David Keenan, The Wire magazine journalist turned novelist, coined the term ‘hypnagogic pop’, its exponents making “pop music refracted through the memory of a memory”.
Fitting then that this immersive novel could be characterised as an invocation of the heady, wide-eyed sixties counterculture, before Keenan was born. It’s a prequel to his debut about the post-punk period, This Is Memorial Device.
Part One is from the perspective of an initially unidentified, jilted hippie living in Airdrie, Scotland. A caravan crammed with sixties artefacts has fallen into his possession. This inventory serves as an ingenious springboard for the narrative. Through the narrator’s inspections of the sixties ephemera - vinyl, record reviews, bubblegum wrappers - the fragments gradually cohere into a story comprising a motley crew of characters who staged far-out, light shows and subversive events known as ‘happenings’. There’s also a novel, about a deformed detective, who tries to reincarnate his soulmate. Eventually, it becomes clear who our narrator really is. Part Two wipes the deck clean and, coming in the form of a tarot reading, centres on two hitherto peripheral characters.
At first, this scattershot, intertextual approach might make this book seem finicky. I did find Part Two a little too discontinuous with Part One. And Keenan’s formal innovations, what with all the chopping and changing, can come at the expense of character investment.
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But you can get that stuff anywhere. Soon it’s clear something more interesting is happening here: a conjuring up of the feeling-tone of the sixties. Experimental writers can be po-faced, but Keenan’s randomness is an absolute hoot. His writing has real flair.
He’s both wistfully admiring and also slightly mocking of the sixties’ guilelessness. Reading this singular book, you feel the ecstatic possibilities of expanding consciousness.
However, this thrill is tempered by the melancholy of nostalgia, the impossibility of fully inhabiting a time no matter how much you’re steeped in its culture, a time that could only be realised for what it was later. After all, nostalgia is a fantasy of the past.
Has the decline of object fetishism made the decades after the millennium feel culturally indistinct by comparison? Ironic then that I played my Spotify while reading, the better to imbibe all the rarities in this paean to a “working-class avant-garde street culture”.
