Sarah and I have been admirers of Mike McCormack’s work for a while. (His back catalogue is a marvel, and I urge you to check it out). When we started Tramp Press, we talked about discovering authors of his talent and tenacity. The more we can publish brave, innovative writing that defies expectation, genre or what we’re told the market wants, the more authors would take risks in their own work too, knowing that there’s a home for it. We’ve been building a list of brilliant books by daring writers, and with each one, someone has told us in good faith that they admire it, “but it’ll never sell”. It was hard, for example, to persuade people to trust us that a book about a man and a dog by an unknown writer from Cork was going to be a big deal, but readers repaid our faith in Sara Baume’s Spill Simmer Falter Wither.
Meanwhile, we continued to check in with Mike’s agent every couple of months to see if he had anything in the works. When we heard he had a strange new manuscript on the go, we emailed more.
We got a hold of the manuscript and read it overnight. The way Sarah and I work, from our respective home offices, is an intricate on-going conversation in the form of several email threads organised by day, theme, book, ideas and whatever pops up. These conversations criss-cross and loop back on each other. I reckon this Borg-like gabfest made us uniquely qualified to apprehend the voice of Solar Bones straight away. The “Mike” email thread started at dawn, and we were in agreement immediately.
We weren’t the only publisher interested, but I’m confident Sarah and I were the most interested. We hopped on a train to Galway to talk to Mike about why we loved the book and why he should trust us with it. I wasn’t above pointing out that I’m from Mayo too, and inclined to recognise the intersection of superstition and pointless optimism in lines like “you have to have faith, Dad, that’s what we Mayo people do, we journey in hope”. Surely he didn’t want to trust these words to anyone who may scribble in the margin “What’s a mearing?”; “Will readers know what a bothán is for?”; ‘Is “butty” a misspelling of “buddy”?
Sarah, who takes the lead on our marketing campaigns, solemnly told Mike we’d “sell the shit out of this”, and that it was such a great book, if it didn’t do really well “it’d be all our fault”. Happily, this pitch worked out for us.
Editing a book is a kind of conversation. From the day you sit down with the author to talk about it, you have to be sure of a meeting of the minds before you set to making changes. I love working with literary fiction, because you get to throw grammar rules out to suit the voice or the intention of the author. The first thing you do is learn the language of the book, because that’s the grammar you’ll be working with for the coming months.
With Solar Bones, the trick was to figure out Marcus: his voice, his use or misuse of language and slang, his deliberate repetition of phrases that served to drive the narrative, and to make sure his voice held throughout. The book lives or die by the voice, and it’s a testament to Mike’s skill that so many people have asked how autobiographical the book is (it’s not), or who got in touch to say that the incorporeal Marcus is as real to them as their own fathers.
My father was dragged into it a few times too. When I’d query the odd word or phrase, Mike would often reply “ask your father”, knowing my dad would vouch for it, which he always did, in between answering other texts in another long conversation thread. Mike weaves ontology and philosophy into domesticity with great elegance; the nods to Hamlet in the language around the scenes with Marcus’s son are witty and played down so you’d barely spot them, but I think his most impressive achievement is rendering the accent of a Mayo man without the text reading as folksy or twee. It’s really hard to do this well, and it’s a small act of defiance to skirt the non-regional dialect that’d make easy reading for general readers. So, lofty theme: check; idiomatic language: check; one long sentence full of dreaded comma splices: check. If this doesn’t do well, it’s all our fault.
I’d love to talk about how we bravely took a big risk on this book but it never felt like a risk. The only thing Sarah and I worried about was signing Mike fast enough and getting started on it. We did talk about the challenge of marketing Solar Bones, but every single book is a challenge and a hard sell. (Happily, Solar Bones is doing great; the recent Goldsmiths shortlisting cleared out our second print run, so another batch is being rushed to the warehouse.)
As with all our books, the critical reception has been very gratifying (oh, I am insufferable about it), but word of mouth from readers is what reinforces our convictions. The success of Solar Bones to many, I think, is that the main character isn’t trying to be an Everyman, but he’s a perfect Someone. Mike isn’t trying to offer a character in a presumed state of universality. The point is not that we can all identify with a rural middle-class Irish engineer, but that the wilfully idiomatic nature of Marcus’s story lets us in for a snoop, and offers a view of the universe that is sincere and a surprisingly light touch.
Readers get in touch to talk about their experience of the novel and how its story maps onto theirs. “I’ve loved Mike’s work for years” is a regular, or “This is a break out!” My favourite is when a Tramp supporter emails to say they didn’t know if it’d be for them, but they had a look, and now love it like we do. We add those messages to our email thread with Mike. It’s a long thread.
Solar Bones is published by Tramp Press. Mike McCormack’s interview with Martin Doyle of The Irish Times will be podcast on October 31st
