Industry of Magic & Light

by David Keenan

Industry of Magic & Light is a love letter to the counterculture of the 1960s and a requiem for its passing.

The much-anticipated prequel to Keenan's cult classic debut, This is Memorial Device, Industry of Magic & Light is set in the same mythical Airdrie in the 1960s and early 70s and centres on a group of hippies running their own psychedelic light show. Told in two halves - the first in the form of an inventory of the contents of a caravan abandoned by one of the hippies, the second in the form of a tarot card reading - it is not so much a book about the 1960s as a direct channelling of the decade's energies, bringing to life how even the smallest and dreariest of working class towns felt so full of possibility in the wake of the psychedelic moment. Via artefacts from the time - everything from poetry chapbooks, record reviews and musical instruments through bubblegum wrappers, bicycle repair kits and mysterious cassette recordings - the book opens out into adventures along the hippy trail in Afghanistan and behind the Iron Curtain that leads a cast of new and returning characters - as well as the authorities - to believe that they are literally making magic. Simultaneously a forensics of the 1960s, a detective novel, an occult thriller, a vision quest, and the hallucinatory exposition of a moment where it felt like anything was possible, Industry of Magic & Life brings to life the streets of small working class towns as transformational sites of utopian joy.

Genres: Fiction

272 pages, Hardcover

Published August 25, 2022

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

[Joachim Stoop · Rating 3 out of 5]

More like a weird encyclopedia full of hippie items than a novel. More something to read one page a day than in a couple of days

[Alex Sarll]

I had thought Monument Maker might represent a capstone to the shared world of Keenan's first fictions, but this unexpected Memorial Device prequel proves otherwise. Which makes sense; as he reiterated at the not-remotely-cult-like launch for this book, he doesn't see himself as having created another world at all, but as recording and speaking for this one*. Accordingly, it makes sense that the first half of Industry Of Light & Magic is presented as an inventory, a box of detritus triggering memories of the sixties counterculture in the small Scottish town of Airdrie, transcendence rooted in not just the material but the utterly disregarded. The inventory format, of course, being exactly the one taken by the book I finished immediately prior to this, Jarvis Cocker's memoir. But then the nature of Keenan books is such that I suspect whatever I'd been reading beforehand, there would have been startling correspondences; think of the books as the fruiting bodies from a network of filaments which run through everything, and if you think that sounds mental, you should read the article Bill Drummond wrote about this. The mood Keenan builds encourages that sort of mad connection-finding, though: there's a reference to Love, and I was listening to them the day of the launch! Roy Harper comes up when I have a tab open with a track of his! A mention of Dreamachines, and I was in one of those recently! All this stuff about mortality, and I am mortal...you see what I mean.

In some ways, this might be the hardest of Keenan's novels to sell. Granted, Monument Maker is a book which is also an 800-page attempt to immanentise a cathedral outside space and time, and that's bound to put some people off – but this is a novel about the 1960s, which is arguably even worse. You doubtless already know the outline – the free love, the expanded consciousness, the cool sounds, then the curdling into casualties, smack, too many courgettes (OK, maybe the courgettes aren't so much part of the cliche, and fair enough – some things are even more horrifying than Altamont). But it's all in the telling, isn't it? I'm not sure it's even that Keenan makes it feel like it was if you were there, rather than hearing about it from some ageing boomer keen to let you know you missed the party. Rather, I think he makes it feel like the people who were there wanted it to feel, makes the whole era catch light as in reality only a few of the very best nights could have done, gives every tiny little town a fascinating and alive music scene to match or maybe excel the best of what was coming out of the big freak scenes. And yet does that without ever turning it into some frictionless utopia – this is still a recognisably fallen world, from the authoritarian pushback to the expired packets of salt'n'shake crisps.

The second half, structured around tarot cards rather than a personal archive, didn't connect with me – or Drummond, for that matter – quite so viscerally. Each of the major arcana corresponds to a segment of two stories; one, from the hippy trail in Afghanistan, refracts incidents of which we've already heard a partial account; the other, about an amphetamine-crazed underground boxer in Prague, appears to have very little to do with anything. Obviously connections do become apparent, because as we've already established Keenan connects everything to everything, but this still felt a little anticlimactic after the specificity and the intimacy and the epiphany of the opening section.

And no, while the title does make sense in and of itself, you'd need a more determined exegete than me to tell you what the connection to Star Wars et al might be.

