I wondered how Keenan is going to follow a ten-year-in-the-making novel like Monument Maker? Is he burnt out? Does he need a break? No way. Keenan has three new novels all finished and awaiting publication. Have you ever been to visit the Lincoln Memorial? If you have you probably will remember how large and beautiful it looked. Well, did you know that you have Daniel Chester French to thank! Linda Sweeney does a wonderful job explaining the rich history behind one America's most talented artists (at least in my opinion). Our lives are greatly defined by the items, principles, activities, events or occupations that we’re most passionate about. Often these hallmarks are how others identify or remember us. The event of a life’s passing causes others to reflect on the deep importance those elements meant to the departed—and often how the deceased contributed to and honored those aspects. David Gelber: Chancellors & Chancers - Austria Behind the Mask: Politics of a Nation since 1945 by Paul Lendvai The IdeaBook’s collection of customized gravestones, monuments, and tombstone designs includes images that depict the most essential interests, beliefs, connections, and work to represent what departed loved ones were most passionate about. IdeaBook images feature themes that convey aspects deeply related to the history of the departed, including:

Custom headstones illustrate the significance of a well-lived life, the love they shared with close ones, and the legacy they leave the rest of the world. Although we construct monuments in times of grief and sadness, the strongest memorials can also serve as inspiration for others, an appreciation for the eternal gifts the departed leave.From there we move to Africa, to Edinburgh... and this is only the beginning. But it is clear from the start that, despite the great detail, Keenan is not primarily concerned with people or place. There’s something else going on. Almost deliberately off-putting; a self-consciously monumental book by a straight white man, driven by a devout if deeply unorthodox Christianity, suffused with the male gaze and occasionally a colonial one too. And somehow the bastard mostly carries it off. I've used the book as cathedral metaphor before, most often regarding Piers Plowman, but I never expected to see a modern novel openly set out to be that; even Jerusalem, with which this shares a lot of DNA, was at least polite enough to tie its project of remembering moments in eternity to a working class district instead, create its cosmic structure from the lost shops of childhood memory rather than the bastion of traditional authority. Memorials also represent the endurance of the human spirit. They depict the nature and quality of the life they honor, the elements the departed held closest to their hearts and defined them to others.

MONUMENT MAKER straddles genres while fully embracing none of them, a book within a book within a book that runs from hallucinatory historical epics through future-visioned histories of the world narrated by a horribly disfigured British soldier made prophetic by depths of suffering; books that interact with Keenan's earlier novels, including a return to the mythical post-punk Airdrie landscape of his now classic debut, THIS IS MEMORIAL DEVICE; whole histories of art and religion; books that are glorious choral appendices; bibliographies; imagined films; tape recorded interviews; building to a jubilant accumulation of registers, voices and rhythms that is truly Choral.The short answer is he didn’t. It was the voices in his head that wrote it. And I don’t mean the voices of the writer’s imagination; we’re talking other worldly voices. Supernatural stuff. He hears dead people. Since the publication of This Is Memorial Device in 2017, a fictional oral history of the post-punk scene in his native Airdrie, Keenan has become one of the most prolific and innovative literary stylists of the past five years, garnering favourable comparisons to David Foster Wallace and Alan Warner. Now he publishes an epochal epic that asks whether books are capable of dreaming, echoing Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 in terms of sheer ambition and scale. These are some of the questions posed by David Keenan’s Monument Maker, an epic romance set in an eternal summer, and a descent into history and the errors of the past; a novel with a sweep and range that runs from the siege of Khartoum and the conquest of Africa in the 19th century through the Second World War and up to the present day, where the memories of one summer and an unforgettable love affair unravel. It goes on like this. Monument Maker is at least, well, original. Most contemporary fiction is insipid and formulaic; I’d rather read a confused novel like this one than something I’ve read hundreds of times before. So, Keenan deserves due credit for his ambition and fearlessness. But this doesn’t mean Monument Maker is a good book.