THE OCCULT AUTOFICTION OF KIERAN LEONARD’S 'A MUSE'

According to my iMessage history, the only text I sent during the first and only time I saw rockstar-cum-author Kieran “Saint” Leonard in action is as follows: “This man has just said he doesn’t believe in similes.” This is unusual for me, a known opprobriate of the you-really-shouldn’t-bitchtext-during-live-readings decalogue, which I think speaks massively to just how captivating Leonard’s writing is.

I have been shouting the praise of Hyperidean Press since last October, when their inaugural press night at L’Escargot saved me from the lull of an otherwise very dull Frieze week (the evening ended with cigarettes on the stairwell of Soho House with an exceedingly charming Teuton who knew nothing about contemporary art whatsoever, which is always a win in this art journalist's book). This was right around the waxing cusp of the great revival of the London literary scene, and the house’s writers are still just as ahead of the curve as its parties: Udith Dematagoda’s 2010s Agonist prognosticated the rise of the now-current ‘death of the male postinternet author’ discourse, Adam Lehrer’s 2021 Communions those surrounding that fearsome tripartite of fame, desire and addiction, and — finally and most fiercely — Kieran Leonard’s A Muse touches on what I have been affectionately referring to in contemporary art as the Ozymandias effect: the hyperaware re-examination of what nostalgia, history and magic means in a world that fails to reject the lingering influence of all three.

The primary themes of A Muse are dislocation, enchantment, and the erotics of spiritual melancholy. We follow the story of a man fleeing the calcified world of London’s creative scene to a deconsecrated church on the Yorkshire moors, only to be swept into a mythopoetic spiral of hauntings and heartbreak as he departs on tour with sets off to travel with the enigmatic magus Tiberius Red and his hypnotic consort, only to be drawn into an esoteric, identity-dissolving tour across continents. It's a memoir, sort of? A novel, maybe? An alchemical record of a musician’s life as a religious rite, certainly.

Ostensibly autobiographical, the narrative sees Leonard and his fiancée leave London for a church-turned-home in the Yorkshire Moors, hoping for renewal but instead descending into grief, madness, and occult visions after the sudden death of their cat Harold. As his fiancée grows distant, Leonard begins to unravel psychologically, haunted by the church and increasingly untethered from reality. He is eventually invited by the charismatic magus Tiberius Red to join a surreal European tour, entangled with the Merlin-figure’s lover Pinky Capote (more on her later) and, drawn into their esoteric world, Leonard is seduced, manipulated, and spiritually destabilised, culminating in various rituals, rites and sacrificial demands. The novel ends when Leonard returns to London, where he begins to write the tale down, only to find that something has followed him home.

A better investigative journalist than I could probably root out who the characters are actually based on, but one of the great joys of this novel is that it doesn’t really matter what’s true and what isn’t. A great frustration with much magical realism these days is the rigid refusal to luxuriate in the ambiguous and the baroque: this is a work that resists interpretation even as it demands it. In contrast to the trauma-cartography that flattens so much contemporary fabulism, A Muse revels in its own density.

As noted, knows how much of the story is rooted in reality (I know I always have immense fun lying about my ex-lovers) but this autofictive uncertainty manages to uphold rather than outwear the charm and depth of the writing. The proto-protagonist is neither likeable nor unlikeable, he is simply in love, which means worlds more. He is also hyper-aware of his own pasticcio: part Tennessee Williams, part Crowley, all loverboy. In the waning wake of infectiously infantilising media-baby horrors like Married at First Sight or Love on the Spectrum, there is something deeply and refreshingly honest about a work of literature that is unashamedly bare in its depiction of the beauty and ugliness of male adoration and desire for domesticity, as well as the incompressible tension between both states. We flicker from the “cold crucible” of an annexed Yorkshire church to the nocturnal German countryside to the “glamorous den of iniquities” of Big Sur, from drug-fueled rug-laid fantasies of “subtly shaded silks and opulent ermines, spiced wine, tobacco and hashish thighing on the air, Araby-oiled sweetscented skin, delicately-bejewelled henna-inked feet dancing and twisting in the red and black earth” to the “discrete mid-century furniture, exposed concrete, rugs, and Californian ephemera” of Los Angeles. In each of these aesthetics lies a different mask of longing reflecting separate versions of the protagonist as he learns to accept his own role.

