"an extraordinary hymn to small-town Ireland "
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017
WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2016
BGE IRISH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2016
Marcus Conway has come a long way to stand in the kitchen of his home and remember the rhythms and routines of his life. Considering with his engineer's mind how things are constructed - bridges, banking systems, marriages - and how they may come apart. Mike McCormack captures with tenderness and feeling, in continuous, flowing prose a whole life, suspended in a single hour.
Excellence is always rare and often unexpected: we
don’t necessarily expect masterpieces even from the great. Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones
is exceptional indeed: an extraordinary novel by a writer not yet famous but
surely destined to be acclaimed by anyone who believes that the novel
is not dead and that novelists are not merely lit-fest fodder for the
metropolitan middle classes.
McCormack is not entirely unknown. In 1996, he won
the Rooney prize for Irish literature with his first collection of short
stories, Getting It in the Head. The prize is a sure predictor of future
greatness, responsible for bringing to wider public attention the work of Anne
Enright, Claire Kilroy, Claire Keegan and the two mighty Kevins, Barry and
Power. McCormack’s second collection, Forensic Songs,
was published in 2012, and he is also the author of two novels, Crowe’s Requiem
(1998) and Notes from a Coma (2005). But it would be safe to say
that outside his native Ireland his work is less well known than that
of many of his contemporaries. Solar Bones is published by Tramp,
one of Ireland’s small independent publishing houses, which, like its UK
counterparts, is enjoying an unprecedented period of growth and success. The
book deserves attention and applause.
It stutters into life, like a desperate incantation
or a prose poem, minus full-stops but chock-full of portent: “the bell / the
bell as / hearing the bell as / hearing the bell as standing here / the bell
being heard standing here / hearing it ring out through the grey light of this
/ morning, noon or night”. It is 2 November 2008, we are given to understand,
All Souls’ Day, the Day of the Dead, the Commemoration of All the Faithful
Departed. The bell is the Angelus bell and we are in rural Ireland – in
Louisburgh, near Westport, County Mayo, “a county with a unique history of people
starving and mortifying themselves for higher causes and principles [...]
blistered with shrines and grottoes and prayer-houses and hermitages [...] a
bordered realm of penance and atonement”.
The speaker hearing the bell is one Marcus Conway,
husband, father and a civil engineer in some small way responsible for the
wild rush of buildings, roads and bridges that disrupted life in Ireland
during the boom that in the book has just gone bust. Marcus is a man gripped by
“a crying sense of loneliness for my family”. We don’t quite know why until the
very end of the novel, which comes both as a surprise and a confirmation
of all that’s gone before.
Among its many structural and technical virtues,
everything in the book is recalled, but none of it is monotonous. Marcus
remembers the life of his father and his mother, for example, a world of currachs
and Massey Fergusons. He recalls a fateful trip to Prague for a conference. He
recalls Skyping his son in Australia, scenes of intimacy with his wife, and
a trip to his artist daughter’s first solo exhibition, which consists of
the text of court reports from local newspapers written in her own blood, “the
full gamut from theft and domestic violence to child abuse, public order
offences, illegal grazing on protected lands, petty theft, false number plates,
public affray, burglary, assault and drunk-driving offences”. Above all,
he remembers at work being constantly under pressure from politicians and
developers, “every cunt wanting something”, the usual “shite swilling through
my head, as if there weren’t enough there already”. He recalls when his wife
got sick from cryptosporidiosis, “a virus derived from human waste which
lodged in the digestive tract, so that [...] it was now the case that the
citizens were consuming their own shit, the source of their own illness”.
The book is a hymn to modern small-town life, then,
with its “rites, rhythms and rituals / upholding the world like solar bones”,
as well as an indictment of human greed and stupidity, and how places and
cultures respond to the circumstances beyond their control and yet of their own
making.
Asked in a rare interview some years ago if there
is such a thing as “Irish” writing, McCormack suggested that indeed there is
and that it consists of “a three-part harmony of experiment, comedy and
metaphysics”. The magnificent song that is Solar Bones possesses such
peculiar depth, such consonances and dissonances that it is a reminder that a
writer of talent can seemingly take any place, any set of characters, any
situation and create from them a total vision of the reality. This is a book about
Mayo, Ireland, Europe, the world, the solar system, the universe.
Further thoughts: I have pasted an image of two pages from the book. At first sight the lack of punctuation, other than commas presents a density and continuity which leads one to expect a stream of consciousness which might leave the reader breathless. But no so.The book was brought to life for me by a reading by Tim Gerard Reynolds, a trained actor and audiobook narrator, who brings a wonderfully authentic voice to this Irish narrative, modulated and paced. A pleasure to listen to.
Ian Sansom (born 3 December 1966 in Essex, England) is the author of the Mobile Library Mystery Series. As of 2016, he has written four books in a series that will comprise a projected forty-four novels.[1][2][3]
He studied at both Oxford and Cambridge, where he was a fellow of Emmanuel College. He is a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick and teaches in its Writing Program.[5]
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