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.
