A shaggy drug story: Industry of Magic & Light, by David Keenan, reviewed

The Scottish writer David Keenan has published five novels in five years: This is Memorial Device (2017), For the Good Times (2019), Xstabeth (2020), last year’s magnum opus Monument Maker and now Industry of Magic & Light. At a comparatively modest 250 pages (Monument Maker weighed in at more than 800), it is practically a novella, or perhaps the sort of pamphlet one might once have picked up in a ‘head shop’ such as Compendium Books in Camden. The last book of Keenan’s I reviewed here I described as ‘either a cycle of novels or one vast fictional gallimaufry’ – to which I now approvingly add a third category. Industry of Magic & Light confirms the enterprise as a shaggy drug story:

Then the main band came on. I thought they had been on already. And maybe it was the LSD. But I started to get it… this music was like a split second of that music only extended forever, like a magnification of that music, I thought to myself, like an atomic vision of that music, and I thought of atoms, and of splitting the atom, and of how that was how it all had come about in the first place; and that’s when the devil appeared to me.

In one sense this novel is the prequel to This is Memorial Device that its publisher claims it to be. That book reconstructed the landscape and mindset of the late 1970s post-punk moment in Airdrie, Scotland; superficially, Industry of Magic & Light maps the same terrain ten years earlier. Keenan focuses on a small band of hippies in the town running their own light show, plus the bands around the gig scene, before pulling back out to other times and places.