{"id":22244,"date":"2017-08-22T15:35:44","date_gmt":"2017-08-22T19:35:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=22244"},"modified":"2017-08-25T11:42:10","modified_gmt":"2017-08-25T15:42:10","slug":"mike-mccormack-solar-bones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2017\/08\/22\/mike-mccormack-solar-bones\/","title":{"rendered":"Mike McCormack: Solar Bones<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a><\/span><\/div>

Solar Bones<\/strong><\/em><\/span>
\nby Mike McCormack (2016)<\/span>
\nSoho Press (2017)<\/span>
\n224 pp<\/span><\/p><\/h3><\/div>

\n

the bell<\/span>
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0the bell as<\/span>
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 hearing the bell as<\/span>
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 hearing the bell as standing here<\/span>
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 the bell being heard standing here<\/span>
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 hearing it ring out through the grey light of this<\/span>
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 morning, noon or night<\/span>
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 god knows<\/span>
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 this grey day standing here and<\/span>
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 listening to this bell in the middle of the day, the middle of<\/span>
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 the day bell, the Angelus bell in the middle of the day, ringing out<\/span>
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 through the grey light to<\/span>
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 here<\/span>
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 standing in the kitchen<\/span>
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 hearing this bell<\/span>
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 snag my heart and draw the whole world into”<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I<\/span> imagine quite a few potential readers of Solar Bones<\/em>, having heard all the plaudits, picking the book up at the local bookshop, reading those introductory lines and finally not bothering, their assumption that the book is too “experimental,” prompting them to replace it on the shelf and opt for something less tricky.<\/p>\n

When in fact that introduction doesn\u2019t especially represent what follows. Although Solar Bones<\/em> is unquestionably one uninterrupted 220-page sentence, it settles down to and establishes a relatively seamless and hypnotic rhythm, all punctuation provided by overlapping lines. The need for punctuation in any case largely negated by the glacial immersion demanded.<\/p>\n

Capsule verdict: Solar Bones<\/em> would be a just Booker Prize winner. There\u2019s no better technical offering nor a more substantial read elsewhere on the longlist, the only serious competitor being\u00a0Lincoln in the Bardo<\/em>. Also: a win would give Mike McCormack a few quid and presumably a bit of breathing space to hone the next effort. His latest is a deeply felt, discursive celebration of Life, as sentimental as that might sound, and is unquestionably art of the highest order. It regularly resembles both John Burnside and W.G. Sebald, two writers similarly haunted by many of McCormack\u2019s preoccupations.<\/p>\n

A man sits at his kitchen table trying to corral together his life, and does so by ruminating on the past, present and future. The snag being: he\u2019s dead, and isn\u2019t quite sure of the fact at first. Over the course of the novel he will understand, and in the process he will piece together some kind of legacy, a sad one he wants to amend but can\u2019t.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a meandering, diffuse novel, a series of traumatized, ambivalent dispatches. There is clarity at the end but no peace. Recurrent motifs dovetail in and out of focus like intermittent, wavering radio signals, myriad\u00a0disturbances jostling for prominence. Topography, how we negotiate physical and psychological placement and displacement (rarely running in tandem), identity, interpersonal relationships, communication, free will, travel, the political state of nations: all are entwined and all are mutable to powers, as McCormack would have it, just beyond our ken, and our struggles with such matters are ultimately impossible to fully reckon with. The state in which narrator Marcus finds himself during and beyond these quietly maddened pages seems to involve his dispensing with some of the stuff of life, rather than making his peace, sifting through his by now finished place in the physical world, discerning and dividing the illusory and the tangible. He seems fated to extend his purgatorial state indefinitely.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s often a topical novel: the financial collapse is an exemplification of our weaknesses, our inability to prepare. We\u2019re fundamentally foolish, destined to bedevil ourselves with ego, with short-termism and short-sightedness. There\u2019s a harrowed insistence that the different strata of evolution \u2013 technological, biological, political, social, cultural — are wildly out of sync, that the different sub-levels of existence are subject to widening gulfs. Our limbo-stricken protagonist seems particularly susceptible to fluctuations in and apparitions of elemental powers, feeling marginal shifts in the nuances of voltage and water-thrum, all the usually shrouded subtleties of a world\u2019s running, as though his languished state has rendered him privy to undercurrents and stirrings to which the corporeal are mercifully obscured. Nonetheless, this is a vantage point from which he can provide no solutions. He is picking over wounds that can now neither further bleed nor heal.<\/p>\n

