Solar Bones by Mike McCormack: October’s Irish Times Book Club Choice

Solar Bones by Mike McCormack, shortlisted last week for the £10,000 Goldsmiths Prize, is October’s Irish Times Book Club Choice.

McCormack, who lives in Galway and has been described by The Irish Times as “one of the most original and important voices in contemporary Irish fiction”, published Solar Bones, his third novel, with Tramp Press to international acclaim earlier this year.

Once a year, on All Souls Day, it is said that the dead may return; Solar Bones tells the story of one such visit. Set in the west of Ireland as the recession is about to strike, this novel is a portrait of one man’s experience when his world threatens to fall apart. Wry and poignant, Solar Bones is an intimate portrayal of one family, capturing how careless decisions ripple out into waves, and how our morals are challenged in small ways every day.

The Literary Review was among the first to review this extraordinary work. Critic David Collard (who was also the first to champion Eimear McBride’s A Girl is A Half-Formed Thing), wrote: “This is all hauntingly sad, but also frequently very funny – Proust reconfigured by Flann O’Brien … Solar Bones has certainly been worth the 10-year wait since McCormack’s last novel, Notes from a Coma. An incisive meditation on the follies of contemporary Ireland, it is also a profound metaphysical exploration of life itself: grotesque, bizarre and unprecedented, yes, but also wholly believable.”

Meanwhile, the Guardian reported that “Excellence is always rare and often unexpected: we don’t necessarily expect masterpieces even from the great. Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones is exceptional indeed: an extraordinary novel by a writer not yet famous but surely destined to be acclaimed by anyone who believes that the novel is not dead and that novelists are not merely lit-fest fodder for the metropolitan middle classes.

“McCormack is not entirely unknown. In 1996, he won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature with his first collection of short stories, Getting It in the Head.The prize is a sure predictor of future greatness, responsible for bringing to wider public attention the work of Anne Enright, Claire Kilroy, Claire Keegan and the two mighty Kevins, Barry and Power. McCormack’s second collection, Forensic Songs, was published in 2012, and he is also the author of two novels, Crowe’s Requiem (1998) and Notes from a Coma (2005). But it would be safe to say that outside his native Ireland his work is less well known than that of many of his contemporaries. Solar Bones is published by Tramp, one of Ireland’s small independent publishing houses, which, like its UK counterparts, is enjoying an unprecedented period of growth and success. The book deserves attention and applause.”

The Chicago Review called it “a stunning outcry against human isolation and the cosmic odds stacked against this here-and-now. It is a heartfelt hymn to the matchless shelter of love, singular in its stability, relentlessly singing us home”, while The Irish Times review said it was “the work of an author in the full maturity of his talent, Solar Bones climaxes in a passage of savage, Gnostic religiosity: the writing catches fire as we draw near to the void, pass over into death itself, and therein confront the truth that even in a fallen universe, when all distractions tumble away, the only adequate response to our being is astonishment.”

Over the course of the next month The Irish Times will publish a piece from Mike McCormack about writing the novel, an essay on editing the work by his publishers at Tramp Press, and essays by 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.