Transcendence, Immediacy and Pride
David Keenan, For The Good Times
Faber, 368pp, £12.99, ISBN 9780571340514
reviewed by Emma Irving
The ‘handsomest boys in the Ardoyne’ have Perry Como on their minds, a stiff drink on their lips and nothing in their hearts. In David Keenan’s second novel, we’re in Belfast in the 1970s and dreams of a Free State are spilling through the streets like blood. Just like the actual Troubles, this is a story as much about Adam’s apples as it is about Adam. The visionary occult is laced with men butchered in bed, targets shot in the face, and a mother blown up by a bomb that was planted by her son. ‘A history of violence [. . .] ran through our veins.’ Boys become men, and men become deranged.
Our narrator, Sammy (or sometimes Xamuel) is one of these boy-men, ‘an angel, come back into the past, to tell I’s now, that it is here right Now, and that this is Christ Jayzus speaking from the cross, and the screws kept their distance’. Sammy sees himself as part Evel Knievel, part cold-blooded killer, part broken little boy. He relives the high-octane high-jinks of the 1970s with all the unsteadiness of recollection, in a narrative that veers between transcendence, immediacy and pride – ‘That’s me on the left, Silk handkerchief in my top bin. One hand in my slacks. The other arm wrapped around the ladies. I mean would you take a fucking look at that would you’. The best books waste no time, and For The Good Times hits the ground sprinting away from the police.
Much of the narrative revolves around Sammy’s relationship with Tommy, his suave, crooning best friend. The girls love Tommy. Sammy loves Tommy. His character bursts into the book with all guns blazing, strapped to the roof of a getaway car after a hit in Dundalk. He’s a man who taps our lust for life lived large and to excess, for life that teeters on the edge of comprehension. Tommy is the spirit of a mythical, Biblical Ireland that may never have existed but has always been longed for – by us, as much as by Sammy.
Often, the book’s much needed tenderness comes from their friendship. I laughed at their bravado, their wit and their foolishness. I also laughed not being sure if I could laugh. Keenan is a dab hand at the straight talking, whip smart, ‘come at me then’ humour of young men who spend half their time bored out of their minds and desperate to prove themselves in the arena. But he’s also deft when it comes to showing us the other half of the time, when they are convinced they are gods. When the boys take over a comic book shop, the language starts to inhabit a cosmic artfulness. It plays tricks, refusing to be pigeonholed and refusing to behave. Bad Irish jokes are repeated with minor variations until they become incantations. An expression of hate becomes baptismal. Keenan has a beautiful way of showing the duplicity in these lives that constantly threaten to spin free of their axis. He writes of Sammy’s desperation with a light touch.
For The Good Times rarely feels overwrought. Its linguistic somersaults are saved from self-consciousness by sharp humour and surprising compassion. There are moments when the narrator collapses into a heart-rending acknowledgement of futility, as the voice of the older man breathes wisdom through the life of his younger self. ‘If you could enter the eyes of a dead man, at mass, in H3, in the years of the hunger strikes, then you would know that heaven and hell are just party games played for the benefit of the living.’ God is very far away. So Sammy starts to look for Him in other places: in a burned man who sacrifices himself for his art and his cause, in Miracle Baby, in Tommy and in the love of a woman in the Europa Hotel. As he matures, he increasingly falls through the cracks of the Edenic dream of swashbuckling adventure. The Belfast ’Ra, it seems, are 'Pathogens of our own making . . . psychopathogens. That’s another word for a fenian bastard and we’re flooding the market.'
These moments of self-awareness and visions of the occult touch the novel’s stomach-churning brutality like snow on soot. Through them, Keenan keeps our hope for Sammy alive and grants him some kind of redemption, particularly as he starts to yearn for forgiveness. They mark an exquisite portrayal of the fire in the blackest of days, and give needed moments of reprieve as the narrative plunges on. We readers, too, are starved for a taste of the mythic, for a transcendent book that we will read back through and relive for years to come, holding it in our hands like a talisman. David Keenan has provided us with that opportunity. Except in this case the mythic is no mere myth.
Our narrator, Sammy (or sometimes Xamuel) is one of these boy-men, ‘an angel, come back into the past, to tell I’s now, that it is here right Now, and that this is Christ Jayzus speaking from the cross, and the screws kept their distance’. Sammy sees himself as part Evel Knievel, part cold-blooded killer, part broken little boy. He relives the high-octane high-jinks of the 1970s with all the unsteadiness of recollection, in a narrative that veers between transcendence, immediacy and pride – ‘That’s me on the left, Silk handkerchief in my top bin. One hand in my slacks. The other arm wrapped around the ladies. I mean would you take a fucking look at that would you’. The best books waste no time, and For The Good Times hits the ground sprinting away from the police.
Much of the narrative revolves around Sammy’s relationship with Tommy, his suave, crooning best friend. The girls love Tommy. Sammy loves Tommy. His character bursts into the book with all guns blazing, strapped to the roof of a getaway car after a hit in Dundalk. He’s a man who taps our lust for life lived large and to excess, for life that teeters on the edge of comprehension. Tommy is the spirit of a mythical, Biblical Ireland that may never have existed but has always been longed for – by us, as much as by Sammy.
Often, the book’s much needed tenderness comes from their friendship. I laughed at their bravado, their wit and their foolishness. I also laughed not being sure if I could laugh. Keenan is a dab hand at the straight talking, whip smart, ‘come at me then’ humour of young men who spend half their time bored out of their minds and desperate to prove themselves in the arena. But he’s also deft when it comes to showing us the other half of the time, when they are convinced they are gods. When the boys take over a comic book shop, the language starts to inhabit a cosmic artfulness. It plays tricks, refusing to be pigeonholed and refusing to behave. Bad Irish jokes are repeated with minor variations until they become incantations. An expression of hate becomes baptismal. Keenan has a beautiful way of showing the duplicity in these lives that constantly threaten to spin free of their axis. He writes of Sammy’s desperation with a light touch.
For The Good Times rarely feels overwrought. Its linguistic somersaults are saved from self-consciousness by sharp humour and surprising compassion. There are moments when the narrator collapses into a heart-rending acknowledgement of futility, as the voice of the older man breathes wisdom through the life of his younger self. ‘If you could enter the eyes of a dead man, at mass, in H3, in the years of the hunger strikes, then you would know that heaven and hell are just party games played for the benefit of the living.’ God is very far away. So Sammy starts to look for Him in other places: in a burned man who sacrifices himself for his art and his cause, in Miracle Baby, in Tommy and in the love of a woman in the Europa Hotel. As he matures, he increasingly falls through the cracks of the Edenic dream of swashbuckling adventure. The Belfast ’Ra, it seems, are 'Pathogens of our own making . . . psychopathogens. That’s another word for a fenian bastard and we’re flooding the market.'
These moments of self-awareness and visions of the occult touch the novel’s stomach-churning brutality like snow on soot. Through them, Keenan keeps our hope for Sammy alive and grants him some kind of redemption, particularly as he starts to yearn for forgiveness. They mark an exquisite portrayal of the fire in the blackest of days, and give needed moments of reprieve as the narrative plunges on. We readers, too, are starved for a taste of the mythic, for a transcendent book that we will read back through and relive for years to come, holding it in our hands like a talisman. David Keenan has provided us with that opportunity. Except in this case the mythic is no mere myth.