The Mookse and the Gripes discussion

Solar Bones, by Mike McCormack



2016
223 pp

Once a year, on All Souls’ Day, it is said in Ireland that the dead may return. Solar Bones is the story of one such visit. Marcus Conway, a middle-aged engineer, turns up one afternoon at his kitchen table and considers the events that took him away and then brought him home again.

Funny and strange, McCormack’s ambitious and other-worldly novel plays with form and defies convention. This is profound new work is by one of Ireland’s most important contemporary novelists. A beautiful and haunting elegy, this story of order and chaos, love and loss captures how minor decisions ripple into waves and test our integrity every day.

I finished this last night. The first thing I would say is DON'T READ THE BLURB ON THE BACK! Apart from that, I found it an absorbing read. The middle bits seemed more like a conventional narrative but typeset oddly rather than something really experimental. The beginning and end were the strongest bits for me. DON'T READ THE BLURB ON THE BACK!

I didn't read the blurb and entirely agreed with you after reading the book when I did eventually read it. Struck me a bit like Agatha Christie's publisher blurbing her as "Learn how the narrator killed Robert Ackroyd"

But then I found out the author's advice is actually:
READ THE BLURB ON THE BACK!

To quote:
“I made a deliberate decision to flag that at the beginning so that it would not come as a cheap reveal at the end of the book. I like the way that it privileges the reader throughout with a knowledge that Marcus does not have … it gives the reader a hold on the situation that Marcus does not have.”

https://www.writing.ie/interviews/lit...

I haven't gotten my copy of this yet but now I don't know if I should read the blurb or not!

Ok, so I apologise for scaremongering. However, it's still not quite right. The following might be considered a spoiler, but is probably only actually what is deliberately written on the back of the book - make your own choice whether to read further. As the whole book is the recollections of the already dead Marcus, actually what happens is that the blurb puts us in the same position as him, not in a privileged position.

No using spoiler tags, Neil! Could you edit and remove them please? They are impossible to read on many devices and as a group we decided against them. You can still warn of spoilers in your text. Thanks!

Sorry - done. And, actually, the more I think about it, the more I am coming to realise that the blurb could actually be the cleverest thing about this book. The author has managed to do the scene setting and create the atmosphere for the book without actually using up a single word of his novel. I think that might be close to genius!

No worries at all! Thanks for the edit!

Neil wrote: "As the whole book is the recollections of the already dead Marcus, actually what happens is that the blurb puts us in the same position as him, not in a privileged position. "

Not quite sure I agree as it seems to only gradually dawn on him that he is dead. He clearly can't understand what is going on at the start of the novel and why everything is so odd.

The bizarre spoiler in the blurb that is apparently not a spoiler debate aside, think this may be my favourite so far (out of 4 read).

Pleased also to see it on the list given it turned out to be ineligible for the Booker
(see https://www.theguardian.com/books/boo... - incidentally on the comments on that article I said it would make the Goldsmiths instead).

Although I suspect the fact that a novel from a male Irish writer won last year may count against Solar Bones this year? (And yes I know it really shouldn't, I just think it will.)

Thanks for sharing the article Paul - very interesting. I would definitely support the rule change.

Based on empirical evidence being Irish is extremely predictive of success in the Goldsmith Prize.

At the same time of course that the inclusion of American authors seems to have impacted badly on Irish authors chance of winning or even being long listed for the Booker prize.

Gumble's Yard wrote: "Based on empirical evidence being Irish is extremely predictive of success in the Goldsmith Prize.

At the same time of course that the inclusion of American authors seems to have impacted badly o..."

Ireland is historically no 2 (to UK of course) in Booker winners, but the Irish press here make a valid point that they shouldn't have to sell the rights to a British publisher to be Booker eligible given the book is actually sold in the UK.

To be fair US books have the same hurdle.

E.g. Sellout, was originally published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a US firm, in 2015. It was readily available (and often reviewed) in the UK, but it was not eligible for the 2015 Booker. It was re-published by a UK publisher this year, Oneworld Publications, and hence eligible for the 2016 award, and indeed is now on the shortlist. Indeed I wonder if it was so published precisely to make it eligible, given it had won a major US award.

I think we can all be very grateful to Oneworld publication.

Without them we could never have read your glowing tributes to The Sellout which have been the highlight of the Booker thread.

My copy shipped from the UK this morning. Can't wait to get this one.

