Monument Maker

by David Keenan

Is it possible for books to dream? For books to dream within books? Is there a literary subterranea that would facilitate ingress and exit points through these dreams?

These are some of the questions posed by David Keenan’s masterly fifth novel, Monument Maker, an epic romance of eternal summer and a descent, into history, into the horrors of the past; a novel with a sweep and range that runs from the siege of Khartoum and the conquest of Africa in the 19th century through the Second World War and up to the present day, where the memory of a single summer, and a love affair that took place across the cathedrals of Ile de France, unravels, as a secret initiatory cult is uncovered that has its roots in macabre experiments in cryptozoology in pre-war Europe.

MONUMENT MAKER straddles genres while fully embracing none of them, a book within a book within a book that runs from hallucinatory historical epics through future-visioned histories of the world narrated by a horribly disfigured British soldier made prophetic by depths of suffering; books that interact with Keenan’s earlier novels, including a return to the mythical post-punk Airdrie landscape of his now classic debut, THIS IS MEMORIAL DEVICE; whole histories of art and religion; books that are glorious choral appendices; bibliographies; imagined films; tape recorded interviews; building to a jubilant accumulation of registers, voices and rhythms that is truly Choral.

Written over the course of 10 years, MONUMENT MAKER represents the apex of Keenan’s project to create books that contain uncanny life and feel like living organisms. It is a meditation on art and religion, and on what it means to make monument; this great longing for something eternal, something that could fix moments in time, forever.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Historical Fiction, British Literature, Scotland

816 pages, Hardcover

Published August 5, 2021

About the author

David Keenan is an author and critic based in Glasgow, Scotland. He has been a regular contributor to The Wire magazine for the past twenty years. His debut novel, This Is Memorial Device, was published by Faber in 2017.

Reviews

[Domitori · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a perfect world, I would like to see e.g. London Review of Books publishing a (very) long article, preferably written by someone very smart, reviewing the following 4 books together: “Professor Dowell’s Head” (1925) by Alexander Belyaev, “The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia” (2019) by Anya Bernstein, “http://xn--e1agkrcj.net/” by Tatsiana Zamirouskaya (2021) and this one, “Monument Maker” (2021) by David Keenan. I would like a reviewer to ponder why the former punk guitarist-turned-anthropologist (Bernstein), music critic (Zamirouskaya), and post-rock-musician - turned music critic - turned record store owner (Keenan) all became obsessed with the themes of immortality and resurrection of the dead (and how Belyaev’s nearly-100-year-old novel hovers over them). Is this a new trend -- musicians and music critics turning to literature and immortality research? Keenan is also obsessed with sex, takes pride in the fact that some of his readers masturbate to his books, and it is because of this juvenile, masturbatory (and maybe slightly misogynistic) bend that I was ready to quit several times (not out of prudishness: it is simply annoying). But I persevered and, 808 pages later, happy that I did. Joyce (style-wise) and Pynchon (theme-wise) are clear influences, and it may be preposterous to think of Keenan as occupying the same reputation and quality strata as those two - but why not? The book is structured like a cathedral and contains multiple interlocking novels (my favorite one - about the time-traveler Frater Jim who got a face transplant from the experimental Nazi surgeons-cryptozoologists wearing monkey suits — but there are also subterranean psychogeographical secret societies, siege of Khartoum, summer romance among the French cathedrals, an architect and poet called Pierre Melville and his joint literary identity with the German soldier of fortune Maximilian Rehberg and their sci-fi novella about climate change, and 50+ pages at the end listing every single character in the book in quite a humorous fashion). Keenan gluttonous ambition may invite contempt and mockery but somehow he pulls it off: the ambition may not be unearned after all.

[Patrick.G.P · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolute masterpiece. Monument Maker feels like an open portal, words forming the entrance into its many mysteries. A strange, intoxicating journey that within its many narratives centres around the idea that art is magic and magic is art. I am not entirely convinced that it's not so much a novel, but that Keenan has updated an age-old grimoire to our age. The term Post-modernism can’t even begin to describe Keenan’s work, I think Post-Mysticism would be a much more fitting description.

