Faber and Faber, 2019, 358 p.
How do you follow up a novelistic debut such as This is Memorial Device, a book about an imaginary rock band told from a kaleidoscope of multiple viewpoints? Keenan’s answer is to write about something totally divorced from that. 1970s Northern Ireland. “The best decade what ever lived.” (Except for the lack of oral sex.)
For the Good Times is another odd concoction, though. Larded with “Irish” jokes, it is essentially the story of three laddies, Tommy, Barney and narrator Samuel, held together by a linked love for the songs of Perry Como whom they have been told is absolutely clean-living, and who slip into nationalist activism almost by accident.
Their first project is to carry out a shooting and they narrowly avoid capture, running a roadblock with Tommy on the car roof spraying gunfire while singing For the Good Times. Their second is to recover an old arms stash, their third to kidnap the wife of a comic book store owner who they are told owes The Boys money. Her name is Kathy and she disappears leaving only her high heels behind. Sammy later sees her dancing in a bar, pursues her to the toilets where, unbidden, she fellates him. He can’t decide whether or not the relationship they then enter is because she wants to protect her husband from retribution but goes along with it, meeting her after her work in the Europa Hotel. The three lads take over the book shop in lieu of the supposed debt. Cue various riffs on comic books and superpowers.
This is Belfast as a surreal place. One of the characters is nicknamed Miracle Baby. He is “a retard” but one who knows the truth of everything. Kathy’s husband turns out to look exactly like Tommy. The three each imagine themselves as a different superhero. The most potent power? Invisibility; “being invisible is the greatest power you could ever have in Ireland,” a cloak which IRA membership conforms on them.
There is some stark realism. Local IRA boss Big Mack when the lads are joking about a bomb he’s demonstrating, tells them not to act like clowns, adding, “‘see if the IRA could dispense with Irishmen altogether, we’d be one fuck of a formidable fighting unit.’” Joining The Boys was motivated by “protection, resentment, ambition, revenge, honour, sex, money, style, class,” plus a history of violence “that ran through our veins and (let’s face it) was one of the only things holding the generations together,” and moments of recognition. “In Ireland history isn’t written. It’s remembered.” As it is in all sad countries.
Eventually escape becomes necessary. “Fucking Glasgow, my friend, it’s just like Belfast, the same rivalries, the same segregated pubs, the same flags, the same halls, the same murals, the same fucking teams; a friendly city once you get to know it. Plus you’re just as likely to get stabbed for your colours as back home, so as you know where you stand as soon as you’re off the boat. …. It was just like being back in the Ardoyne only with blow jobs aplenty.” But even life in Glasgow becomes too hot.
However nothing in this world is as it seems. Even Kathy. “It’s a web of lies we were all caught in. It’s the default position of the Irish. If in doubt, lie; if asked, make it up; if questioned deny it … tell them fucking nothing.”
In a passage that might be true to the book’s milieu but could equally well be there because Keenan thinks he ought to say it, Sammy tells us, “that was the one thing we never did: we never asked ourselves any questions, in fact we lied. We lied to ourselves more than we did to anyone else. You had to. How else do you do this stuff, day in day out? If you had a working brain you would be finished.” He says he “realised that Belfast is full of ghosts, that Belfast is haunted in the daytime and that nobody pays attention to any of them.” It’s the perfect place to indulge in mayhem. “If you were a daemon where would you go to do your work? Belfast.”
The novel partly comes across as a kind of cross between Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay and, in its observation of casual violence, Graeme Armstrong’s The Young Team. It is, though, made problematic by its illustrations of violence (admittedly difficult to avoid in any novel dealing with this subject) and flawed by some overblown passages rendered in italics illustrating the adventures of the superheroes the three have imagined for themselves. It also contains an aside on the erotic connotations of the ladies’ silk handkerchief.
Pedant’s corner:- The epigraph attributes the song It’s Impossible to Perry Como. (He did sing it but the English lyric was written, as noted in the Acknowledgements, by Sid Wayne, Spanish words and music by Armando Manzanero.) Otherwise; “a beautiful delicate labia” (labia is the plural, no ‘a’ then,) “a flappy disk” (floppy disc, but this may have been trying to convey the speaker’s argot.) “‘Does that not gives you a shiver?’” (give,) “a dice” (x 3, dice is plural; one of them is a die,) fit (fitted,) “lay low” (several times; lie low,) “so as” (frequently; used where ‘so’ would be sufficient,) “faraway lochs” (I know Keenan is Scots but the narrator is Irish, shouldn’t that be ‘faraway loughs’.)
