I love this book. I have found myself urging people to read it, but struggling to find the words to describe it, words which capture it or even hint at its complexity, instead saying things like: you just have to read it for yourself, or it’s just so good, you know? I read it slowly in the evenings over a few weeks, wholly absorbed in its world. The premise is simple. A man returns to his home on All Souls Day. The reader knows from the blurb that Marcus Conroy is dead. Marcus does not know that he has passed on, that it’s over. He is a young enough man, barely 50. He sits at his kitchen table waiting for his family to come home. The Angelus bells mark the passing of the day. While he waits, he thinks.
Marcus is a family man. He wonders, as he sits at his table, where his family is that day. He thinks with great tenderness about his wife. He remembers the day Mairead discovered she was pregnant. He thinks about his children, now in their twenties. He considers the house that he and Mairead bought and made into a home. He thinks about his parents, about their deaths, the regret he feels over his father’s last days in particular. He thinks about the society he finds himself in, that of rural Ireland. Marcus is a civil engineer. He is charged with building and protecting the infrastructure that keeps society together: the roads, bridges, civic buildings. This infrastructure is the framework through which he perceives the world.
McCormack deploys the language of engineering to capture nuanced moments of the heart and the mind. This is the work of a prose master with a faculty for depicting the numinous in the everyday. The village of Louisburgh comes to a brief stop to observe the passage of a dismantled wind turbine being “hauled through the main street on its bier without fanfare or procession, the whole thing so lonely and monumental it might well have been God himself or some essential aspect of him being hauled through our little village on the edge of the word, death or some massive redundancy finally caught up with him so that now he was being carted off to some final interment or breakers yard beyond our jurisdiction.”
Marcus is no saint. He details early on his infidelity to Mairead. A different writer might have placed this information towards the end of the novel in the service of the all-important “sympathetic character” but McCormack is not interested in hiding from the ugly stuff. It’s all there, the flesh and bones of a man’s life. Marcus regards himself as quite ordinary. Maybe this is why the novel is so compelling. It feels entirely real. Marcus feels entirely real. He is a decent man, a kind one, a man of duty, an Everyman. He is not yet finished, not by a long shot. He is not ready to die. That is his tragedy. That is his sentence, a death sentence. He responds with a sentence of his own, a single and singular sentence which declares what a man is, what a life is. Much has been said about the form of this novel, that of the single sentence punctuated by those lovely, rhythmical, thoughtful, paragraph breaks, but it is the emotional content of Solar Bones that makes it soar. So much of Irish fiction written in the rural tradition depicts men who cannot love fully, who are emotionally stunted, trapped, frightened of women. Marcus’s love for Mairead registers on a broad spectrum: he loves her physically, emotionally, intellectually, philosophically. He is in love both with her and with the idea of her, this woman who creates a garden, who engages with her adult children, who has embarked on a partnership with him in life.
McCormack is brilliant and worryingly plausible on parish-pump politics. As he waits to see Mairead and the kids again, Marcus remembers the time he refused to sign off on the foundations that had been poured for a new school. The concrete came from three different local suppliers to keep all three of them sweet. This means that the three poured slabs will swell and contract at different rates during the winter and summer. Any school built on such a foundation will soon begin to shift and crack, and therefore Marcus refuses to sign off on the foundations. The pressure put on him by the local TD to provide an engineer’s cert is a source of immense stress. He feels a pain in his chest which he mistakes for heartburn. He swallows a few pills. As he waits at his table, he notices a photo of the TD in the local newspaper cutting the ribbon on the new school … He remembers how Mairead suffered at the hands of such cut corners, such low standards in public life. She was a victim of the cryptosporidiosis outbreak. Marcus catalogues all aspects of her illness – the indignity of it, the helplessness, the stench, Mairead’s anguish, his. This is what happens when shysterism prevails. Citizens suffer.
These are dark times. These are dark times for women in particular who hear the words of Donald Trump and wonder about the locker rooms in men’s minds from which they have been barred. McCormack leads us into Marcus’s locker room. It is flawed, yes, but it is also familiar, reassuring, endearing, illuminating. Trump and the shyster politicians walk amongst us, but so does Marcus and spirits like him. The Irish Times ran a series recently on how to be a man. Read this novel.
Throughout October, The Irish Times will publish essays by Mike McCormack, his publishers at Tramp Press, and fellow writers Sara Baume, Colin Barrett and Mia Gallagher. The series will culminate with a live interview with Martin Doyle, assistant literary editor of The Irish Times, in the Irish Writers Centre, Parnell Square, Dublin, on Thuraday, October 20th, at 7.30pm, which will be published as a podcast on October 31st. Solar Bones is published by Tramp Press, and is available online and in all good bookshops for €15
