MONUMENT MAKER

DAVID KEENAN

White Rabbit, 912pp, £25 Not even his most ardent admirers have claimed that David Keenan’s latest novel, Monument Maker, is a relaxing read. In fact they struggled even to describe what it was about. David Annand in the Times Literary

Supplement absolutely loved it (‘at once sacred and profane, highminded and foul-mouthed … beautiful and bewildering, formally daring and frequently confounding’) but even he ‘limped to the end of it, exhausted and emotionally wrung out, but convinced of Keenan’s profound artistic seriousness’.

Stuart Kelly in the Guardian noted that the novel was ‘structured as a cathedral, the reader moving through books entitled “Nave”, “Transept”, “Apse” and “Choir”’. The final pages are an index of every single character in the book – and there are a few of them: ‘Chagall, Ouspensky, Bernini, Saint Anselm, Hans Frank or Arthur Rimbaud are all fleeting presences.’ Kelly liked some parts of the novel, ‘the parts that are more meditation than narrative’ and ‘there is a wonderful cadenza on whether books dream and change while they are not being read’. But overall, however, ‘there is too much self-indulgence in Monument Maker’. In the Times, Houman Barekat shared Kelly’s reservations. Reflecting on Keenan’s earlier career as a music critic, he found reading the novel ‘rather like listening to an unpolished early demo by a much-loved band. You can see the rudiments of talent: the feverish, hallucinogenic quality of his rhythmic prose style, his manic obsessiveness and sweary libidinousness.’ But there is too little ‘control’ and too much ‘messianic pontification’ and ‘woolly theorising’ in what ends up a ‘bloated and repetitious novel’.