The Towers The Fields The Transmitters

by David Keenan

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A businessman experiences a breakdown when he arrives in the town of St Andrews on the east coast of Scotland in order to audit a military air base. Obsessed by his estranged daughter, who he believes is walking the streets at night, the unnamed businessman starts to look to art and ritual in order to redeem this new reality, even as time itself appears out of joint, as old WWII fighters appear in the skies and his twin brother, his double or personal daemon, wreaks havoc in his name. The Towers The Fields The Transmitters is a magical novel that channels the surreal paranoia of Kafka, Burroughs, Bolaño and Philp K. Dick, while asking big questions about the nature of art, its ability to re-frame reality, and its moral culpability in aestheticizing suffering and despair. Written in a high-octane style and with a visionary sleight of hand that digs deep textual tunnels between Xstabeth and itself, The Towers The Fields The Transmitters is the next stage in Keenan's radical re-thinking of the possibilities of the modern novel.

Release date: October 29, 2020

Publisher: White Rabbit

Print pages: 224

Sample

We met in the early evening, on the steps of the museum, two six-foot twins in Glasgow, we got our share of attention, when we showed up we were big news, two six-foot twins on our way to this fight night, this martial arts contest, kickboxing, Thai boxing, MMA.

I’m sitting on the balcony and I have my arm around this one girl – long hair, white dress, dreadlocks – and across from me is this great beauty with my brother, this great beauty with a name like a wild horse or a fountain. My brother has set us up. It’s date night, fate night. He’s on the other side of the table with his finger in this great beauty’s ass. She is bent over the chair and he is licking his middle finger and sliding it in and out of her asshole while she pulls her panties to one side. My brother was always adventurous. He was the one to get out and do things. Now he has her on his lap and he’s screwing her on a chair, though no one could know that for sure, she’s just bouncing up and down in his lap, but she’s wearing stockings and by this time her panties are on the floor, so he’s screwing her, and I know it, I’m sitting right across from him and I look over and for a second I have a feeling like I’ve been robbed, like something that could have been mine has been taken from me, and I curse him beneath my breath, while wishing him well at the same time, which is the curse of families, as we all know.

The fights are going well, they’re evenly matched. A comedian comes on stage. A comedian at a fight night. It’s not funny. A woman in a tight gold dress vomits in the corner. A group of boys with short haircuts are chanting something indecipherable. There’s the unmistakable smell of spunk in the air. I have a nose for spunk, I’m like the Wolfman. If you’ve done the deed, I can smell it off you in a high-street supermarket. It’s like a curse.

That’s when I notice this guy seated in front of us, this guy with two women, one on each arm, which is no surprise on the balcony but still I get this weird feeling – by this time I’m paranoid about missing out and thinking about my brother and all those kinds of things that get between you – but it’s like we were twinned stars.

I look down at his shirt and I see that he is wearing a chain with an Eye of Horus on it. We lived in Cairo for a bit, after mum and dad split up, after we had to flee for our lives in other words. I look round at the women and they both have Egyptian eyeliner on and suddenly I get this spark, not a lightning bolt but more like a small stroke where my brain ups and dies rather than face up to the truth. One of the women is my daughter.

I hadn’t seen her in sixteen years, and when I say that I recognised her what I mean is that I felt the gravity of my own blood, rising, from out of nowhere, which is a once in a lifetime experience, believe me.

She’s the image of her mother, when she was young and beautiful. I make my excuses and I get up and stand next to her table. She ignores me. I look around. She looks back at me. How you doing? I say to her. She looks back at me again. She doesn’t recognise me at all. How would she? You look fantastic, I tell her. It’s easy for me, I’m her father, and she’s taken aback, instantly disarmed, she looks up at me and she blushes, a little, and she says yeah, just like that. Unbelievable. Yeah. Yeah what? I’m trying to work out what the hell is this guy’s story. But despite my bold gamble, I lose. She turns away and he puts his arm around her, a thin arm that moves like a snake around her neck and slides under her bra strap, the bastard. Then the three of them get up in unison, at least that’s how it seemed, like it was designed to send me crazy, and they made their way downstairs where I watched as they weaved past the reserved tables and out through an exit door at the side of the ring.

Afterwards my brother and I shared my girl in one of the back rooms (girls love getting done by twins) and as I was leaving (my brother said he wanted to finish her off on his own) I went downstairs and crossed the hallway, now entirely emptied of people, although in the hollow corridors and backrooms I could still hear muffled sounds of pleasure and distant partying, so that for a second I felt myself paralysed, as if the cube of the room was a diving bell or a bathysphere plunging through space, and I looked for the door that my daughter had stepped through and was unable to find it, which I put down to the drink or the sex or the jazz cigarettes or the interaction of all three, and as I made my way to the front door it was already light outside, blessed light, I said to myself. I remember the phrase because it wasn’t like me at all. I wasn’t prone to epiphanies.

My job was based around accounts, solutions and logistics. They call it a career, which is ridiculous, as it was so precarious, so vaguely defined, and so mind-numbingly pointless as to be uninhabitable by an actual human being for any extended period of time. If that sounds like a description of Antarctica then it’s no surprise. What’s that poem about the frozen wastes of the north? The one about the passage through the ice where down below a great octopus eye looks back up at you and it’s impossible to know whether it’s frozen stiff or all-seeing? Some Norse saga? We spent some time in Norway too, back when we were on the run. Our mum got involved with a jazz musician who rescued us. That’s where they tend to live, jazz musicians, either that or Holland. That’s what my job felt like, like the time we fled to Norway, endless days with no perceptible horizon, no possibility of upwards or forwards motion, and me like a damn Viking in a horned helmet, only nowadays it was a tailored two-. . .