Experimental fiction: revelling in the wonder of words

The Goldsmiths Prize for experimental fiction in the UK has been awarded four times since its foundation in 2013, and three times it has been won by Irish authors. (The odd one out, Ali Smith, is Scottish.) Eimear McBride, Kevin Barry and Mike McCormack won the prize for their first, second and third novels respectively. All three books deal, in one way or another, with rural Ireland, and specifically the north-west corner of the country: Sligo, Mayo, Leitrim. They share, too, an approach to form and language that is playful, exuberant, even at times indulgent. These are three writers who luxuriate in words for their own sake, who take immense pleasure in both their sound and their power. All three are concerned, on a deep and nuanced level, with the issue of the voice.

Barry's Beatlebone may be the most obvious in this regard. It does, after all, focus on a singer, one John Lennon, late of the Beatles and now hiding out in the countryside around Clew Bay, where he has bought an island for himself that he would very much like to visit. This simple desire becomes a Sisyphean quest, wherein Lennon is brought face-to-face with the skeletons in his own closet, as well as the homespun philosophies of the locals. Beatlebone could easily be a farce, but Barry's ear for the speech rhythms of the west and his willingness to take massive formal risks turn it into something quite profound.

There is a moment in the middle of the book that is telling. Up to this point the novel has been told through a fluid mix of dialogue and description, sometimes closer to a play than a novel, but the contours of the plot are clear and it zips along nicely. Then, without warning or explanation, Barry is writing an essay, in the first-person, about his writing of the book we have up until now been reading (and indeed still are). It’s a dramatic shift of perspective, one that binds tighter the concerns of the author and his central character and exposes the mechanics of the story Barry is trying to tell.

Lennon has come to the west of Ireland to be cleansed of the trappings of fame and fortune; he has come to find clarity and a way forward. Instead he finds only the ghosts of his past; his mother and father, rising to meet him like screams in the dark. To create art, Barry says, is so often to face those ghosts, to take them with you into some unknown future. To search for a voice in which the accents of the past, the present and the future can be reconciled, where the working-class estate meets global fame, where the Liverpudlian drawl meets the rapid, questioning syllables of the Irish west. It couldn’t be straight-forward. Or, as Lennon says in the book, “Something’s got to crack and something’s got to give.”

Primordial language

McBride's A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing is even more cerebral, more cracked than Beatlebone. It seems at times to be made primarily of full stops. Set at first in some unnamed and featureless town in the west of Ireland, Girl is a book about being trapped. The interior monologue of its unnamed narrator, a sharp and fractured set of syllables, is a primordial language, a language dramatically halted in the act of becoming sensible, becoming social. It's a voice broken by the place from where it has emerged, rejected by the people who should recognise and welcome it. In place of community the girl finds only abuse, hate and sickness, a pious coverup. The words come out the way they do – associative, reversed, frantic – because the narrator can find no reflection of herself in the people around her. Identity, constituted and performed through language, becomes a site of intense pressure and emerges, diamond-like, ready to cut and glimmer.

The novel moves to London, or "the city". Free now from the religious stricture of her upbringing ("her in her rosaries"), the girl does what any unleashed 17-year-old would do and rushes into every opportunity for sex and booze she can find, a lifetime's worth of repression spilling out into the pubs and parties of London – "Nicer is not what I'm after." It's a path many novels, particularly first novels, by Irish authors have followed; the bildungsroman of the youth from the country getting an education (in school and out of it) in the city, learning to live with their unrefined rural past while making a new life for themselves in the metropolis of possibility. Girl is different, however; there is no learning to live with. The novel is tragic – in the Greek sense – because the girl refuses any compromise with society as it is. Her desperation, unable to escape the dark of the past even in London, forces her hand. It ends, Antigone redux, with the only expression of power traditionally left to "uncontrollable" women: utter negation.

Intimate image

Solar Bones, Mike McCormack's third novel, is in some ways the inverse of Girl. On a purely formal level, it does away with full stops entirely. More importantly, it is a novel about someone who does learn to live within the structures of Irish rural life. Again set in Mayo, this time near Louisburgh and Westport, it features the recently-deceased Marcus Conway as narrator. Marcus was an engineer who worked for the local council and his life was exceedingly ordinary, dotted with professional frustrations and personal mistakes, simple pleasures, real loves and complex family ties.

The novel is concerned, to borrow a phrase from Martin Heidegger, with “the same that is always newly sought”. The daily rhythms and routines of a place and community – Angelus bells, morning news, cars going along the road – shape the lives of those who live within it, and McCormack examines the idea that some balance might be achieved between ambition and duty, between imagination and responsibility. In the figure of his wife lying sick in bed, laid low by a glass of cryptosporidium-infected water, Marcus sees the collapsing together of the political, the personal, even the aesthetic. All of life discovered in such an intimate image, a cipher for the banality and the astonishing strangeness of everyday life.

It is important though that Solar Bones is told from the perspective of a ghost, the ultimate outsider. Who else could see "all of life"? All three books share this outsider's perspective, and together they suggest there is no true way to tell the story of a place from the inside. As John Berger once said, writing is like getting very close to something and then coming back. What you bring back, always partial and unfinished, is the story. Barry, McBride and McCormack all get very close to life – daily life, and the life of the mind – in one part of the country, but then they come back; they return to the literary world, the creative world, which makes different demands.

What kind of voice emerges from this constant back-and-forth? A voice that is always both here and there, always up and down; cryptic, wild, jazzed, jagged, unstoppable, glottal, fucked. A voice that is nowhere settled. A voice that is nowhere at home.