*It was most surprising when interviewer John Higgs went in completely the wrong direction with this, talking about paracosms; I've not been as keen on Higgs' last couple of books, and I'm not sure I'm going to bother with the new one at all because Beatles, but I still think of him as incisive, rather than someone who misses the point that badly.

[Don McKinlay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jaw droppingly good
Like absolutely nothing else you’ve ever read
My only disappointment is not being able to forget I’ve read it and start all over again

[Russell Barton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like a lot of Keenan’s work, this book contains some stunning writing. And also like many of his books the plot takes second place to the writing, so that you reach the end and you’re not really sure where you are or where you’ve been.

I hope one day that Keenan (or his published) delivers a compendium explaining how all of his characters and plots interact as it can be hard to remember what comes from where.

[Benny · Rating 3 out of 5]

this was a rollercoaster. first hundred pages or so I was having the time of my LIFE. Weird spiky narrator has just bought a caravan full of hippie paraphernalia and is listing each item with a short description. quite epic! we get a kaleidoscopic patchwork landscape of a psychedelic settlement in Scotland, with weird little characters, tons of musical references, scraps of manuscripts and cassette transcripts, delicious. reoccurring characters!! plotlines buried in pamphlets and plays and old packets of gum! this is so interesting and clever! oh cool!! we get to know the narrator more; bit by bit we realise he's a middle-aged lamewad divorcee who thinks he's the next Arthur Conan Doyle, bitter about never being fully inducted into a legit cult and obsessing over this caravan to try and fill the gaps in his knowledge on the organisation. I love a pathetic narrator I really do. We get to read his autobiographical detective-thriller manuscript, which is simultaneously absolutely shit and quite compelling. Second part of the book: side-by-side vignettes telling the stories of two characters, each few pages marked by a wood-cut print of a tarot card. the prints are gorgeous!! now. why out of nowhere does Adam decide in one of his sections to drop NINE racial slurs while describing the process of punching a man TO DEATH !!!!! HE IS ALREADY DEAD !!! WHAT GIVES THE DISRESPECT !!! im trying to enjoy my insane scottish hippie novel and out of nowhere im reading "shit-eating (slur) low life pussy bitch" in reference to a man who is in the process of getting murdered. bro did nothing wrong also one of about three total POC characters in the entire book? I get that this is the 1960s but this book covers a lot of europe in progressive left-wing encampments - I don't know. I just cannot find one legitimate reason for the absolute slew of racist language they just smack cam you with outta nowhere and then never address again. Adam goes on to be a prize underground streetfighter? and then the book just ends? and then the postscript is just a collection of words and phrases squashed into the shape of a magazine interview? It just fell off so hard. Endless sentences with twenty commas, rambles into nothing, a bunch of white hippies waxing lyrical on the verbal dynamicism of class-heironomic proto-conscious activism blah blah blah and then doing a bunch of heroin and beating the shit out of eachother. which I guess is what the hippie movement frequently devolved into, but whatever. Didn't make me feel like I'd gotten much of worth from this text past a certain point. first half was so silly fun interesting and there were moments of sheer brilliance but the book never recovered from its racism arc and I feel quite disappointed.
I will add though that I believe this is a prequel to Keenan's novel This Is Memorial Device and some of the characters translate across, so maybe the context of that book makes sense of the more gibberish parts of this one? I'm not entirely opposed to reading that one eventually but not for a while.

[Leftjab · Rating 5 out of 5]

I mean, I completely enjoyed and looked forward to reading Keenan’s spontaneous/improvised prose every night – the organizing principles – a commentary on the remnants of a recently purchased hippie caravan and a dual story of a boxer and a hippie woman through some sort of Tarot reading allow Keenan to basically go wherever he wants to explore what he sees as the spirit of the age (for want of a better term). For me, it felt like Samuel Delany’s The Einstein Intersection filtered through David Foster Wallace and Irvine Welsh. This is the 5th book of Keenan’s I’ve read (getting ready for Monument Maker!!) and it is a spiritual prequel to This is Memorial Device, but I generally preferred it to Memorial Device (which I enjoyed very much as well) – calling this “focused” isn’t the right word, but I found Keenan’s organizing principle and how both stories built to almost epiphanic rhapsody in prose – the cataloging climaxing in the “Battle of Katherine Park” and the Tarot section climaxing with our hippie heroine Suzy going through withdrawal lost on the hippie trail (I don’t quite know where Suzy winds up!) where boxer/enforcer Adam having met and fallen in love with Suzy at first sight deciding to read her tarot right before Suzy faces the void.

