Solar Bones
By Mike McCormack
(Tramp Press, €15)
Meet Marcus Conway, County Engineer for Mayo,
resident of Louisburgh, fiftyish, husband to schoolteacher Mairead, father to
aspiring artist Agnes and backpacker Darragh, brother to Eithne, ex-seminarian,
one time adulterer, and all round connoisseur of chaos, both domestic and
universal.
Mike
McCormack’s new novel – his third, following Crowe’s Requiem (1998) and Notes
From A Coma (2005), and his fifth book if you include the short story
collections Getting It In The Head
(1996) and Forensic Songs (2012) – is a day, or rather, a morning
and early afternoon, in the life of this gentleman. It is no ordinary half-day
either, although it seems so for most of the narrative, culminating in its
closing pages in a finale it would be spoilerish to reveal (did you see it
coming?), but which attempts to lend weight to what has gone before, in so
doing asking important ethical and metaphysical questions about life and death,
how to live and how to die.
Although clues are dropped throughout, the
novel largely dispenses with plot contrivances, and completely with full stops,
choosing instead to range broadly over Marcus’ reminiscences of his life, in a
Bloom-like, free associative, stream of consciousness manner. Indeed, like
Joyce’s Leopold, Marcus is in many ways an ordinary hero, a mythic everyman,
although his classical correlative would not be Odysseus, but rather Achilles. He
even has a literal gammy heel, a side effect of the Lipitor cholesterol
medication he is on, which weakens tendons down there. However, unlike the
largely equanimous, even jovial Bloom, the metaphorical equivalence of this
vulnerability is Marcus’ defining characteristic of anxiety. In his mental
ramblings, he is inclined to fret about everything, whether it is his immediate
family, or the state of the county, the country, or the whole shooting match.
For while the universal may be contained in
the particular (and vice versa), for Marcus this translates into an engineer’s acute
awareness of the nothingness upon which everything is built, and the
provisional nature and inherent instability of all structures. This sense of
dread is vividly illustrated in a genuinely unnerving recollection Marcus has
of coming home from school one day as a boy in short trousers, to find the
engine of the Massey Ferguson 35 tractor his farmer father had bought ‘completely
broken down…gutted of its most essential parts and forlorn now, its components
ordered across the floor in such a way as to make clear not only the sequence
of its dismantlement but also the reverse order in which it would be restored
to the full working harmonic of itself.’
He comments: ‘…since looking at those engine
parts spread across the floor my imagination took fright and soared to some
wider, cataclysmic conclusion about how the universe itself was bolted and
screwed together, believing I saw here how heaven and earth could come unhinged
when some essential cottering pin was tapped out which would undo the whole
vast assemblage of stars and galaxies in their wheeling rotations and send them
plummeting through the void of space towards some final ruin out on the
furthest mearing of the universe and even if my childish fear at that specific
moment did not run to such complete detail, only such cosmic awareness could
account for the waves of anxiety that gripped me as I stood over those engine
parts on the hayseed floor soul sick with an anxiety which was not soothed one
bit the following day when my father drove the tractor out of the hayshed with
a clear spout of smoke blurting from the exhaust…’ Marcus is quite an
articulate, even at times verbose, prose stylist, for an engineer. Proust had
his madeleine, McCormack has his tractor engine.
This idea of incipient collapse extends to
‘the global economic catastrophe, all this talk of virus and contagion, it is
now clear to me that there are other types of chaos beyond the material satisfactions
of things falling down since, it appears, out there in the ideal realm of
finance and currency, economic constructs come apart in a different way or at
least in ways specific to the things they are, abstract structures succumbing
to intensely rarefied viruses which attack worth and values and the confidence
which underpin them, swelling them beyond their optimal range to the point
where they overbalance and eventually topple.’
Similarly, and in keeping with his Achillean
sensitivity to perceived offences against his amour propre, or perhaps it is
his integrity as a concerned citizen, he also has quite a hard-on against the havoc
reeked by the venal short-termism of local councilors, TDs, developers and
builders, looking to circumvent planning and health and safety regulations with
a nod and a wink.
On the home front, his anxiety about the
centre not holding and things falling apart is made manifest not just in the
body politic, but also the physical body, when Mairead is infected with the
coliform Cryptosporidium viral parasite, after a trip to the opening of Agnes’
first show at a gallery in Galway, a reference to the outbreak of food
poisoning there in 2007 caused by infected water.
If this
all sounds a little abstract and heady, it is in the familial moments that
Marcus’ humanity survives, best exemplified in how attentively he nurses
Mairead through her illness. Technology, of itself, is an agent of neither
control nor chaos: that depends on how it is used. Thus, the amusing father and
son exchange about the generational gap in popular musical taste which takes
place when Darragh, Skyping from Australia, asks his Dad if he has made any
headway with Radiohead’s Kid A. In
Marcus’ opinion, ‘it sounded a lot like unleaded King Crimson’, a band his
offspring describes as, ‘music for engineers, all those dissonant chords laid
down at right angles to each other’, prompting Marcus’ conclusion, ‘exactly, my
generation demanded more from our music than soft emoting.’
Mike McCormack is an important writer, not
just in the Irish context, but internationally. Writing from and about the
furthest edge of Europe, he is leagues ahead of many of his more cosmopolitanly
located contemporaries in tapping the pulse of the zeitgeist.