This brings me to my next point: the vocab is fucking fantastic, and after the hallucinatory, gothic-baroque imagery is the beating heart of the novel. It treads that very careful line of divinely incomprehensible (cut to me mutter-praying in the backseat of a Great Red Shark to the 5G gods of the Mojave so I can google what the hell ‘callipygian’ means) and the Pratchett-esque funny (who else is going to describe Randolph Hearst as a ‘total freak’?). There is a very postmodern pastiche to the lexis that complements, Foster Wallace-style, the overall dramatic aesthetic arc of the story: the reader is guided through a maximalist tapestry of mythic registers that ends exactly within the same and opposite dream-logic and disintegration as how it starts. Very Pirsig, in the best way.

The indirect Romantic totalitarianism of West America(na) is also a huge and deeply enjoyable aspect of the novel. I was lucky enough to receive an advance reader copy right before I set off on my own formidable fortnight across the bottom half of the States (“Keep close.” warns the editor email, two words that would haunt me when I inevitably forget the unlocked iPad with the PDF by a motel pool in Sedona.) By the time I’d settled into the first chapter we had reached the Mojave and I found myself in total memetic absorption of the subtly-named character of Pinky Capote, a vile and adorable Sheba-myth stand-in who is also the ontological herz/hero of the work. She is in and of herself the premonitory Hanged Man of the novel (a card pulled by Leonard before one of his performances), the nucleus of the work’s spiritual ethos; the speculation – and proof – that transformation comes through surrender rather than conquest. She is introduced in “carmine red halter dress contrasting sharply the reptilian green of her eyes, an unignorably sensual threat reared its arrestingly beautiful head, veiled in the auric shroud of the room’s golden gloom.” Just like the hot womb of the Mojave, frfr. She ends up being an exceptionally strong female character, somewhere between the Circe-figure of Fear and Loathing’s Lucy and Le Fanu’s impregnable Carmilla, and is given ample space as both element declencheur and ultimate obliterator of the Freudian psychocontract. The sex-adjacent scenes are also especially good, and I say this as a veteran of the AO3 fanfiction days.

I return here to Silverblatt’s theory that every good novel is, on some level, a Sierpiński fractal: the overarching messages and motifs of a work should be represented in each chapter, and in each chapter there should be a shadow-witness of each paragraph, and in each paragraph’s  sentence, word, punctuation mark, etc. there should remain a silhouette of the complete work. Triangles all the way down. A Muse is deeply, cosmologically charged in this sense. I’m too much of a kabbalist to have ever taken any real interest in tarot, but Leonard understands the universal appeal of the Major arcana’s archetypes well enough to translate them with impressive smoothness into broader literary tropes and tendencies: the theurgy, as Leonard calls it, consistently and formally introduces and reaffirms themes of intrusion and fate (the Queen of Cups and the Wheel of Fortune) through the work. The tarot readings come to represent the changement of an initially private, contemplative ritual (“We dusted off [a consecrated altar] and sacrilegiously hacked its legs off to make it a more comfortable height for a dining table (...) One night I would even read my friend’s tarot cards from this altar.”) to the psychosexual entanglement with Tiberius and Pinky’s manipulative power-play (“I want a tarot reading right now./I can’t Tiberius, I don’t have my cards with me.”) Leonard realises only about halfway through the novel that “I hadn’t been playing at magic, magic had been playing at me,” which is somehow both deeply devastating and exhilarating, because it recasts the entire narrative from a story of artistic self-discovery but as one of subtle (re)possession.

If there is a frustration to be had about the work, it’s in how much it leaves you wanting. This is not to suggest some duplicity on behalf of the author, but rather an accusation of clarity: the reader is left totally and assuredly unsure what is real, what is dreamed, and what is summoned. This is a work so convinced of its own astonishing aesthetic that you really can’t help but fall head-over-heels into its atmosphere. If A Muse offers any resolution, it’s that resolution is beside the point: it’s a complete reversal of the romantic, psychic, sonic memoir genre, and one very much welcomed in the discourse-trail of male autofiction and its various failures. Triangles all the way down, yes–but not your triangles.