\n

for clarity\u2019s sake this article is illustrated by a sidebar which gives some indication of \u00a0 just how outsized the nation\u2019s financial folly was in the years leading up to the\u00a0 \u00a0collapse, debt piling up till it ran to tens of billions, incredible figures for a small\u00a0 \u00a0island economy, awe-inspiring magnitudes which shifted forever the horizons of what\u00a0 \u00a0we thought ourselves liable for and which now, stacked on top of each other like this \u00a0 — all those zeroes, glossy and hard, so given to viral increase \u2013 appear like the indices\u00a0 \u00a0and magnitudes of a new cosmology, the forces and velocities of some barren, inverse\u00a0 \u00a0world — a negative realm that, over time, will suck the life out of us, that collapse\u00a0 \u00a0which happened without offering any forewarning of itself, none that any of our\u00a0 \u00a0prophets picked up on anyway as they were all apparently struck dumb and blind,\u00a0 \u00a0robbed of all foresight when surely this was the kind of catastrophe prophets should\u00a0 \u00a0have an eye for or some foreknowledge of but didn\u2019t since it is now evident in\u00a0 \u00a0hindsight that our seers\u2019 gifts were of a lesser order, their warnings lowered to a\u00a0 \u00a0tremulous bleating, the voices of men hedging their bets and without the proper pitch\u00a0 \u00a0of hysterical accusation as they settled instead for fault-finding and analysis,\u00a0 \u00a0that cautionary note which in the end proved wholly inadequate to the coming disaster<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The narrator\u2019s drifting, elliptical focus alights on those matters that plague him still beyond the grave. Aptly enough, the contingency and agency of the body is plentifully mulled upon. There is a returning curiosity at blanks in memory, in moments lived and immediately lost, journeys traveled that leave no trace beyond departure and arrival points.<\/p>\n

There is more than a suggestion here that much of our existence is imaginary, that most of our lives may never properly occur. It\u2019s hard to know how much of this is wish-fulfillment as opposed to philosophical inquiry; he cannot fathom any of a returning journey from his parents-in-law to rescue his marriage after his own act of self-sabotage. How much of us is self-creation, or even non-existent? Marcus asks. So much of us is barely there. He marvels over the Skype image of his son onscreen from the other side of the world, never fully believing it\u2019s more than pixels he\u2019s talking to; at the transformation of his wife, Mairead, as she endures a shocking illness, an illness that abruptly brings together the personal with the political. All is subject to change but human nature and the process of disintegration. If McCormack has a theme we can concisely encapsulate, it\u2019s how things placed in juxtaposition accrue meaning, in particular people, and how they become part of a world that often seems arbitrary or illusory, and always strange. It\u2019s a world in which administration and the attentions of the state both lend solidity to and draw uniqueness out of the individual, but where that individual means both less and more than is imagined.<\/p>\n

\n

I saw drawn up before my eyes in a little office down the hall from the maternity ward of the county hospital, a single-page document which told me that now my child was\u00a0completely realised and that<\/span><\/p>\n

the seal had been set on her identity as an Irish citizen, who, although less than four\u00a0days old, was nevertheless the point of all the massive overarching state apparatus\u00a0 \u00a0within which she could live out her life as a free and self-determining individual, the\u00a0protective structure of a democracy which she in turn would uphold as a voter, a\u00a0 \u00a0consumer, a patient, a student, a banking customer, a taxpayer and so on while\u00a0 \u00a0gathering to herself all those ID cards and certificates that would enable her draw\u00a0down all the benefits of being born a free child of a republic, accessing education and\u00a0medicine and bank accounts and library books, all of these rights devolving from<\/span><\/p>\n

her birth certificate, the source document, which was drawn up for her in a small\u00a0office at the end of the hall, the cramped space shelved to the roof with files and\u00a0records and lit by a single fluorescent strip which cast down a hard light on the head\u00a0of the smiling lady with large arms who took down my details and Mairead\u2019s details\u00a0and then entered them carefully in a newly opened file before she went to a cupboard\u00a0and took out a blank certificate which we both signed before she entered some final\u00a0details on it and then, reading it through one last time to ensure it was complete to her\u00a0 satisfaction, took a stamp and pressed the state seal onto it before handing it to me\u00a0with a smile, where I, affected with a deep sense of occasion, found myself reaching\u00a0out to shake her hand because this surely was how the moment should be marked and<\/span><\/p>\n

ten minutes later, sitting in the car with Mairead in the back and Agnes in her arms,\u00a0 \u00a0I continued to stare at this document<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 the document scarcely less miraculous than the child in the way<\/span><\/p>\n

