For me, Belfast has long been a place of myth, apocrypha, danger and glamour. My first encounter with the city was via the birthday and Christmas cards my father’s family would send to me in Glasgow from north Belfast in the 1970s. Few of my dad’s family were educated, and they would write like they were guessing how language worked. It was an early inspiration as a writer, the idea that you could transcend the most difficult of environments by laying claim to your own words.
Various books contributed to my experience of Belfast; Show Me the Man, the biography of ex-Provisional IRA member turned Sinn Féin politician Martin Meehan, who had grown up in the same street in the Ardoyne as my dad’s family; Nor Meekly Serve My Time, an incredible oral history of the H-block struggle; Borstal Boy and Confessions of an Irish Rebel by Brendan Behan, who, like my grandfather, was a volunteer in the IRA. Although Behan was from Dublin, his books helped situate the experiences of my own family in some kind of literary tradition, and I’m still in love with his ability to channel his exuberant energy into prose that feels completely alive.
I always loved the Belfast murals, on both sides. Bill Rolston’s series on them, Drawing Support, are essential documents of modern folk art. Architectural and photographic books about the city became a major obsession, too; works by Paul Larmour and Jonathan Bardon. With the city being perpetually razed and renewed it felt like the ultimate palimpsest; every building populated by ghosts.
What attracts me to writing about certain places is the feeling of reality being up for grabs. In the 1990s my mum spotted a life-size model of Doctor Who’s dog K9 in a comic shop in Belfast. She inquired about buying it, but the owner apologised and said he had to close up for the night because the IRA had kidnapped his wife and he had to go and pay their ransom. My mum just shrugged and asked if he would be open in the morning and he said, sure, he would. It was only once we were on the ferry with K-9 in the back of the car that we looked at each other like, “What just happened?” In Belfast it had seemed normal. But as soon as you are out of its reach it’s like a different planet, where different rules apply.
In the last birthday card my father sent me before he died, he wrote “always, remember, you, are, an, very, special, person”. It’s so important to read, my father would tell me, my father who couldn’t even read himself. How would he know? I thought about this a lot after his death and I knew that if he could have read, most books would have disappointed him. That’s when I made the vow to write the kind of novels that would live up to an illiterate person’s fantasy. That’s how Belfast made me, and how in For the Good Times, I remade Belfast in return.
• For the Good Times by David Keenan is published by Faber. To order a copy for £8.99 (RRP £12.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