[Stephen Toman · Rating 5 out of 5]

An enormous, baggy masterpiece. Adored getting lost in this and was very fortunate to be welcomed into the reading Sunday night readalongs organised by Lara MF Pawson and Wendy Erskine (two writers who have also immediately shot into my read-whatever-they-write-next-without-hesitation list of select authors) where Keenan himself was generous enough to enthusiastically answer many of my (slightly squiffy) questions about the book and writing in general. Ten years on the making during which Keenan also wrote three (!) other incredible books. He says he doesn’t plan his books but let’s the words come to him and what is incredible (but also challenging, in a way) is that he lures the reader into that same receptive hypnogogic state whereby the reader ends up channeling their own ghosts and it became difficult to maintain focus, at times, on the book when it continually inspired me to create something of my own. Wonderful experience.

[Alex Sarll]

Almost deliberately off-putting; a self-consciously monumental book by a straight white man, driven by a devout if deeply unorthodox Christianity, suffused with the male gaze and occasionally a colonial one too. And somehow the bastard mostly carries it off. I've used the book as cathedral metaphor before, most often regarding Piers Plowman, but I never expected to see a modern novel openly set out to be that; even Jerusalem, with which this shares a lot of DNA, was at least polite enough to tie its project of remembering moments in eternity to a working class district instead, create its cosmic structure from the lost shops of childhood memory rather than the bastion of traditional authority.

Not that Keenan is quite so reflexively canonical as this could suggest; yes, there is an attempt here to preserve a perfect Bach concert, but there is also the perfectly imperfect rendition of Baker Street by a mediocre yet somehow in their own way ideal local band. And imperfections are very much key to the project; at the live launch for this, Keenan was impassioned on the theme, his conviction a big part of almost convincing me he might have hit on that rarest of things, a theodicy that isn't insultingly stupid. There was a moment, sat reading it in the sadness of the November sun, looking down on the woefully, loveably inaccurate Crystal Palace dinosaurs, that I thought, this is so perfectly Monument Maker. But then part of the trick of Monument Maker is that so many things are, and that despite a title which makes it sound like Melody Maker for stonemasons. In places it's simply beautiful: "I came to regard the others, too, as filled with an impossible longing, which is heaven, which is as futile and beautiful as holding on to your lover". And of all its fervent attempts to memorialise, for me none were so affecting as the attempt to capture the place and the moment and the feel of a country lane when the whole symphony of it is just right.

Elsewhere, it's deliberately and effectively ghastly, and I don't just mean the very male writer bit about erections, but stuff like the whole strand where we manage to go from backstreet vivisection to an idea which, against all odds, makes the atrocity camps of the 20th century even more appalling than they already were. There's a section in besieged Khartoum which seems almost designed to piss off the reader invested in what's preceded it, and which features something very like a Cosmic Cube, leading me to wonder if Keenan was riffing on the way this book too seems like the culmination at least of a phase of the shared universe in which it now turns out his books take place. But then I'm sure other readers would be more irritated by the science fiction interlude, including a story of a rock festival on the Moon that reads like the fruit of a deeply improbable collaboration between John Higgs and Julian Cope, perhaps with Roy Wilkinson lending a hand. Personally, I enjoyed that section, but then I tend to agree with the commentary (in the ensuing bibliography of the character from elsewhere in the book who wrote that bit) – "reality is for people who can't handle science fiction". And while we're on the points of comparison, at that live launch there was something about Keenan's accent and physicality that really made me think of Grant Morrison, but it wasn't just that. God and stone and hearts, characters entering the art, tunnels inside it where they jump around, outer churches and severed heads... Does recalling all this, yet also Jerusalem, mean Keenan has somehow created the alchemical union which ends comics' great wizard war? Almost certainly not, but it's quite exciting to have a book which naturally makes me ask that question. Considered as something many people might actually want to read, it's not as good a novel as Keenan's first two. But as a showy, ludicrous, possibly great work of mythmaking, an idiosyncratic statement of a personal creed which also works as a late entry in the Pynchonesque field of the baggy conspiracy doorstopper...well, different rules apply. Hell, this is a book where the concluding dramatis personae is the best part of 50 pages long, often spectacularly unhelpful, and yet has to be read because it contains information not previously mentioned. Though one question remains: if you're going to make a work of art which is itself about escaping into works of art, wouldn't you make one of which a higher proportion were appealing? There's plenty of books I'd like to live inside, but even in those few early chapters all about immortalising perfect moments, Monument Maker would be nowhere near the top of the list.

