The Scottish writer David Keenan has published five novels in five years: This is Memorial Device (2017), For the Good Times (2019), Xstabeth (2020), last year’s magnum opus Monument Maker and now Industry of Magic & Light. At a comparatively modest 250 pages (Monument Maker weighed in at more than 800), it is practically a novella, or perhaps the sort of pamphlet one might once have picked up in a ‘head shop’ such as Compendium Books in Camden. The last book of Keenan’s I reviewed here I described as ‘either a cycle of novels or one vast fictional gallimaufry’ – to which I now approvingly add a third category. Industry of Magic & Light confirms the enterprise as a shaggy drug story:

Then the main band came on. I thought they had been on already. And maybe it was the LSD. But I started to get it… this music was like a split second of that music only extended forever, like a magnification of that music, I thought to myself, like an atomic vision of that music, and I thought of atoms, and of splitting the atom, and of how that was how it all had come about in the first place; and that’s when the devil appeared to me.

In one sense this novel is the prequel to This is Memorial Device that its publisher claims it to be. That book reconstructed the landscape and mindset of the late 1970s post-punk moment in Airdrie, Scotland; superficially, Industry of Magic & Light maps the same terrain ten years earlier. Keenan focuses on a small band of hippies in the town running their own light show, plus the bands around the gig scene, before pulling back out to other times and places. The first novel transported us to a Paris apartment and dropped us off there; this time we journey beyond the Iron Curtain and to the far reaches of the hippy trail in Afghanistan. And as one might expect, this being the late 1960s, there is a wide variety of pharmaceuticals involved. But where is this all going, other than Far Out?

It is becoming apparent to this reader – who, as you may already have guessed, has signed up for the whole trip – that what Keenan is attempting with these novels is to evoke the psychedelic experience in all its metaphysical, Blakean, sanity-threatening intricacy. The sequence represents not so much a roman-fleuve as a Roman bacchanal, a Dionysian freak-out to the music of time, where enlightenment is pursued via ritual and the ‘systemic derangement of the senses’.

To call such an artistic undertaking risky is an understatement. For every Rimbaud adrift in a ‘drunken boat’, there is a Jim Morrison dead in the bathtub. Commercially it must represent something of a challenge to the publisher too. Paraphrasing Eric Morecambe, Keenan is not going to sell much ice-cream going at that speed. Industry of Magic & Light does not perhaps represent the easiest way into this labyrinthine fiction. It can be a challenge to recall when or where one has met a character before; at points I wished I had ingested something enabling me to go back and reread all four previous books very fast. But I love the ‘chains of flashing images’ that hold everything together here – tunnels, the Tarot, mirrors, things glimpsed and then obscured, only to reappear somewhere else – and the crazily ambitious attempt to catalogue and commemorate the psychedelic experience even as it recedes into history.