Fiction
On the outskirts of the village of Louisburgh, on the west coast of Mayo, a man sits at his kitchen table. He contemplates the sandwich made and left by his wife, and considers going out to buy the newspaper. What’s important is that his meditations, both on smaller domestic details and bigger life moments, are occurring on All Souls’ Day, the one day of the year when the dead are allowed to visit earth.
Mike McCormack’s story nudges into being through the sound of religious bells. As the angelus chimes, the language starts to build. Like a newborn child — or a reborn spirit — learning how to speak, the story stumbles its way into full sentences. “The bell/the bell as/hearing the bell as” stutter the first three incoherent, incomplete lines. But our protagonist soon finds his bearings and the language its rhythm. The kitchen forms around Marcus Conway, and the villages around that start to solidify, their shops and pubs and the water treatment plant, until finally Marcus and the reader know where they are: slap bang in the middle of an ordinary, middle-aged life.
Marcus is an engineer working for the council. He is husband to Mairead, a woman everyone seems to agree is his better half, and father to two grown children. Darragh lives on the other side of the world and Marcus communicates with him through Skype; the father watches his heavily bearded son reaching out to the screen as the connection breaks, as if trying to touch what is a world away.
Marcus’s daughter is an artist. He recalls attending the opening of Agnes’s first significant solo show in Galway. The exhibition, which consisted of Agnes’s own blood and local newspaper clippings, unnerved Marcus greatly. As well as having to contend with the idea of his daughter mutilating herself in the name of art, he felt the exhibition sanctimoniously mocked small-town Ireland.
Marcus may be particularly sensitive to such jibes, given the professional dealings he has with self-seeking county councillors. He has to navigate powerful men who make decisions based not on budget or safety but on what will secure their re-election or lead to triumph at the tidy towns competition.
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Readers who judge a book by its opening paragraph should give Solar Bones a couple more pages. This is not the modernist, Eimear McBride-esque novel that the opening suggests. Solar Bones is more traditional, although this is still an exercise in style.
McCormack has shunned punctuation, letting paragraph breaks fulfil duties usually fulfilled by full stops and quotation marks. Presumably intended to maintain the book’s otherworldly attributes, it doesn’t add a lot in this regard but it rarely confuses either.
The spiritual aspects are strongly established by McCormack’s setting.
Louisburgh is cast as a town as much on the edge of reality as of Ireland, and there are mystical tales, many true, of local hermits and believers.
McCormack’s may not be a household name but he is a highly considered author — a writer’s writer — who has been honing his craft through short stories and two previous novels since the 1990s. Solar Bones is carefully constructed, with a tenacity and attention to detail that establishes a style of its own. We have a haunting sense of Marcus without ever really picturing his face. Spookiest of all is how this story manages to flow, perversely, from one interrupted sentence to the next.