The Towers The Fields The Transmitters

by David Keenan

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.

Genres: Fiction

50 pages

Published October 29, 2020

About the author

David Keenan is an author and critic based in Glasgow, Scotland. He has been a regular contributor to The Wire magazine for the past twenty years. His debut novel, This Is Memorial Device, was published by Faber in 2017.

Reviews

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m alone in a foreign city, mostly, and it occurs to me that there are possibilities of speech that have yet to be explored and that one day I may be graced with the ability to talk about these things. But for now it feels closer to the memory of a half-forgotten melody, a suggestion of harmony buried deep beneath the waves of time and activity and everything that has happened to me before and since. I could hum it for you. And perhaps you could write it down. I’d call it ‘Walking to Damascus’ or something like that. But really, I suspect it would mean nothing to you.

The Towers The Fields The Transmitters is a companion novella to David Keenan's Xstabeth (my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).

Both are published by White Rabbit Books, "dedicated to publishing the most innovative books and voices in music and literature", most notably recently Mark Lanegan's Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir which was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, a prize for which David Keenan's first and second novels won and were shortlisted and won respectively. The publisher Lee Brackstone explains the background to publishing Keenan's two new books (https://www.thesocial.com/gnostic-gol...

Today, a few days into official British Summertime we announced the third novel by David Keenan as a new season in his publishing life commences at White Rabbit Books. It will be the first novel published at the imprint, which is dedicated to literature related to music, because Xstabeth is full to the brim with music. It is, among other things, a novel about singersongwriters, St Petersberg, St Andrews, golf, and music as a visionary and transformative experience.

Xstabeth arrived with me accidentally. Last year I had arranged for David to be the inaugural Writer in Residence at Andrew Weatherall’s Convenanza Festival in Carcassonne. Andrew and I had talked about the idea of starting a private press publishing one short book a year (fiction or non-fiction) to coincide with the festival in September. The imprint would be called Convenanza Press. Safe in the knowledge there are many files of books in various finished and incomplete forms on David’s hard drive (at least six that I know of) we discussed what might be a suitable title for such a venture. A week or so after the festival he sent me Xstabeth which was then called This is Where the Heart Ends claiming he couldn’t remember having written it. I believed him. We talked some more and reached the conclusion it had been written over a period of weeks towards the end of 2017 after a particularly eventful visit to Holland together. A moment, we both reflected, when we had both been quite unhinged.

Earlier this year, I think around the time of Weatherall’s funeral, David informed me of the existence of a 22,000-word prequel to Xstabeth called The Towers The Fields The Transmitters. Excited and intimidated by the sheer volume of WORDS ready to pour forth into the world from this writer we decided to gift this book to readers in ebook form when you pre-order the new novel. The Towers The Fields The Transmitters will then disappear. Did it technically ever exist? Or did we collectively dream it into life?

The Towers The Fields The Transmitters was certainly an intriguing taster for Xstabeth and an interesting if perplexing story in its own right.

It isn't really a book susceptible to a plot summary, but it opens:

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.

Our narrator twin ends up in St Andrews where he has an ill-defined job auditing an airfield (above which WW2 planes seem to mysteriously appear). Both in Glasgow and later in St Andrews he is convinced young woman he sees are his daughter, who he has not seen many years, but also finds himself attracted to them. And he finds himself accused of nocturnal misdeeds for which he claims to not be responsible, perhaps carried out by a doppelganger - a companion remarks that he is living the story of Poe's William Wilson.

And he learns of various odd characters including a local writer called "David W. Keenan" (I understand Xstabeth may be presented as written by this man) who committed suicide by throwing himself from St Rule's Tower in the grounds of St Andrew's Cathedral, and also a legendary and mysterious performance artist called Abramelicz, or The Commander, who performed his work from inside WW2 concentration camps:

She listed the most famous of The Commandant’s works, he created these masterpieces, she said, at which point she took another beer and drank it down like it was a hot afternoon, even though it was a late autumn evening in Dundee, The Towers, she said, The Fields, The Transmitters, The Construct, The Bunker, The Diorama.

I originally read this before the release of Xstabeth. Reading the novel gave a new dimension to this, notably to one key scene, and if anything I found this novella the more compelling work.

3.5 stars

[Paul Dembina · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was more satisfying than its companion piece Xstabeth. Partly due to a slight crossover with Xstabeth and mainly due to an underlying sense of dislocation and dread

[Justin Sarginson · Rating 4 out of 5]

You need to pay attention to this book as it races through, with no respite (let alone chapters) at all.
Frankly bizarre at times, but all the more enjoyable for it. The characterisations are superbly crafted and the story interests you from the onset. Buckle up and enjoy. One of my favourite authors right now.

[Duncan McKay · Rating 4 out of 5]

David Keenan continues to entertain with his machine gun style. Not sure I completely understood everything but i still enjoyed it. St Andrews is beautifully observed.

[Russell Barton · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m not really sure what this novella is about or is trying to be. It’s quite a stream of consciousness type thing and it’s hard to tell when it’s set, how much of it is actually happening vs imagined in some of the protagonists’ heads, or what it’s all supposed to mean.
I also found his regular use of the word ‘handicapped’ offensive, his editor should surely have dealt with that.
I’m about to start reading Xstabeth, which this book is kind of a prequel to, so I may come back and revise this review is the main book makes this one make more sense.

[Gareth Kay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Love the last two books (especially This Is Memorial Device) but the experiment in writing here fell flat with me

[Matt Jamison · Rating 4 out of 5]

It feels like a dream that you keep waking up in the middle of and are able to go back asleep quick enough to hop back into.

[Chris S · Rating 4 out of 5]

Doubling with Xstabeth.

[Harry Allard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't enjoy this quite as much as Xstabeth but it's an interesting companion to it, covering some of the same ideas of synchronicity, excess of meaning, and coming unmoored from your True Will

[Alex Sarll]

After missing its brief surfacing as a pre-order incentive, I assumed I'd be waiting for this one until Keenan was safely canonical and it resurfaced as part of some uniform edition combining reverence with terrible new covers. But no, it's already available for anyone, hanging out the back of Xstabeth, and I use that phrase advisedly because even by Keenan standards a lot of this one is dubious sexual obsession. It's brief - the jacket calls it a novel, but applying that to 80 pages irks me just as much as the modern habit of describing 120 or even 140 pages as a novella - and, especially having read the colossal Monument Maker between the parent* book and this companion piece, it can't help feeling slight. But as with one of the less compelling MCU entries, there are still enough fun scenes and Keenanverse connective tissue to ensure the reading experience isn't altogether unsatisfactory.

*A term so perfectly wrong in this instance that it goes back around and becomes simply perfect.