A haunting, visionary novel that moves from St Petersburg to St Andrews, with ghosts and saints hovering over every page
“Novelists are ventriloquists, shape shifters, ghoulish inhabiters of other lives,” wrote the English author Andrew Miller. This is certainly true of Scottish writer David Keenan, who loses himself in the multifarious voices he creates. Keenan has said that he doesn’t remember writing this novel, his third, and that when he stumbled across it on his hard drive, “it spoke to me in an unrecognisable voice, a voice that seemed fathomless, bottomless”. There is indeed something uncanny about this haunting book, which connects frozen St Petersburg with misty St Andrews, and in which ghosts and saints hover over every page.
Keenan’s first novel, 2017’s This Is Memorial Device, captured the febrile post-punk scene in smalltown Scotland during the 1980s; it became a cult hit with fans of underground music and left-field fiction. Each chapter was told by a different character, in contrasting voices and styles, but the unifying thread was music. His second, the Gordon Burn prize winner For the Good Times, dealt with betrayal among IRA footsoldiers in 70s Belfast; Perry Como was their soundtrack.