Then we encounter Rehberg, “a theologian and a soldier of fortune” in Africa, where he meets with Pierre Melville. In completely different ways, Basinski and Keenan commemorate lost souls by creating permanence in music and literature, one of the highest achievements of art. We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.

A strange, intoxicating journey that within its many narratives centres around the idea that art is magic and magic is art. There is a lot of sex, from the polymorphously perverse to the simperingly coy, but all this action has no impact on the action of the novel: these scenes are inconsequential. 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. This is funny – look at the definition of King Herod, “wanted Jesus dead”, or “CIA – never the CIA”.A statue is as much a monument to past beliefs of who deserves to be idolized as it is the subject of the statue itself. I say this with surprise because Fields appears to have a natural talent for allowing the text and his art to work and flow together (part of this should be credited to the book’s art designer as well, for that matter).

Any changes made can be done at any time and will become effective at the end of the trial period, allowing you to retain full access for 4 weeks, even if you downgrade or cancel. It presents a highly accessible challenge for the reader in rewarding rerereading of separate sections and individual books. A hallucinatory epic and a forward-looking history of the world, Monument Maker was written over the course of ten years and represents the apex of Keenan’s project to create books that are themselves teeming with organic life.I Saw my mum the other and she remarked that I was exactly the same person I was when I was a teenager. Even in the midst of confusion I was still engrossed by the style and writing and never regretted picking it up. At once sacred and profane, high-minded and foul-mouthed, seemingly etched in stone and writhingly alive, David Keenan's 808-page Monument Maker is the kind of novel that somehow affirms your faith in fiction while putting you off from reading it entirely. 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.