Mike McCormack (1) (1965–)

I’ve been looking forward to this novel since the Booker longlist was announced, although I can’t exactly tell you why. I don’t gravitate to Irish-set fiction, I’d never heard of the author, and the entire text is one long sentence (more on that later). That should be at least two strikes against it. But something in the description grabbed me and wouldn’t let go.

Marcus Conway is a middle-aged engineer who lives in County Mayo, in a small village near the coast. The book opens with show more him listening to the Angelus bells tolling at noon. The reader knows (from the blurb on the back of the Irish version) that Marcus is dead, but Marcus doesn’t seem to. He stands in his kitchen, thinking about his life and his family. The rest of the text is made up of his memories of various events, although they often have an immediacy that makes them feel as if they’re happening in the present. Maybe when you’re no longer alive time doesn’t work the same way.

Anyway, Marcus reflects on his various roles: as a son, a father, a husband, and a civil servant. He’s mostly performed these roles very well, although he’s fallen down hard a few times. His marriage has weathered some storms but he and his wife, Mairead, have a strong, loving, and still passionate relationship. His daughter Agnes is an artist with a promising future ahead of her, and his son Darragh is off spending a year working his way through Australia and other countries far from home. Through Marcus’s recollections we get crisp images of each family member, as well as of some of the politicians and businessmen he clashes with as part of his job. McCormack does a phenomenal job of immersing the reader in Marcus’s life. At one point I was almost afraid to keep reading because I didn’t know if one of his family members would pull through, and I really didn’t want anything bad to happen. This is the power of fiction: in a hundred pages I was fully invested in people that I had no idea I’d even be interested in.

This book struck me as the structural inverse of Reservoir 13: Whereas Reservoir 13 takes a distanced view of a village and slowly draws you into individual lives, community relationships, and the natural world, Solar Bones takes one man’s life experiences and pans out to encompass the surrounding community. Both juxtapose quotidian events with large-scale change (especially environmental hazards and how we are changing our natural and built surroundings). The main characters are imperfect but humane and caring. Ordinary people turn out to be much more than their simple descriptions suggest, and McGregor shows how love of science and appreciation for art, spontaneity and meticulousness, can coexist in the same personality.

Much has been made of the single-sentence structure of this novel, but once you fall into the rhythm you don’t really notice it and it’s not intrusive, although I did have to remind myself to take breaths in the first part of the book! There may not be full stops, but there are paragraphs, and if you look at where the line breaks occur you can see they’ve been carefully thought out.

This is such a beautifully conceived and crafted book. It’s about the world we live in, how we live in it, and what we’re doing to it, as well as about the ways in which apparently mundane relationships and connections are rich with emotion and meaning and intensity. I can see why it has already won awards. show less

"Solar Bones" describes a couple of hours in the life of Marcus Conway, Irish citizen, resident of County Mayo, engineer, public-sector employee, husband, father of two, and completely unique individual, one of the seven million humans who live on this crazy spinning ball of dirt we call the Earth. And you can't say that the author doesn't make these hours count. In two hundred fifty or so pages written in an intensely lyrical stream-of-consciousness style that reminded my admittedly show more untrained ear of nothing so much as T.S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday," we learn about -- among many, many other things -- Marcus's marriage, his sometimes difficult relationships with his children, his daughter's burgeoning art career, the enormous respect he had for his father, the route he takes to commute to work, his grounded and unfussy devotion to Catholicism, a few of his formative childhood memories, and what a typical workday of his might be like. It's a lot to get through, and I can't blame those who, when they read this, suspect that "Solar Bones" might just be another unfortunate literary exercise of the Joycean kind -- another manic Hibernian episode of verbose self-expression. But Solar Bones sets itself apart by its rigor: Marcus isn't just some of neighborhood character, he's also an engineer. Tension, collapse, and potential disaster are constantly on his mind, and it's no accident that "Solar Bones" is set in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of Ireland's too-good-to-be-true "Celtic Tiger" economic miracle. Marcus is, he tells us, a man who reads the newspaper and listens to radio news bulletins. Marcus may speak often of the affection that he feels for County Mayo, a place where he can trace his ancestry back centuries, but there's more than just sentiment at work here. Still, McCormick ably shows how his character's life is also linked to his town -- and to the wider world -- by extremely concrete economic and social realities. While reading this one, I wondered if the author knew what his audience might have been expecting from an "Irish novel" and deliberately tried to write against type, at least a little. There's more than just discursive, well-written modernist prose and fond, glowy memories of long-ago marital lovemaking going on in "Solar Bones."

