Novel For the Good Times runs riot in the Belfast of The Troubles; Pharrell-approved singer/songwriter Maggie Rogers arrives confident and cool on Heard it in a Past Life
Young men run riot in Northern Ireland in David Keenan’s troubling novel
Sammy, Tommy and Barney are friends who spend time drinking, chasing women and debating music, art and the world around them. Typical young men, then — except for when they’re robbing, kidnapping and murdering. This is Belfast in the Seventies, a city seized by paranoia where shocking acts of sectarian violence are as pervasive as the drizzle and a person who is the life and soul of the party one minute can turn up in a pool of blood the next.
Keen to rise in the IRA ranks, Sammy and his friends pile body upon body while smoking weed, singing karaoke in the pub and commandeering a comic-book shop to cover their operations. The latter is an allegory author David Keenan returns to often in his second novel, For the Good Times, the narrative switching from Sammy’s joke-peppered Irish vernacular to surrealist visions of him and the others as superheroes battling cosmic forces. Those passages, though infrequent, feel like a flimsy cover for Keenan to revel in the book’s cartoonish violence, the causes and consequences of which go largely unexamined.
Where Keenan focuses on the affectionate but fraught friendships, Sammy’s naïve affair with a compromised wife of a target, or anecdotes from a bruised community, the prose sings. Irvine Welsh comparisons hold up well: both write with a fitful brilliance and an ear for knuckle-cracking dialogue.
As Brexit threatens stability in Northern Ireland, a novel set during The Troubles feels well timed, though this one is less a sobering reminder of Irish history than a queasily enjoyable coming-of-age yarn. Murders aside, Sammy and pals feel like they could be growing up anywhere. It’s both the novel’s weakness, and strength.