it fixed her within a political structure which undertook to spend a percentage of its\u00a0GDP on her health and her education and her defence among other things and over\u00a0twenty years later I can still feel something of that mysterious pride which swept\u00a0 \u00a0through me as I sat there behind the steering wheel, the uncanny feeling that my child\u00a0was elevated into something above being my daughter or my own flesh and blood \u2013\u00a0there was a metaphysical reality to her now \u2013 she had stepped into that political index\u00a0which held a space for her in the state\u2019s mindfulness, a place that was hers alone and\u00a0could not be occupied by anyone else nor infringed on in any way which might blur\u00a0her identity or smudge her destiny<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As an engineer, naturally — towards matters of world-building — Marcus can\u2019t quite get to grip with the stuff of life, by which he is too beguiled and perturbed to truly settle into. Only outside it can he find perspective. He is enraged by his daughter Agnes\u2019s art exhibition, news items she has written out in her own blood on gallery walls, a shock that prompts him to storm out. He\u2019d be much happier with that blood bound by her veins. Yet even as he undergoes such a rapid change in mood, he can\u2019t begin to get to grips with what he is thinking as it occurs and transforms him. His anger baffles him. Clearly there are certain types of engineering he does not want to consider too closely. He is much happier considering impersonal fluidity and flow, the external world in systolic motion, that which is not as malleable or subject to ruin as the human heart.<\/p>\n

But there is a sense of futility even in this, the utilitarian stock that makes up a working town and country, as decisions are made that have nothing to do with effectiveness and efficiency and the greater good. And even when things miraculously work, when a house is plumbed perfectly and wired seamlessly, people are blas\u00e9, disinterested,\u00a0or they imagine that such intricacies are too much of a reminder of the inner workings which at any moment might rupture or draw to a halt. They live on the surface, and seem to have an easier time of it than Marcus. There is an ever-present assumption within a functioning community, perhaps an inevitable component necessary for it to properly function, that chaos has been mastered. Marcus is far too close to the nuts and bolts of everything, is too conscious of what lies behind walls and under floorboards, but also how hierarchical systems work, how logic and sense are often secondary.<\/p>\n

Different kinds of structures — those joining civilian to the state, man to wife,\u00a0 parent to child, water to life, bridges to community and functioning cohesion — are dwelt upon. We come away from the novel with, if nothing else, a reminder of all those mutual contingencies that make up a working world, run by mercurial and narcissistic people but following some kind of pattern outside any individual reckoning that articulates in a solid, if still ineffable, manner.<\/p>\n

Solar Bones<\/em> convincingly draws together all the necessarily loose strands of life, closes the gaps between acts and occasions and people, pieces together a singular world emptied of all but yearning and loss, and reinstates a life too abruptly curtailed. It obsessively stitches together convergences that don\u2019t quite meet, intersections that jar, binds together geometrical and metaphysical overlapping points that aren\u2019t quite cohesive. It\u2019s an appalled attempt at tidying up a grand mess — an echo of the fictional art.<\/p>\n

Marcus had throughout his life been moored by numerous means, of which one was regular news bulletins. During the day local reports attached him to his communal self, before later international reports fix his place as a citizen of the world. There\u2019s something both wrenching and affirming about this predicament of divvied-up consciousness, that artificial need to belong in such a routine and compartmentalized way. It\u2019s a way of belonging and being present strong enough that he can\u2019t relinquish it even in death. He\u2019s fittingly undone as he clings to that tether, another news bulletin, one he will never fully hear as its consequences are played out for those still subject to its outcome. Even in death he claims seemingly immutable co-ordinates, an eternal place on the map, as much a part of the landscape as any enduring physical structure, finally outside the auspices of time and chronology.<\/p>\n

\n

I died in that lay-by<\/span><\/p>\n

died surrounded by tons of sand and gravel and hard-core with my mouth open in a\u00a0 \u00a0black howl to take leave of myself as, without missing a beat my body had already\u00a0 \u00a0picked up the rhythms of decay which had begun to work immediately in my soft\u00a0 \u00a0flesh, that momentary heat spike which gave way to the falling temperature of rot with\u00a0 \u00a0my blood passing from oxygenated red to black as the universal cellular explosions\u00a0 \u00a0which bring on that spillage of filth within my organs which will eventually purge\u00a0 \u00a0from every orifice of my body even as I found my way home home again to sit at this \u00a0table and drift through these rooms<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Most great novels don\u2019t bother to stalk resolution or symmetry, and this one accepts its own limitations, knowing that however broad its scope and replete its focus, it can\u2019t capture that towards which it spends its entirety in rueful pursuit. It\u2019s a remarkable feat of, yes, engineering, but its achieved literary aspirations, as a heartfelt explication of living and dying grief, are easily met. It\u2019s a triumph of voice and effect over plot, and a wonderful experience for this reader, but you\u2019ll probably either love it or hate it. And there can only be an unhappy ending for a protagonist who relates that<\/p>\n

\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0what really tormented me was that all this filth and disorder offended my engineer\u2019s \u00a0sense of structure, everything out of place and alignment<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>

\"\"\"\"\n \n