David Keenan’s seventh novel is quite the ride, but its plot is not always easy to disentangle. The author has said that its title is his favourite word, and the book’s clearest narrative thread concerns the abduction of a young boy outside a Glasgow football ground in 1979.

The boy’s older brother, Aaron, is subsequently guided by an angel called the Precious Gift. Aaron meets the guardian angel during a run for charity in 1986, on

the last day of his boyhood, or so he thought, because he could never imagine doing a sponsored run again after that, because he got into literature and smoking pot straight afterwards.

The Precious Gift also has a talent for ‘remote viewing’, which Keenan describes as ‘the ability to see anywhere in the world with your mind without travelling there’. He used this when he was part of a secret services operation in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, but also to help Aaron and his friend Scott identify the men who assaulted them in a nightclub. As revenge, Aaron and Scott murder one of the men and steal a herd of horses from them, which they shoot and bury standing up.

If this is in danger of sounding straightforward, the plot also zips back to wartime Paris, a serial murderer from the 1970s who was nicknamed the Vampire of Derry, and the guitarist from the Undertones. The horses that are stolen are also fed LSD.

I found it all less fun than it may sound, mainly because it’s quite difficult to work out what’s going on most of the time. I also wondered if I were missing some deep irony in Keenan’s approach to writing about sex. Many scenes are littered with women orgasming explosively in the most unlikely circumstances. One woman ‘vibrates in ecstasy’ shortly after her lover ‘slides her black panties down, scrunches them into a ball, has her open her mouth and stuffs the panties in there’.

It occurred to me that Keenan was satirising a dated kind of view of female sexual fulfilment. An interview he gave to the Times in 2021, however, would suggest not, and that he has an entirely different ambition:

William Blake writes about a hierarchy of the imagination, and the entry level imagination is the sexual imagination. The comments I get more about my sex writing come from women. The ultimate review is that I have had many women say that they masturbate to my novels. That to me is absolutely the best review ever.

What a surprising and, to me, baffling author David Keenan is.