[Jo Bevan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Blimey.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Somehow I finished this but it was truly a struggle. It's a mish mash of various (fairly unrelated) stories (historical fiction, science fiction) with some vague underlying theological theme that never became very clear to me

[Kevin Dooney · Rating 5 out of 5]

This wasn’t an easy read, at times I did really question what I was reading, but ultimately it is an amazing work. Keenan has clearly spent a long time constructing this monument that spans earth, in many eras, and space. Even in the midst of confusion I was still engrossed by the style and writing and never regretted picking it up. Although it did require reading in silence to try follow what was going on.

[Dylan Reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really don’t (for no apparent reason) enjoy writing reviews on GoodReads, really not too sure why. Despite this, after finishing this time and looking at the reviews currently showing here, I felt a sort of duty to add in my voice to what I really feel should be a dense chorus of praise.

This book is absolutely fantastic and essentially beyond my powers of description. Although there is a lot I can say about it, this book’s great value is bound up in the experience of reading it. In my view, Keenan is phenomenally successful in his stated (paraphrased) aim to create a space and/or narrative that is outside of time or something that is not/not of oneself. There wasn’t a single time, in the week that I devoured this book, where I did not very actively look forward to my next frolic through Keenan’s clouds and meadows of language.

I’m trying to keep things straightforward here, so as mot to gush too much or sound like Keenan snuck Kool-aid through the book, but he really laid bare an assortment of powerful dollops of wisdom, euphoric mimeses, and side-splitting surprise attacks of bathos.

Do yourself a monumental (eh? Eh?) favor, and get a copy of Monument Maker!

P.S. since the halfway point, I’ve ordered the rest of his works, which I wait for in gleeful anticipation!

[Jim Levi · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lost patience after the first 5 chapters. Is he trying to do Alasdair Gray? Just incredibly lengthy, pretentious and irritating. Memorial Device this is not.

[Paul Harrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

It pulls you along at a breakneck speed but never leaves you behind.

It's a book dreaming itself.

I'm not sure I understand what I've read, but boy did I enjoy the ride.

I'm going to have to read this again, and soon.

(And am I really the first written review??)

[Aaron McQuiston · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received Monument Maker as an ARC from Europa Editions in exchange for an honest review.

When I reviewed David Keenan’s last Europa Edition release, Xstabeth, I thought it was an interesting way to tell a story. The author is a dead person who is writing about a girl who might be dead or alive and this confusion is compelling, complete with asides about science and language that only make sense metaphorically. After spending many hours reading Monument Maker, David Keenan has swept me into an even bigger story, one that not only shares the same universe as Xstabeth, but one that is much bigger than even the story on the pages told here. A story that is as endless and timeless as art, science, and the galaxy.

The basics of the story is the telling of Pierre Melville’s life, an artist who lives with Maximilian Rehberg and writes science fiction novels under the pen name Paimon. But this is not right. The real basics of the story is a third of their party, Frater Jim, who is a time traveler and tells the story in a World War II camp about how he got a face transplant, in the future, from Nazis wearing monkey suits, but returned back to the camp to tell how he got this procedure done. Frater Jim is a Janusist, one who lives forward and backward at the same time. But this is not right either. The real basics of the story is the exploration of art and the way that it changes and moves throughout the years and how all art is like religion, where every piece of art, every stone, every writing, painting, song should be studied and worshiped and those who make it should be seen as gods. Every piece of art needs a monument made for it, and David Keenan is the monument maker.

Monument Maker is a mosaic with hundreds of little pieces that can be put together in any order because the picture will be up for the reader’s interpretation anyway. One of the smallest of passages close to the end of the novel brings this to light:

“Suddenly I was struck by a terrifying thought. Was it possible for books to dream? Could it be that every time a book was closed it fell into a deep slumber wherein it dreamed itself as something else? I considered myself an erudite man, well read, able to discourse at length on the classics. Could it be that I was simply a victim of fancy and fate? That all I had remembered and studied and was able to quote at length, all that I had in fact lived by, was nothing but the night-time reveries of books dreaming themselves? In that case the history of literature was nothing but a phantom; no one had ever read the same book.” (pgs. 619-620)

This feels like an thesis of the entire novel. Books are a fluid thing and even when we close the pages, when we open them again, the novel has dreamed and has changed. It is not the novel itself, the words have turned into something else, but us, as the readers have changed, even if is just slightly. Within a few minutes of taking a break, we are not the same person that closed the book earlier. We might have forgotten a small detail. We might have made up the true synopsis of what we think Monument Maker may be about but changed it while taking a shower or cutting the grass, only to return to reading with filtering the story now through a different lens. Books are constantly changing because the reader is constantly changing. We change our feelings and interpretation all of the time, and the idea that “no one has ever read the same book” is one hundred percent accurate.