Keenan cheats a bit by having one of the artifacts being a manuscript for a novel about a local constable John St. John that was unpublished (though the author of the manuscript I think is the person going through the caravan? It feels like this was someone going through his memories and the manuscript was his way of expressing his anger at his then-wife for having an affair with a police officer – the specifics are a bit hazy but as with Memorial Device there’s the inclination that if you go back through the book and piece together the characters there’s a bigger picture out there where everything adds up…. But I’m also reminded of one of my favorite creative endeavors of the moment the Moon Wiring Club where characters and places reappear but any thought that a true “story” is underneath the machinations and digressions is really up to the reader.) so he can tell a story through the story of John St. John – which dominates the first half of the book really.

But again, reading this book and getting hung up on the specifics of the “story” is missing the point – similar to how I felt after reading Xstabeth. Keenan writes in the repetitive voices of his characters and the book is less a story than a vibe – as if he was literally trying to channel the spirit of the 60s (or what he thinks the 60s were – I think Keenan was born in 1970 so this is NOT a first hand account of it, but maybe a chance for him to correct what he sees as something incorrectly portrayed through stoned rose colored glasses). Don’t give me wrong, there are drugs galore in this one, and he does a bit of Pynchon in Inherent Vice & Vineland (and DFW) of creating fictional bands and splicing them between real bands. Of course, the Doors & Frank Zappa and the big touchstones of the era are easy to identify, but when he starts getting into the super obscure – The Bachs, Zweistein, These Trails, Savage Resurrection – if you didn’t work at a vinyl shop that traffics in the obscure, you’d have no idea that all these albums are real artifacts. You do get a hint of Keenan’s taste in this – he loves Abe “Voco” Kesh (a San Francisco DJ who produced the first Blue Cheer albums) and the 13th Floor Elevators. Easter Everywhere would make a good soundtrack to this read – I actually made a 3 hour playlist based around the many bands he mentions throughout.

I know that this is most likely not for everyone. I enjoyed it immensely and felt it benefits from being read aloud – Keenan’s prose, especially for the later parts of both sections really builds and bends into poetry. But hey, this whole thing is literally about Magic and Light – and how maybe our conceptions of both twisted a bit in the 60s. Against the Day is very much about Light – so in both cases an exploration of light is an exploration of perception and how we create the world of objects around us.

[Loring Wirbel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first of Keenan's novels I've read, which makes sense given that it is referred to as a prequel to This Is Memorial Device, so it prepares me in a way for his first and most treasured novel. I've kept tabs on his nonfiction work, both his book on outsider music in the U.K. and his writing for The Quietus, and was also aware of his work with his partner Heather Leigh on the legendary Glasgow music store, Volcanic Tongue. All of which is a roundabout way of admitting I'm pretty late to the party.

Still, with Keenan's gift for assembling elaborate scenarios from fragments of inventory descriptions and police reports, he lures the reader to dive directly into the deep end of Airdrie, the region east of Glasgow where the author grew up. Airdrie also was the setting for his debut 1980s post-punk novel, and in this event, he takes us back to 1968-69 for a look at burgeoning hippie culture in Scotland. It's evident within the first few pages that, where the U.S. was bifurcated between a mellow West Coast led by the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, and an intense East Coast led by the Velvet Underground and downtown undergrounders like LaMonte Young, Airdrie was borrowing the best of all American hippie scenes to come up with something new and fresh. The first part of this two-part novel lays out the Airdrie landscape as seen from the leftovers inside an abandoned caravan that once was part of the light-show-and-freak-out providers, Industry of Magic and Light. A Google search for many obscure names will show that Keenan has done his homework in dredging up the parts of psychedelic culture that usually go unnoticed by both historians and users of hallucinogens.

There are intriguing links between a police inspector who has developed an obsessive love for an artist's wife, and the various tales of drug manufacturers, makers of bootleg LPs, and elevated beings who want to make Airdrie the transcendent part of Glasgow. The first part of the book ends with the climactic Battle of Katherine Park, played to a soundtrack of "Walk Me Out in the Morning Dew." We could assume that all loose threads have come together and the book has given us the triptych for trippy Airdrie -- except that, just like Into the Woods between Acts 1 and 2, there is more of the story to tell. Keenan gives us first-hand reports of two tangential characters from Part 1, Adam and Suzy, to give us a deeeper sense of how individuals drifted into and out of the scene. And he tells the tale as a series of Tarot cards, and provides us with block-print art of each card as a bonus.

