It’s the intimidation factor.
Say to most ordinary people on the street (the well-trodden path everyone always goes for a wander on when they need opinions about everything from political scandals to Brad and Angelina to global warming) that a book has no full stops in it, no quotation marks for the dialogue and that it’s framed on the page, well, unusually, and chances are the shutters will probably come down. Even if it’s only 223 pages long.
I have to admit that, although I consume books a fair bit more than most people I know, I felt the same way too when I was confronted with Solar Bones for the first time. The conspicuous absence of full stops immediately puts you in mind of Finnegans Wake, a book as unread as it is revered in the canon of Irish writing. It’s one that I’ve tried to tackle at least once a decade since I was in college, always ending in me quietly putting it back on the “long-term to be read” shelf after an attempted wrestle followed by me throwing it frustratedly at the couch in whatever house I happen to be living in at the time.
But, before you think I’m making comparisons with Solar Bones, at least in terms of how easy or hard it is to tackle, let me stop you there. Mike McCormack’s new book is one of the most fluid, readable and approachable I’ve read this year.
Amongst other book-related activities I’m involved in these days, I run an online book club on Facebook. A little kitten that started off life as a place to chat with people I knew back and forth about what I was reading, it has since grown into a hulking monster of a thing now numbering a few thousand people and my favourite place of calm and warm friendship on the wide, wild web.
It’s a perfect place to find those typical people “on the street” whilst they discuss everything they’re reading. As I write this, chats are ongoing inside the virtual walls about everything from the Polish title of The Girl With All The Gifts (It’s Pandora, thanks for asking) to how brilliant John Connolly’s Charlie Parker Series is all the way to why one member had a headache and needed a nap after reading William S Burroughs for the first time.
Many of them are an adventurous lot too, though, and when I choose books of the month I try to pick things that I think are brilliant, worthwhile and, every now and then, possibly outside their comfort zones.
It was only there, when I made Solar Bones one of those books of the month a while back, that I realised that the punctuation is for many (and a bit counter-intuitively) one of the attractions of it as a read. I got many, many responses throughout the month saying that, because it has no natural pauses, stops or chapters, and it’s so compelling, you just had to read it in a single sitting.
One member said that she found the best way to read it was to whisper it aloud to herself and another described Mike as “a master sentence writer, which is probably why this book is written in one sentence”. I can’t disagree.
Then there’s, as it came to be referred to in our discussions, “The Thing”. The ending of the book. There are a hardy breed of us who try, wherever possible, not to read the blurb on the back of books when we’re weighing up whether or not to dig in. Instead, I’m of the “read the first page and that should give you an idea of whether it’s for you or not” lot. So I came to the beautiful, poignant, long-signposted end of Solar Bones slightly blind to it (I’m a little slow at the best of times) and I’m glad I did. I’m aware the author intends readers to know where the journey ended to avoid any suggestion of shock or twist for shock’s sake. For me it just made what happens all the more moving. It’s one of only two occasions I’ve welled up at the end of a book this year (the other was Maggie O’Farrell’s This Must Be The Place in case that’s going to keep you up at night).
Thus, for me at least, Solar Bones is that rare creature in the centre of a beautifully awkward Venn diagram of contemporary Irish writing. It falls at the same time into the tiny sliver of space occupied by a small, utterly traditional interior story of ordinary life, a radical form, a book that perhaps might have been expected not to find a mass audience but has, one published by a small press and a book that is gaining international acclaim (not least from the recent controversy about its exclusion from consideration for the Man Booker Prize, and its thoroughly deserved inclusion in the shortlist for the year’s Goldsmiths Prize, which rewards innovative fiction.)
We live in a world of stories of modest narrators, frequently from rural Ireland with achingly real lives and it would be all too easy for Solar Bones to have disappeared into the cracks of that particular well-trodden road. Instead Mike McCormack takes his own sharp turn left onto a new, uncharted track and I, for one, am hugely glad he did.
At a public interview I was conducting with him recently, Donal Ryan called me, to my immediate mortification, a “book warrior”. Someone who goes out into the world and fights hard to get people to notice and engage with genuinely great books.
After I stopped blushing, hard, I ended up thinking that it’s not such a bad title to have. Solar Bones is a genuine thing of beauty and one of those books worth fighting for. You should give it a chance.
Rick O'Shea presents The Poetry Programme on RTÉ Radio 1. Throughout October, 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, 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.