There are so many things I have been thinking about since finishing Monument Maker, and one of them is how important art and artists are to David Keenan and his writings. In both of the novels I have read by him, he has focused on an obscure artist and the people who surround these artists and worship them, turning their following into a small cult. This group, sometimes 20 or 30 people worldwide, are devoted to these artists, even when these said artists really have not released a massive amount of work, sometimes just one obscure book. In Keenans’ world, if someone writes a slim novella or someone paints a few canvases, there is a potential that a group of people will follow this artist, try to learn everything about them, and will obsess over every move that the artist makes. This devotion to the artist, regardless of obscurity, seems to be one of those things that Keenan likes to fantasize about, like how every single little piece of art has the potential to make someone a devout to the artist and his life. This exhibits a sincerity to the value of art in David Keenan’s life, otherwise this phenomenon would not continue to be a major plot in his novels.


As a whole, Monument Maker is a huge and difficult book. I say this in the most loving way possible. I enjoy it because I enjoy the way David Keenan writes, but it is not for everyone. His novel is nonlinear, metaphorical, and really has made me think a great deal about the meaning behind his choices. Some of the sentences are pages long, some of the little details turn into pages of falling down a rabbit hole of information (like the idea that Goya should paint what might possibly be on the flag that is planted on the moon if we were to land in a joint world effort and why). There is not really an imbalance in this book because there is never really much balance. Book Four is far removed from Book One, and the appendixes are just as important to the novel as the four parts, including the science fiction story by Paimon. In the end, it is one of those books that I enjoyed the journey and the difficulty, like I really feel like I accomplished something serious by finishing it and mulling over the multiple meanings. If you are hesitant to read Monument Maker check out Xstabeth first, to get a taste for the way that David Keenan constructs his universe. But who knows, maybe you should just start with Monument Maker. Maybe the book that you read will be completely different than the one that I read. That is how books dream, right?

[Loring Wirbel · Rating 5 out of 5]

You'll notice that many Goodreads reviewers give this massive work five stars, even while admitting they find the work more puzzling than anything by Joyce, Pynchon, Proust, Lucy Ellman, etc. Count me in their number. I was both puzzled and fascinated by a dream-state book that could link a 1970s search for unusual cathedrals in northern France, the siege of Khartoum late in the 19th century, a science-fiction story about "Victory Gardens" in orbit around the Earth, the documentation of the meetings of the Society for Irregular Research and Knowledge, and a whole hell of a lot more. Just as an example, the final appendix that provides an alphabetical listing of all the characters in the book, is not just a cheat-sheet for the confused, it's an integral part of the story.

This is not one of Keenan's mysterious memoirs of various music scenes in the Glasgow area, which constitute his most famous works. Yet a few characters from those books have cameo roles in this novel, telling us we need to real Keenan's full body of work to see the way the novels come together as a whole (I'm still missing a couple novels in that regard). Marketing material claims that Monument Maker is a novel that is "dreaming about itself," though the meta-analysis is never so obvious that it ruins the flow of the book. Instead, it is a book with a decided linear flow at times, but one that diverges into such strange tributaries that it is much harder to pick up a solitary thread of narrative than in books by Pynchon or Joyce. And I do not consider that a criticism. Don't look for a steady flow, just let the book overtake you and follow the river.

In the midst of odd environments, the reader will find plenty of signposts and Easter eggs with references from World War 2 to the 21st century, and a few such references going back to the Victorian era. Enjoy them for what they are, and don't worry about their larger meaning. More of these will coalesce into a common subconscious stream than ever resolve themselves into a story that can be explained. In a way, this keeps reviewers from providing any spoilers by accident, as there are no key elements to "spoil" within.

Keenan visits various sexual and social undergrounds from several decades, and his book may startle some readers. Joyce and Pynchon, of course, were famous in that regard, but are often explained away by saying "consider the time." Keenan wrote this book in 2018, so he is offering the text without trigger warnings, and if it should get cancelled in any way, it would only serve to impoverish the cancellers. Consider Monument Maker to be a continuous micr0-trigger for life itself.

