Who were the local legends round where you grew up? The beautiful losers and the outsider freaks: did they form the greatest band any of you had ever seen, play a few obscure gigs then break up after the lead singer killed himself? Or did they deal in drugs and rare psychedelic vinyl, but mainly focus on making their nuclear bunker as cosy as possible? Or did they romantically quit the whole scene to go and work in Palestine?
David Keenan’s first novel is populated by about 30 beautifully believable and appallingly sad local legends – including that great band (Memorial Device), that drug-dealer survivalist and that expat romantic. The book’s subtitle gives the most succinct description of the whole enterprise: “An Hallucinated Oral History of the Post-Punk Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and Environs, 1978‑1986”. I’ll start with the basics, and come back to “hallucinated” later.
This Is Memorial Device takes the form of a series of 26 interviews with or communications from people whose lives were touched, transformed or entirely trashed by what Ross Raymond, the book’s fictional “editor”, calls “the greatest rock group of the modern age or at least of Airdrie – Patty Pierce, Lucas Black, Remy Farr and Richard Curtis – but even better when they had Mary Hanna in them”. About 80 pages in, I thought this novelistic equivalent of talking heads wasn’t working at all. The voices were too similar, one to the next – Keenan wasn’t distinguishing them through attitude, accent or even basic text layout. Also, despite the book’s being set in the hinterland between Glasgow and Edinburgh, I’d found little unique to that area. Not language, landscape or weather. Change the place names to Ampthill, Flitwick, Bedford and Milton Keynes, and it could just as well have been set where I grew up.
But then, with the chapter “Scatman and Bobbin the Dynamic Duo”, the voices break away from their rueful, post-adolescent-but-never-really-over-it tone and explode into wild Scottish life. Perhaps Keenan wanted to steer clear of cultural stereotypes, including crappy weather, but I was relieved and delighted when I finally hit this: “You hud tae lean furid tae forty five degrees just tae get anywhere and then the wind wud change direction and you wud faw flat on your face.” That isn’t Milton Keynes.
There are certain things you might expect, picking up a novel by a music writer whose previous book was called England’s Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground. Lists of obscure bands, acerbic one-liners and socio-cultural anger are all present and correct, but much of This Is Memorial Device is surprisingly tangential to the music scene. Many characters have no interest in bands or what they sound like. One chapter, “An Inoculation Against Spirit-Devouring Life as Practised in the West Coast of Scotland”, is an account given by Claire Lune of caring for the dying father of Memorial Device’s bassist. Like many of the chapters, this would work as a brilliant standalone short story. Taken together, they add up to one of the most acute, affecting and aphoristic novels of recent years.
As a portrait of the early-80s post-punk era, This is Memorial Device takes its place among a growing literature that includes Simon Reynolds’ history Rip It Up and Start Again, Stewart Lee’s memoir How I Escaped My Certain Fate and Joseph O’Connor’s Luton-set rock novel The Thrill of It All. These, we are told, were “the glory years … because back then everything seemed impossible”.
But it’s in that word “hallucinated” that the real power of the book lies, a power that takes it beyond the gnarly social surface it shares with those other works. At their highest and lowest, hours before suicide or moments after falling in love, these landlocked Airdrie legends find themselves sinking down and down into a submarine world. They all describe it in similar terms. “Then it came to a point where it felt like I was at sea – where everything slowed to the pace of the ocean – and I began to lose consciousness … Beneath me I could make out shapes – black shapes, that I took to be rigging, torn through, high masts with fish running up and down – and they were illuminated, man ...” As Keenan writes it, the early 80s were a collective shipwreck, and those boats remain sunk. It is a hallucinatory and haunting vision.
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