludes, “then I’m interested. Because if you’re driven so mad you want to commit yourself to the writing life – then you’ve caught my interest.”
Boyhood is published by White Rabbit on April 9th.