[Stephen Cardie · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Backlisted', the literary podcast, has a recurring phrase it uses for more "challenging" books - the first reading is preparation for the second. That is very much the case with this monster of a novel. It is structured, straightforwardly enough, as several shorter stories all woven round a common set of themes and characters, but the language and the flow of each story is often complex and difficult, and requires careful consideration on the part of the reader. This is definitely not a novel to be skimmed or skipped through.
I recently read a huge doorstep fantasy novel by a famous author in that genre that extended to some 1000 pages or so, and I reflected afterwards that if Russel Hoban could, in 'Riddley Walker' create an entire culture and language, and populate his world with believable characters, in the space of about 250 pages, why did Famous Author need four times as many to achieve something similar? Keenan's genius here is managing to avoid that question through structure, and by constantly casting backwards to stories already told (often by others) and forward to his own yet to tell.
I've only rated this 3 stars on initial read through. The sheer length of the book felt like an anchor dragging me down at points, and the flow of these stories lacks the urgency of the preceding novels. These are failings on my part rather than his; as per the opening, I'll return to this in future and I expect the rating will increase.

[Grant McDougall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just finished this behemoth. It's unlikely very few, if any, other books I've read. It's a hard book to describe and was often not easy to follow or understand. But there was often also times when the pages just flew past, it was that engrossing. It's a very, very complex book, multiple styles and story lines, that never quite tie together. But it was always, at the very least, interesting and frequently, compelling. It's massive, sprawling, dense, obtuse but also hugely, totally original. It's like the literary equivalent of a latter period Scott Walker album. It's not a easy read and isn't meant to be, it's difficult, but it's also a enticing, rich, stimulating work of literature. If you like his other books you'll like this, but you'll have to persevere. If you haven't read anything by him before, start with This Is Memorial Device or my favourite, For The Good Times.

[Rob · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have previously been a big fan of Keenan’s work and would certainly cast him among the most significant and talented of contemporary authors but this has the hallmarks of self-indulgence mediated through narcotics that many of our favourite writers descend into. Erudite – yes – but also repetitive, onanistic, sexist (deeply disappointingly) and inaccessible. Among cultural artefacts, see also Goldie’s Saturnz Return, Sufjan Stevens’ The Age of Adz and Olga Tokarczuk’s The Book of Jacob. Flabby and representative of a case where a publisher has allowed an author to ‘go off on one’.

[Liviu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read a review of this one in a mainstream newspaper that made me want to read it, but overall I felt it was way too pretentious and while it had pages and parts thatwere interesting and kept me reading it, the book just didn't cohere well and the whole was much less than the sum of its parts, so again somewhat of a disappointment considering the high praise reviews.

[Brent Hayward · Rating 3 out of 5]

A series of mostly entertaining segments, some more so than others, with recurring characters and artifacts woven throughout. There is a general sense of grand conspiracy, and secret societies, moving back and forth in time. WW2, sex, Europe, Hitler, outer space. Buttons are intentionally pushed, and there’s a few laughs.

[Russell Barton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t know what I’ve just read but it’s highly readable. It might even be a masterpiece if only I can find the map that sets out where it’s going.
I think I saw that someone had read the book backwards, not word by word but section by section, so I might try that next.

[Brian Hanson · Rating 3 out of 5]

What was it that was said of Wagner: some wonderful moments but some pretty awful half-hours. This "challenging" novel is certainly Wagnerian in that respect. But, as with Wagner, one cannot but admire the ambition.

[Justin Sarginson · Rating 4 out of 5]

David Keenan's imagination is boundless and without limit.
This book is so expansive and creative it just bounds through your mind, through time, places and viewpoints. I've read nothing like it and we should take a step back and value this author as a national treasure.

[Yves Heymans · Rating 3 out of 5]

Op zijn beste momenten geniaal, grappig, meeslepend en innovatief, op zijn slechtste momenten saai, repetitief en pretentieus. Wil een soort van ‘Ulysses’ zijn en slaagt daar ook wel in maar is daardoor ook bijwijlen veel te langdradig en overmoedig.

[Raul Guastavino · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can only say that this book has the unique quality of being the continuation of a literary line started by Joyce, continued by Henry Miller and followed also by Leonard Cohen. MAGNIFICENT!

[Chris S · Rating 5 out of 5]

1st reading which is preparation for a 2nd reading.

Favourite quote: 'Reality is for people who can't handle science fiction'.

[Niels Geybels · Rating 5 out of 5]

Monumental! The architecture of time.

[Jared Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hate the smug saints sitting smugly in the small provincial churches, smug, bored of heaven already, sainted by mere saintliness, and would disembowel them.

[Tobias · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heady stuff! Wildly ambitious and all-encompassing.

[Glen Pinder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing