Boyhood by David Keenan review: 'a vertiginously wild ride'
Billed as ‘a love letter to Glasgow’, David Keenan’s latest novel confirms his place as one of ScotLit’s most unfettered imaginations, writes David Robinson
“Split the lark – and you’ll find the music” wrote Emily Dickinson in the first line of the poem David Keenan uses as an epigraph for his first novel in four years, but it could just as easily serve as a warning to any critic trying to sum up this swaggeringly imaginative, polyphonic novel. Dissect the lark, and it’s very definitely dead.
Keenan himself calls Boyhood “a love letter to Glasgow”, and true enough, that’s where it starts, back in 1979 with the abduction of Aaron Murray’s five-year-old brother Nemo. It’s where Keenan started too: in an author’s note he adds that his father often told him that an angel touched him on the head when he was born. It must have been, on this evidence, an angel of a particularly maximalist, apophenic bent.
The angel in Aaron Murray’s life is called The Precious Gift, and he (I think it’s a “he” but I’m just guessing - he may also be a spirit, love itself, or a book: let’s not split the lark) is adept at “remote viewing”. Like Dali’s Christ of St John of the Cross, the Precious Gift can look down at the world from his book-lined eighth-floor flat on Glasgow’s Wyndford estate, and see everything. Or at least that’s the theory; in practice, he is taking a break from his work in Northern Ireland, where the person who watches over him - his own angel, if you will - has just been murdered.
Eight years after Nemo’s disappearance, the Precious Gift will teach Aaron something about remote viewing, allowing him also to see into his father’s past and recover memories denied expression through dementia. And though Glasgow is the centre of this particular universe, it also pulls in stories from distant places too, from a German gymnast who falls in love with a French ballerina in 1930s Paris to a French DJ researching Mayan mysteries in 1980s Mexico. Most of these are also linked - if not by music (the Precious Gift knows at least one of The Undertones) then at least by books (the Anabasis by St-John Perse being a particular favourite).
If The Precious Gift knows about Perse’s Anabasis (hands up: I didn’t, nor that TS Eliot thought it as important as all of Joyce’s work), he also knows about Xenophon’s eponymous but suddenly timely original about an army trapped while invading Persia. What’s an anabasis? I hear you ask. An arduous journey, an expedition, an advance into the interior, the dictionary replies.
It fits. There’s plenty of death here, but the Precious Gift hints that maybe love for those who have died can be liberated from time, that we can transcend the limitations of our own life by being receptive to everything beyond it. This is part of the interior journey so many of the novel’s characters make, and while this might make it sound impossibly heavy, and the lack of paragraphs or quotation marks make it look so too, it is emphatically not. That said, maiden aunts everywhere should perhaps be warned that despite the innocent-sounding (and somewhat confusing) title, Boyhood also has lashings of fairly explicit sex, rock and roll and drugs.
Take, for example, the scene when Aaron and friends plan to rustle four horses from a gang on the other side of Glasgow. As they approach the stable, one of his friends hands out some sugarcubes containing microdoses of LSD.
“What?! We’re not going to take LSD and ride horses through the night in Glasgow are we? Dougie says, and Scott Ruff says, no, don’t be mad, they’re for the horses.”
Needless to say, the riders also take a lick of the drug and charge past Parkhead in the middle of the night, bellowing out Sixty Eight Guns by The Alarm as they do. And if you ever feel like swapping the predictable certainties of the social realist novel for a vertiginously wild ride from one of ScotLit’s most unfettered imaginations, you should consider saddling up.
Boyhood, by David Keenan, White Rabbit, £23
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