Reading David Keenan can easily become an addiction due to his expansive writing style, which becomes habit-forming when the reader least expects it. I'll jump back with his first novel, so I can spend more time in Airdrie. But I'm determined to read all his novels, just to spend more time in his astonishing mind.

[Paul]

This is a book. It's something like a prequel to the novel This is a Memorial Device and it has a fair bit in common with that previously released title. There's the same drive to grandiose, to elevate something that was likely not that big a deal to many people into being an earth-shattering period. And of course, it is when the person explaining things believed it to be that way.

Chris sees an opportunity to purchase a bit of history. A part of his own personal history and the spilled histories of those he saw as magic-makers that flood out of this time-capsule he has discovered. An old caravan, full of odds and ends that must be classified and cemented. Each item unfurling some new branch of this life giving tree. Eventually this method, though it continues for most of the book, sort of melts away and we get an order jumping cascade of people and places, their truths and their fictions. It's very difficult to explain. But it certainly worked on me. Dizzy and beguiling there's a pleasant head-swim to reading about these hippies and their art, their paranoia and passion, in late 1960's Airdrie. It's a fascinating encapsulation of a 'scene'. It's also very funny, and a bit sad. I think I could've read so much more about John Maris St John, the best cop. There's a feeling of reward when something loops back around at the end, a strange thrill. And yet, I'm none the wiser about a lot of it. It feels right, though. That seems like the most important thing.

So I enjoyed this, even though I'm struggling to explain why here. It is unfortunate that the title of the book keeps getting mixed up with George Lucas' special effects company every time I look at it.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nou, ik heb nog maar een keer een experimentele inventarisatie van (grotendeels gefictionaliseerde) Schotse alternatieve cultuur gelezen.

Op momenten gewoon zo goed als voorganger This Is Memorial Device. Het belangrijkste punt van deze recensie is feitelijk dat iedereen This Is Memorial Device moet lezen.

Ook Industry Of Magic & Light ontvouwt zich als een labyrint, waarin je telkens weer op oude paden belandt, omdat de nieuwe paden noodzakelijkerwijs aansluiten op eerder bewandelde routes.

Dat klinkt abstract, maar dat is het boek ook wel, met hypnotische herhaling van namen, artiesten, ervaringen, paranormale verschijningen.

Veel komma's, weinig punten. Een van de weinige auteurs waar ik dat van pik, in zijn boeken zou ik eigenlijk niet anders willen.

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved ."This Memorial Device". that I read in 2022. Talked to a friend in May who recommended another book by David Keenan that was mainly about .golf.. I bought this book thinking it was it, but I got it wrong so read most of this thinking "When will the golf stuff start?" which kind of added to the surrealness of the book.

Anyway, it's not a book about or including golf, but a prequel to "This Memorial Device" mainly featuring hippies in the 60s and it's pretty good. Reads like a fever dream, just like "This Memorial Device" and is full of facts, fiction, unreliable narrators etc etc.

[Andy Haddon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Looking at a book split in two, one half an 'inventory', the other half a 'tarot' reading, I gave thought to whether DK had disappeared up his own *rs*.
Turns out, the genius of his previous novels continues into this fever dream 'prequel' to 'Memorial Device.
Stories retold and repeated, embellished and misremembered, edited and expanded; this is how legends are made.

[Justin Sarginson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dazzling read. A book you open just to blinded by the author’s imagination and brilliance.
This author has a capacity to create scenes, stories and characters that are just so unique and surreal, which the author builds these spectacular worlds around.
Incredible imagination.

[Tim.Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Keenan’s best fiction yet. The 60s lends itself so well to this kind Borgesian cultural inventory. Experimental for sure, but like the best experimental writing accessible because in tunes into the right wavelength of form and sophistication.

[Alan Stuart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great characters. Unique storytelling. What was it about? Not sure but an enjoyable ride into the hippie culture of the 60s and 70s

[Jared Joseph · Rating 3 out of 5]

and I looked back at him, and I thought, thank fuck every speeding second is taking us further from this kind of conversation for life.

[Uilleam Mac Uilleam · Rating 3 out of 5]

You might think that knowing Airdrie/Coatbridge/Calderbank well would shed some light on this book. You'd be wrong

[Jesse Webb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some intriguing moments but over all this book felt slight.