First arriving on the literary scene with 1995’s award-winning Getting it In The Head, Mike McCormack has long been of Ireland’s greatest and most criminally overlooked writers. This profound, darkly funny and highly experimental new novel will hopefully change that.
Once a year, on All Souls’ Day, it is said that the dead may return; this is the story of one such visit. Solar Bones opens with Marcus Conway, a deceased engineer, suddenly finding himself transported back from a different realm to the kitchen of his family home in Mayo.
What follows is essentially an 85,000-word stream of consciousness sentence as he reflects back over his life and career. Without pausing for a full stop, the novel examines how the actions of the political body impact on individual bodies, how careless decisions ripple out into waves, and how our morals are challenged in small ways every day. It’s absolutely superb.