This Plague of Souls by Mike McCormack: creates an utterly distinctive, utterly contemporary mood

In one of Mike McCormack’s short stories (it appears in his 2012 collection Forensic Songs), a man is arrested on charges of being the only person in Ireland never to have written a childhood memoir. The sergeant in charge can hardly believe it: “No account of him going shoeless through the fields and developing a thick, protective callus on the souls of his feet? […] A harrowing account of his struggle with the modh coinníollach?” Funny; but not just funny. The story takes place in an altered Ireland. The sergeant embodies a police state founded on voluntary self-analysis: “The self as the first object of suspicion – each man responsible for his own surveillance.”

Here is McCormack’s fictional universe in miniature. In much of his work he has pushed Ireland towards dystopia, or apocalypse. And in almost all of his work the self is the first object of suspicion. Getting it in the Head, the title of his first book, might be the title of all his books. The head is where his characters get it: “it” being McCormack’s scouring, lyric scrutiny.

His characters are usually men: Mayo men, a specific breed. They live outwardly mundane lives – on farms, in civic offices, in breakers’ yards, in motorway service stations – but inwardly they entertain great cosmic musings, nurse unstaunchable wounds. McCormack likes to get his Mayo men alone and send them inward. But the world – unstable, crisis-prone – goes with them. The news is never far from their thoughts, their lives. Sometimes, their lives are the news.

In Notes from a Coma (2005), the orphan genius (and Mayo man) JJ O’Malley volunteers for an experiment that keeps him unconscious aboard a research vessel moored in Killary fiord. He makes the news, of course. “Firing in debate and opinion polls, across editorial maunderings […] his suspended mind is one of those loci at which the nation’s consciousness knows itself and knows itself knowing itself…” Marcus Conway, the deceased civil engineer who narrates Solar Bones (2016), marks his day by way of radio news bulletins: he, too, makes the news, when his wife Mairead becomes a casualty of the 2007 Galway cryptosporidiosis outbreak.

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JJ O’Malley’s context is science-fictional; Marcus Conway’s is supernatural. But McCormack’s quarry in both books is not genre dazzlement, it is the elusive stuff of consciousness itself.

This Plague of Souls, his latest book, is in this sense recognisably a McCormack novel. Weighing in at a slender 179 pages, it devotes more than half of its length to what is essentially a single-character narrative: Nealon, released from prison (where he was detained for an as-yet unspecified crime), drifts around his family home in rural Mayo, thinking, remembering. The second part brings Nealon to a city (Galway? Dublin?) to meet the unnamed man who has been speaking to him cryptically on the phone; this section takes place entirely in the lobby of a hotel, and has the feel of a short play for two actors.

Who is Nealon? What does he want? The novel plays hide-and-seek with these bits of information. The point of view is close third person, which usually offers an untrammelled intimacy between reader and protagonist. Here McCormack uses it to put us on the back foot. We learn that Nealon has rescued his partner Olwyn from heroin addiction, fleeing a city tenement and finding refuge in his home place; we know that they have a small son, Cuan; we know that Nealon has been in prison but we don’t know why. Now the home place is empty; Nealon seems unsure of many things: “What time of year is it? The question flummoxes him for a moment. One end or the other?”

And those phone calls. “You know who I am?” Nealon asks. “That’s the least of what I know,” says the man on the other end. Listening to the first call, Nealon “is aware of himself in two minds”. We assume of course, that Nealon is divided; that his hidden self is leading his revealed self, that object of suspicion, towards dangerous insight.

[ Mike McCormack: ‘There is no good time to lose your father’ ]

But the novel doesn’t bear this out. Instead it carries Nealon to that hotel lobby, as a mysterious crisis engulfs Ireland and perhaps the world: Garda checkpoints, security alerts, quarantine units. What is the connection between Nealon and this crisis? Hints arrive obliquely; mysteries are never quite unravelled. Certainly this is a Covid novel: a housebound protagonist, an eerily empty Ireland, the State mobilised for an emergency.

To say that This Plague of Souls is neither as rich nor as resonant as Solar Bones isn’t to say much, since Solar Bones is one of the signal achievements of 21st-century Irish fiction. Operating in a minor key, nudging us coyly towards an eerily personal apocalypse, the new book creates an utterly distinctive, utterly contemporary mood; like Nealon’s own mind, it is prone to “lateral segues from the present moment into the abstract, lurid reaches of the imagination” – the two fictional locales, that is, where Mike McCormack feels most at home.

Kevin Power’s latest novel is White City