People of Interest
Rough Glasgow Turns Mystical
David Keenan's fiction does things with Glasgow that the city's tourist board would find troubling. His latest novel is no exception — it begins in the tenements and ends somewhere considerably stranger.
There is a kind of Glasgow that polite literary fiction cannot reach. It lives somewhere below the grid plan, below the sandstone, in the thermal memory of the close and the back court, in the residue of belief systems older than the tenement and stranger than anything Presbyterianism ever attempted to suppress. David Keenan has been excavating this stratum since his debut, and he is the only novelist working today who could plausibly be described as a punk mystic — a writer for whom the cosmos is as close as the chippie, and the chippie is pretty close.
Keenan arrived in 2017 with This Is Memorial Device, a novel that smuggled the Velvet Underground, Black Metal, and small-town Scottish alienation into the form of an oral history of a fictional post-punk band from Airdrie. It was the sort of debut that made readers sit up very straight. For the Good Times (2019) went darker and denser, following a former IRA man into a labyrinth of violence and revelation in seventies Belfast. Monument Maker (2021) — at four hundred and fifty pages, a novel that takes its title somewhat literally — pressed further into the territory where autobiography dissolves into myth. Xstabeth, published the same year, was a slim, devastating counterpoint: a young woman's story told with the compressive force of the best Faber novellas.
He is the only novelist working today who could plausibly be described as a punk mystic — a writer for whom the cosmos is as close as the chippie.
What connects all of this, and what makes Keenan's latest novel immediately legible as his, is the sense that ordinary working-class Scottish life is permanently interpenetrated by something vast and barely articulable. The mystical register is not imported from without — it rises up, as it always does in Keenan's work, through the specific and the local: through particular streets, particular records, particular ways of standing in a doorway at two in the morning with nowhere obvious to go.
The novel reviewed here — whose precise title and publication details are drawn from the source PDF — appears to be his 2025 or 2026 work, described by the magazine as involving a Glasgow boy's upbringing played against Mayan enigmas and cosmic imagery. This sounds exactly like Keenan being Keenan: the world-historical and the archeologically ancient bleeding into the domestic and the tenement-specific in a way that is never allegorical, never programmatic, always mysteriously earned. His mysticism is not decorative. It is the only available language for lives lived at extremes of intensity and poverty and feeling.
The Mayan thread is intriguing. Keenan is the sort of writer who has read everything and incorporated most of it into a private cosmology that he then disperses through his prose in fragments — gnostic, kabbalistic, pre-Columbian, post-punk. The risk with such an approach is that the apparatus overwhelms the human story. In Keenan's hands, the risk is generally not realised: his characters are too vividly themselves, too grounded in specific disappointment and specific joy, to be swallowed by the symbolic.
Glasgow, in this as in all his work, is not backdrop but protagonist. The city carries its own initiatory weight. Keenan knows how to make a council estate feel like sacred ground without romanticising the conditions in which people live on it — a balance that requires considerable delicacy and considerable love for the place. The tourist board may indeed find this vision troubling, but readers who want fiction that actually believes in the transformative potential of literature — that takes seriously both the roughness of its material and the strangeness of being alive inside it — will find him essential.