A summons to remember my dad: Sara Baume on Solar Bones

It happens, most often, with smells, with songs.

A resonant rhythm, an arousing refrain, a bittersweet lyric, abruptly transporting my mind back to a past experience – a place and time, a sight, a sensation – which has nothing to do with the music outside of my irresistible association. It can happen with books – this spontaneous conveyance, this vivid connection – but does so much less often.

Solar Bones arrived in the post at the beginning of May and I placed it atop my pile of books-to-be-read. Books for homework, books by writers I vaguely knew, books which might possibly come up in conversation with writers I vaguely knew. It crept down the pile for a couple of weeks because, early in May, my dad died, and even though I had been told many luminous things about this particular novel, the two facts which loomed largest in my mind were that it was narrated by a dead man, and that it was “experimental” – a single sentence, 223 pages long – and though this sounds like just the sort of novel I’d normally choose, I felt all of a sudden exhausted by the concept of difficult, challenging, clever fiction; I suddenly struggled to give a shit about experiment.

But in mid-May, the sun re-lit my sombre summer. I carried Solar Bones outside and spread a rug across the overgrown lawn. The bells of the Angelus began to chime, and so Marcus Conway started to speak.

Conway is county engineer, a good and righteous man of middle age. Every character in his life is effortlessly and convincingly drawn; familiar, yet particular, even peculiar. He is husband to Mairead (a teacher whose tenderness is so innate she applies it to the preparation of cheese sandwiches); father to Darragh (a bright boy turned restless world traveller), and Agnes (a blue-lipped, tantrum-throwing toddler turned persevering artist).

He is also a son. Throughout the novel, Conway recounts stories of his father at different stages of life, from a young man leaving on Sunday evenings to work the week on a building site in Killala, to an old man self-destructing with sadness and rage. At every stage he had an intriguing habit of “dismantling things and putting them back together again” – everything from a harrow to a Massey Ferguson – “not necessarily because of any fault or redundancy in the constructs themselves, but because there was in him that need to know how these things held together so that he could be assured his faith in them was well placed…”

My own dad was cast from the same mould as Conway’s – a man who understood how to build large machines from scratch without making a single drawing. On the overgrown lawn, in the weeks following his death, Solar Bones underscored how this kind of manual pursuit is a no less noble means of discovery than the intellectual means I pursue. I reconsidered his shed full of dismantled contraptions, parts and tools – I appreciated the knowledge he drew from them, the knacks only he understood. Fathers – their kindness and caution and well-meant intractability – are writ large in Solar Bones. Or maybe not; maybe this arose solely from the time and place and frame of mind in which I read it. The sun shone, the pages turned, and the book became a summons to remember my dad – or to fail to remember and imagine instead – the segments of his life and rambling thoughts I wasn’t privy to; the manifold expertise.

I found my dad in the “rattle and creak” of Conway’s newspaper, in his grumbling about politics and concerned yet accepting response to his children’s chosen paths, his daughter’s burgeoning artistic career especially. Agnes is an artist of steely application and unconventional methods. She employs her own blood to make text-based paintings; she parades naked through the streets of Galway. Despite occasional bulletins from a world “going about its relentless business of rising up in splendour and falling down in ruins”, the small dramas of domestic life are what make up the news of Solar Bones – the reassurance of its dynamic, the pain of its upheaval. Time and again, Conway illumines the utterly banal yet incomparably significant role of future-making for a family.

When someone dies, the world dies with them – for them only – all knowledge, all feeling. Though Conway doesn’t begin to realise he’s dead until the final pages, still his thoughts are suffused with foreboding; still he is acutely susceptible to signs of impending collapse – civil, structural, physical. While there is grief over and anger at such fallibility, while there are regrets; there is also an abundance of awe. On every page, a celebration of the everyday, the odd, the incidental – a single street light in the corner of a field in the middle of nowhere, the wear and tear on an old bread knife, the “silver antenna” of a transistor radio and the poignancy of “this small receiver trying to snag a signal” through so many solid surfaces.

Ian Sansom, in his review for the Guardian, described Solar Bones as “a hymn to modern small-town life”; it is also, just as profoundly, a hymn to an ordinary man’s ordinary life, to honest workmanship as a form of faith, to the people who stand “out of shot” in the press pictures of “ribbon-cutting ceremonies”, and who leave life as they lived it – like a wind turbine being towed by an enormous low-loader along the narrow main street of Louisburgh – “without fanfare or procession”.

There is a story Conway remembers his father telling him, about “a massive ship which came into Clew Bay, a ship from god-knows-where with no recognisable flags or markings on it, a huge ship which bow-to-stern was over a mile long and with four massive funnels…” It carried timber and artillery; it “fired two shells onto the mainland, whether as warning or salute no one could say, but one of them destroyed a cart-house in Durless and it was never known where the second one landed or if it did land…” and at the kitchen table on the Day of the Dead, Conway realises “of course it was all nonsense / pure fucking nonsense” and wonders “to what purpose my father told me that story”…? Solar Bones is a single sentence of sundry stories – a machine of many parts – and to what purpose any individual one, only for us each find our own particular, familiar, peculiar resonance.

A smell, a song, a story.

Sara Baume is the author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither
Over the course of the next month The Irish Times will publish essays by Mike McCormack, his publishers at Tramp Press, fellow writers Sara Baume, Colin Barrett, Mia Gallagher and John Kelly, broadcaster Rick O’Shea and academic Sharae Deckard. 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.