Some readers may complain that the prose in this novel seems to have been rendered so exquisitely that the life has been sucked out of it. Others might complain that not much happens in this book. These points are valid enough, but the quality of the writing -- which is conventionally pleasing and designed to throw the reader off-kilter at the same time -- and its careful construction might also be equally difficult to deny. "Solar Bones" succeeds on another fundamentally important level, too: Marcus and his family -- his wife Mairead, his daughter Agnes, and his son Darragh -- all feel like real people rather than literary constructs. I wouldn't call "Solar Bones" conventionally written or plotted, but it's obvious that this doesn't mean that McCormick has forgotten the human element. In other words, his characters come through. I saw a bit of Ian McEwan's preoccupation with systems and technology here, but none of that author's apparent contempt for basic, familiar human stories.

The real question, then, for readers wondering if they should pick this one up is whether they think that -- admirable or not -- McCormack's stylistic trickery and dense, finely worked writing style might make this one not worth the trip. I sympathize: I liked "Solar Bones", in the end, but I can't say that it didn't sometimes test my patience, and I can't really say that I out-and-out enjoyed it. It isn't the sort of thing you can read on a beach or a bus. You might have to make an investment to finish this one. This one is probably going to end up in a second-hand bookshop, but how much does that really mean? I've seen great movies that I know that I'll never watch again. With all the respect I can muster, I can say this: it's clear that McCormick's a genuine talent, and "Solar Bones" checks all of the boxes for what a quality novel should be and do. And that, dear reader, is why it gets four stars from me. show less

There is plenty not to like about SOLAR BONES. It is disorienting, especially the beginning when the narrator, Marcus Conway, sits at his kitchen table reminiscing about his life following his death; the inexplicable idea that the dead can become flesh for one hour every year; the unconventional narrative style that abandons a coherent plot for free-association; and the fact that the novel is just one continuous sentence—that’s right, no periods. With that said, McCormack gives us quite show more a remarkable reading experience.

Conway is an everyman who remembers a pretty mundane life with many regrets but no ability to change anything—remember he’s dead. He mulls over what he has experienced in his profession as a middle-aged civil engineer living in rural County Mayo: the tension between the precision and definability of engineering versus what he perceives as an essentially chaotic world. “What really tormented me was that all this filth and disorder offended my engineer’s sense of structure, everything out of place and alignment.” A childhood memory of a broken down tractor revives his sense that the natural world just teeters on the verge of chaos, “the whole construct humming closer to collapse than I had ever suspected.” Similarly, Marcus recalls visiting a torture museum in Prague where elegant machines were designed just to inflict horrible pain. “The highest technical expressions of their age, the end to which skilled minds had deployed their noble gifts.”

As a man who spent much of his life as a civil engineer concerned “with scale and accuracy, mapping and surveying so that the grid of reason and progress could be laid across the earth, gathering its wildness into towns and villages by way of bridges and roads and water schemes and power lines,” Marcus can’t reconcile a world in disarray and seemingly spinning out of sync. Chaos scientists invoke a concept they call the “butterfly effect” to explain why chaotic systems like the weather can't be predicted more than a few days in advance. It postulates the poetic notion that the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil may be capable of setting off a cascade of atmospheric events that could result the formation of a tornado in Texas. Although he never cites the “butterfly effect”, Marcus acutely senses that it was in force during his life.

Family life provided solace to Marcus, although this also had its chaotic moments. He seems to have a settled and fulfilling relationship with Mairead, his schoolteacher wife. Darragh is his wisecracking son, who communicates via Skype as he backpacks in Australia. Agnes, his daughter, is an edgy artist whose debut installation features her own blood. Marcus’ realization that Agnes used her own blood in her debut show brings on a panic attack. Marcus recalls a painful time when Mairead left him but later returned. Chaos intervenes once again when Mairead becomes severely ill from a contaminated water supply. Municipal political corruption, brought on by the Irish building boom, also tests Conway’s ethics.

This remarkable book is timely because it gives the reader a strong sense of how misguided is our sense of control in a very fragile world. Certainly the most compelling argument is our increasing realization that humans may have irreversibly destroyed the planet, resulting in the loss of species and habitable places. In the face of all of this, we can only gaze in wonder and feel as helpless as Marcus Conway does on All Soul’s Eve in County Mayo, Ireland. show less

Marcus Conway is a ghost. On All Souls Day, he sits at the dinner table waiting for his family to return, and unspools a stream-of-concious monologue about this life written in a single sentence (this is the second single-sentence novel I've read recently!). The single sentence isn't as apparent in the audiobook - deftly narrated by Timothy Reynolds - but I do notice that he starts phrase with "and" a lot, adding a certain rhythmn to the prose. Marcus talks about his own father's death, his show more sometimes troubled relationship with his wife and children, and his work as a civic engineer. Local politics also plays a big part of his story, from voting to a politicians thickheaded insistence on building a school that's not structurally sound, to even the awful stomach virus that infects his community - including his wife - caused by bad sanitation. Over time, Marcus unravels the details of his own death and comes to terms with his mortality. The thing about this novel is that for all the experimental nature of its narrative, Marcus is a perfectly ordinary person doing ordinary things. McCormack's writing unveils the fascinating stories within the everyday person. show less