Industry of Magic and Light by David Keenan review: a trippy 1960s nostalgia-fest

David Keenan presents a problem for a reviewer. 700 words in a national newspaper is nice, but it doesn’t really suit his style or subject matter. So do me a favour. Imagine that, instead of me having emailed this review to the Telegraph, I wrote it longhand on a Weetabix box, removed the vowels and repeated letters, redrew what remained as a sigil, burned that, scattered the ashes on an allotment in North Lanarkshire and then tried to project my memory of the text into your mind as your stared into an Aldis lamp full of indigo-coloured water. Cheers.

In late 2004 Keenan founded a record label that specialised in esoteric underground music. Then he wrote a landmark history of esoteric underground music. Then he started writing novels about esoteric underground music. Industry of Light and Magic is a prequel to his first, This is Memorial Device (2017). Its protagonists are members of a hippie collective who put on light shows that sound a lot like the psychedelic spectacles that Mark Boyle and Joan Hills threw on the walls of the UFO club in 1960s London. Except, like most of Keenan’s fiction, the action happens in his hometown of Airdrie, North Lanarkshire.

Keenan splits his narrative into two parts. The second takes the form of a tarot reading; the first an inventory of the contents of a caravan once occupied by Alan Cardona, a harmonium-playing hippie psychonaut reported to have taken up staring into the sun in an attempt “to open some kind of praeterhuman channel”. The caravan – which must surely be connected by a ley-line to the trailer occupied by Mark Rylance in Jerusalem – creaks with an immense personal archive of porn mags, esoteric pamphlets and private-press vinyl. Electronic composer Ruth White’s LP 7 Trumps from the Tarot Cards and Pinions (1968); poet Steve Richmond’s Hitler Painted Roses (1966); Clyde Bayswater’s Jokes and their Relations to the Walking Dead (1969); James Blackman’s Mahatmas of Scottish Mountains. Some of these are real; some invented.

As a reader, you have a couple of choices. You can submit to the tide of references, or try to distinguish between the genuine artefacts and the Piltdown bones. Choose the former, and you’re tripping with Keenan from the start. Opt for the latter, and you succumb in a different way. You’ll probably guess that Fleur Mayberry’s My Menses (1969) isn’t to be found in any library because we’ve already heard that this poet broke the heart of the most characteristically David Keenanish creation in the book – a writer who, convinced that physical publication is a form of selling out, will only share his masterwork, Telegraph Material Universe, by reading it out, letter by individual letter, at an anti-Vietnam War demo. But when you come across a real work, you may find yourself adding it to your playlist or bookshop order, just because you’re grateful it exists.

Keenan is a novelist and Industry of Magic and Light is a novel. It has characters, a plot, and the pages are numbered in order. But really, it’s more of a vibe. A practice. A mood. There’s a Keenan way of doing a paragraph. And it’s seductive. Seductive because it has its own rhythm. A rhythm that carries words between lines until it becomes a kind of incantation. An incantation that raises the vision of an alternative and enchanted history of modern fiction. A history we might recover, perhaps by getting lost in it forever. You get me?

One of the elements to which the story returns is an account of a visit to Kandahar in 1969, where Alan Cardona visits a guru who sits in the eye-socket of a skull-shaped rock formation in the desert. The guru asks if they have brought gifts. Fruit and nuts and incense are presented. The guru becomes testy. “I’m pining away up here,” he says, “you think I couldn’t murder a Curlywurly.” Alan’s mind is blown: “It was like total enlightenment.”

Mine, too. The Curly Wurly didn’t begin production until 1970. Is this just a minor slip of period detail? Or is it the secret flaw of the book? The moment in which Keenan allows us to glimpse the fundamental curlywurliness of the cosmos? Under his influence, I could believe it.

Industry of Magic and Light is published by White Rabbit at £18.99. To order your copy for £16.99 call or visit the Telegraph Bookshop