‘This Plague of Souls’ by Mike McCormack     (2023) – 177 pages

Can one fault a writer for the key information he intentionally leaves out?

In ‘This Plague of Souls’ paints a picture of a man who has just been released from prison who returns to his small farm in western Ireland to find that his wife and son are not there. He cannot reach them by cell phone either, so he takes up living on the farm as he did before he met his wife.

This man, Nealon, gets these mysterious sporadic phone calls from a guy who seems to know all about him. This strange unknown guy wants to meet up with him, but Nealon hesitates at first. Who is he? What does he want?

In the meantime, I should mention something about the writing style of Mike McCormack. His descriptions are over the top, but so deadly acute and accurate. It’s as if every single word in this novel matters.

“The morning sky is swollen with clouds and driving rain through the gray light, in a steady fall, this day is down for good. Some people are already abroad, a harassed breed with their eyes fixed to the ground, dispirited before the day has drawn breath. They have about them the resentful look of men and women who wish they are elsewhere, anywhere.”

This unique inimitable description of the rain and the people of this city that Nealon is approaching could only be made by McCormack.

Meanwhile a major terrorist incident is occurring in Ireland, and the television anchors are filled with impending doom except when they continue to cover sports events.

Finally Nealon agrees to meet with this mysterious stranger who knows too much about him.

At this point, I was quite satisfied with ‘This Plague of Souls’ even though there were many unanswered questions. What were the crimes that Nealon had been in prison for? How did they relate to this new major terrorist threat? How did this mysterious stranger find out so much about Nealon? Surely they would all be answered in the denouement.

No, none of these questions was specifically answered. Instead we get a lot of dire talk from this mysterious stranger that seems to imply that Nealon was somehow directly involved in this new terrorist threat, but we get no new details about Nealon’s involvement. Instead we get hints like “ripping off insurance companies”.

I’m quite sure that Mike McCormack left out these details on purpose to create a modern ominous atmosphere of menacing terrorist doom, but this reader was left hanging with too many unanswered questions and critical facts left out.

Grade :    B

‘Solar Bones’ by Mike McCormack   (2017)   – 217 pages

There are no periods, no stopping points, in ‘Solar Bones’, not even at the very end of the novel. (I looked.)   It is one long stream of conscious thoughts, and what a stream it is!  You could say that what James Joyce started, Mike McCormack has finished by writing his entire novel as one long stream of consciousness.

This one is not a gimmick; this one is for real.  The absence of a period and the presence of a conjunction propel the reader forward on to the next paragraph and the next paragraph and the next and…  Just as our minds go from one thought directly to another that may only be peripherally related to the first, so goes ‘Solar Bones’.  I generally don’t like to take my breaks from reading in the middle of a sentence on an ‘and’, but with this novel I had no choice.

Often ‘Solar Bones’ reads like poetry, poetry written by an Irish engineering supervisor which is who our narrator Marcus Conway is.

“yes you’re an engineer, math and physics and suchlike, but it was always a bit of a mystery where all your references came from, all the poetry and philosophy that overtakes you from time to time, but now I know, it was all part of the old ecclesial schooling am I right” 

Yes, a time spent in religious training as a young man has made the difference for Marcus Conway.  He combines the rigorous calculation of the engineer with the more expansive view of the world that poetry and philosophy provide.

Don’t be put off by this talk of stream of consciousness and poetry; ‘Solar Bones’ is compulsively readable.  I sailed through this novel smiling at this guy’s vivid frequently humorous portrayal of his family and of his engineering fights.  His loving concern shines through for his wife Mairead, his daughter Agnes, and his son Darragh who’s in Australia but sometimes calls home via Skype  It is all overlaid with that old Irish charm which I try hard to resist but somehow fall for anyway.  If I have any complaint at all, it is that McCormick lays that Irish schtick on a little too thickly.

‘Solar Bones’ was the 2016 winner of the Goldsmiths Prize.  It definitely fulfills the Goldsmiths slogan “Fiction at its most novel”.

Grade :     A+