David Keenan’s debut novel, This is Memorial Device, about a small town in Lanarkshire and its post-punk scene, showed that it wasn’t easy being Iggy Pop in Airdrie. For the Good Times, his second, set in 1970s Belfast, shows that it isn’t easy being a Perry Como-loving one of the boys in the Ardoyne.
In NI parlance, Sammy McMahon and his three friends are connected. This involves participation in punishment beatings, arms raids, killings, explosions and internecine feuds. But Sammy and his friends are not paramilitaries of the type you might imagine — the guerrilla ideologue or the Donegal tweed-wearing killer. This lot, travelling around in a van decorated with a painting of Mickey Mouse, tend more to a Mafioso wiseguy and Droog mutation. For the most part, the friends are highly non-ideological; Sammy has disdain for the IRA’s Green Book, the induction text for new volunteers: ‘We were motivated by more immediate concerns: protection, resentment, ambition, revenge, honour, sex, money, style, class…plus a history of violence.’ This violence is varied and gleefully imaginative: a guy’s ear is torn off with a hoover; someone saws through a wind-pipe. But Sammy, while a perpetrator, recognises how it is part of inexorable cause and effect: he imagines a giant finger parting the clouds, tipping a domino run of murder from Belfast to Bellaghy.
References to crispy pancakes and Rod Stewart’s ‘Hot Legs’ notwithstanding, this fantastic, terrifying novel is phantasmagorical, high-velocity gothic. It transgresses boundaries of present and future through the seer-like character Miracle Baby, and the parameters of life and death through communication with a departed compadre. All the good stuff is there: dark forces, portents, labyrinthine passages, the recurrent idea of the double, inversions of good and evil on an epic scale.
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