Subtitled “A Hallucinated Oral History of the Post-Punk Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and Environs 1978-1986”, David Keenan’s debut novel has clearly been a long time brewing, so the danger might have been that its moment was gone, superseded by the literary voices who have already made themselves heard on the theme of Scotland’s wasted youth.
But Keenan’s undaunted cast of small-town characters, from an earlier era than those of Irvine Welsh or Alan Warner, have an uncompromising style of their own, and together they recollect the days of Memorial Device, “the greatest band that never existed”.
Admittedly, the more laddish narrators in the book’s early part are too indistinguishable, but gradually the tellers and tales become more unpredictable and various, and the main characters come into focus, such as the memory-impaired vocalist Lucas, who has to remake himself each day “in an act of blind faith based on limited examples”.
Like his fans, though, Lucas is ultimately fighting a losing battle – as one puts it, after listening to the “terrific gridlocked noise” of Memorial Device: “They’re going nowhere, I said to myself, and I felt relieved.”