McCormack confirmed tonight that you were supposed to read the massive notaspoiler on the back cover before you read the book.

So for the avoidance of doubt and to help anyone reading the book who doesn't naturally read back covers first....

MARCUS CONWAY IS DEAD

Solar Bones is a lyrical story of an ordinary life. Marcus Conway speaks for the civil engineers of the world and for the concrete underpinning the local governments public works.
It's a triumph to tell such a simple story in such a smooth, continuous, passage of text.
I liked Solar Bones a lot. I hope Solar Bones wins the 2016 Goldsmiths prize.

I liked it a lot when I read it, perhaps favourite (*) but now 3 weeks or so after having done so the details (characters, language) have stayed with me much less than any of the other 5, so ended up slipping down my list.

(* well obviously behind Transit but that is a given)

Good call Jonathan, it does indeed win.

Well deserved. A worthy winner.

Best bit of news I have heard all day. I read this back in June and my first thought was that Solar Bones was an ideal submission for this prize.

So glad that it has won.

Joe has always been the staunchest advocate of Solar Bones, and flagged this before the Shortlist announcement- great perception on your part, Joe.

The Chair of judges on why it won

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/b...

Jonathan wrote: "Joe has always been the staunchest advocate of Solar Bones, and flagged this before the Shortlist announcement- great perception on your part, Joe."

Yes, thanks Joe.

Going to give this a go I think. Currently reading The Underground Railroad and really disappointed so I need something to get my teeth into.

this

this book

this book just

won the prestigious Goldsmiths Prize, given for innovation in the novel form, which is what impelled me to read it in the first place, and I sort of wish I had finished it prior to its winning, because now it will look like I am just being contrary that I really didn't like it since a lot of people did, although the main reason apparently that it won is that it is purportedly one long 223 page sentence, but

the only reason that is so is because the bloody author doesn't use proper punctuation especially eschewing periods where they actually belong, like during dialogue scenes where he just conveniently deletes them at the ends of lines, which really annoyed me, since

the lines just run on and on and on so that it is really hard to find a place to pause in one's reading, and I wasn't about to spend several hours slogging through mindnumbing repetitions in one sitting and as it was I had to constantly backtrack and re-read sections because by the time I got halfway through a thought I forgot what the hell I had been reading in the first place, although

that might have been intentional because on at least three occasions the protagonist talks about how he has been driving in a car and has gone several miles unconsciously without paying any attention to the roads and finds himself at his destination with not a clue how he got there and that is more or less how I felt reading this, which is why it took me six days to get through a relatively short book I should have been able to read in two, and also

the other noteworthy controversy about the book is that the back cover 'gives away' the fact that the protagonist, Marcus Conway, is actually dead, although we don't find that out till the final pages and whether that is something the reader should discover for themselves instead has been the subject of some discussion, but it doesn't really make a shitload of difference, because aside from the fact that the beginning of the book takes place on All Souls Day and apparently Marcus has come back to ponder his dreary life, which is something I kind of had to piece together from the fact that the beginning of the book takes place in March and the ending in November, apparently of the year before, but

then the book skips around in Conway's mind and memory so that he IS actually alive during the vast majority of the book, and it's not like the revelation he is dead CHANGES things, a la Bruce Willis in 'The Sixth Sense', and it might have been more interesting to discover that Marcus was in actuality a squirrel, or maybe a raccoon, and because what he thinks about and talks about endlessly is less than fascinating anyway, unless

one is enthralled with long descriptions of taking apart tractors or the nauseating details of a cryptosporidium epidemic with all of the concomitant talk about vomit and diarrhea, or the scintillating tension derived from whether Marcus is going to sign off on the foundation of a public building for which he is the managing engineer, that has had three different pours of concrete, so that when winter comes the foundation might crack and we get about twenty pages on that whole mess, because it is important to include one major painfully obvious symbolic metaphor, because the author is Irish after all and wants us to know he's read his Joyce and Beckett, and we get as well

the details of his daughter's kooky art installations, which were at least of minor interest to me, although not much is made of those anyway, so that you are left just going around in circles attempting to derive any importance to any of this, but then maybe it's me and I am just not clever enough to figure out the point of going on and on until, like Marcus himself I just wanted to say

stop

for the love of Jesus

stop talking

getting carried away like this on

tidal waves of nonsense

And one week later, Solar Bones also takes the Irish Book Awards Book Club Novel of the Year, again beating The Lesser Bohemians to the prize.