Mike McCormack: ‘There is no good time to lose your father’

It is little wonder that Mike McCormack’s fiction is haunted by death and fascinated with fathers and their families’ fates.

The father of Nealon, the protagonist of his new novel, This Plague of Souls, had a few pints after a funeral, came home, went to bed and never woke up, four months before his son’s Leaving Cert. This was also the fate, almost word for word, of McCormack’s father.

The author became a father at 48, about the same age his own father was when he died. A few hours before his son, Saul, was born, McCormack had finished his third novel, Solar Bones, and sent it to his agent. The author had been dropped by his prestigious London publisher, Jonathan Cape, after his second novel, Notes from a Coma, failed to sell, and his new one was roundly rejected at first by publishers perhaps more focused on the till than on the experimental.

Tramp Press believed in it, however, and the book went on to win the Goldsmiths Prize and the €100,000 International Dublin Literary Award. A superb stage adaptation by Michael West won Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards for the actor Stanley Townsend and the director Lynne Parker.

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Solar Bones is the story of Marcus Conway, a recently deceased Mayo engineer who roams his empty house reflecting on his life. Told in a single sentence, it is a beautifully constructed novel, profound yet accessible.

This Plague of Souls is the story of Nealon, a Mayo artist possibly turned scam artist who returns home after his trial collapses following a long time on remand. His wife and child have gone and a mysterious stranger keeps ringing, offering information about his family in exchange for details of Nealon’s activities. All this against the backdrop of a national emergency, an inchoate sense of threat, possibly payback for Ireland’s ambiguous role as a staging post in the war on terror.

As the parallels suggest, the new novel is set in the same world as Solar Bones and is the second part of what will be a trilogy, but this is a metaphysical thriller, a mystery that prompts the deeper question “what’s it all about?”, not just the usual “what’s it about?” Readers seeking the satisfaction of a whodunit may be disappointed. A Francis Bacon quotation springs to mind: “The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.”

“There is no good time to lose your father,” McCormack says, “but there is a special difficulty in losing him at 18 when you are just finding your way in the world. In some sense that is the incident that made me. It has inflected my depictions of fathers in my books. They are generally decent men trying to do their best for wife and family, frequently floundering, uncomprehending, not sullen, oppressive figures. I think that is partly wishful thinking on my part.”

[ Mike McCormack: It all started in the wild west of Louisburgh ]

Becoming a father himself has been “a continual source of wonderment” but also a great responsibility to look after his health and the planet’s. “Having a family is an incredible adventure, but I come from a line of men who get heart attacks. I want to be around for Saul. I don’t want his 18th year to be like mine. I also buy books now thinking I’m going to hand them on to Saul. I was in Bell, Book and Candle in Galway and bought him a gorgeous box edition of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson.”

McCormack has a grá for genre fiction, and his writing has long paid homage to the works that inspired him as a reader. He studied English and philosophy at NUI Galway, where he “was the dullest student ever but a great reader”. JG Ballard and Philip K Dick’s science fiction inspired Notes from a Coma. “When I was 18, at home in Louisburgh, nothing outside but green fields and cows, my head was with Isaac Asimov in the stars. I thought that was a powerful, magical achievement, a continual enchantment. It doesn’t have to be a place; it can bring you into the mind of someone else,” McCormack says, citing Claire Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor. “It’s why we read fiction in the first place: to have our heads and our minds and our worlds expanded.”

As McCormack’s trademark cowboy hat – a 40th-birthday present – suggests, cowboy books are another love. He uses the first page of Jack Schafer’s Shane as a masterclass in how to start a novel. He is also enamoured of Louis Lamour, his first encounter with landscape as nurturing or adversarial. The peat bogs of Ballycroy are McCormack’s Mojave Desert. He wanted his own Flann O’Brien story so wrote one as the opening tale in Forensic Songs. This Plague of Souls is his homage to the suddenness, the sharp rhythms of noir authors such as Pascal Garnier, Frédéric Dard and Georges Simenon.

“Would it be possible to write a book of which it would be impossible to speak, where I don’t know what happens, and how to make that artistically credible and skilful without it coming across as clueless, as an authorial failure?

“I wanted it to be a metaphysical noir, by which I mean reality and the world itself would be at stake; it has all the dark shading and tough-guy rhythms, but not in the sense of revenge or an orthodox prize, or reward.”

This Plague of Souls shares a thematic kinship with Solar Bones, in that it is about men trying to make the world: how do they go about it? To what extent do they succeed or are self-defeating?

The idea of a man on trial for a mysterious offence struck me as Kafkaesque.

“It’s not something that crossed my mind, but Kafka’s In the Penal Colony would have been a touchstone text for years.” Notes from a Coma features a penal experiment in which prisoners agree to be put in a coma on a ship in Killary Harbour.

Covid-19 changed the focus of This Plague of Souls. “I started this book a long time ago, and it really shifted shape during the pandemic. It started out as how did the world fall apart, but it morphed into how we put it back together. I see it now as a postpandemic novel: this will pass; what sort of world are we going to make? Is it going to be hedge-fund managers and financiers? The heroes of Covid for me were artists, who kept our spirit alive, people who worked in shops, who took our bins away, healthcare workers.

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“I loved the first lockdown. We spent three months in our little garden with our child. But it got progressively more wearisome after that – creeping mental exhaustion, like your soul had a slow puncture; you didn’t realise you were becoming deflated. I also became very aware of living in a world where my rights of assembly and travel were seriously curtailed, although it was the right thing to do.

“This book shares a thematic kinship with Solar Bones, in that it is about men trying to make the world: how do they go about it? To what extent do they succeed or are self-defeating? The world coming apart is synonymous with families coming apart.

“When I finished Solar Bones I knew I was going to do this. It’s not a thematic or linear development, more three meditations on a theme. I conceive of it as an altarpiece of three panels, where the two side panels, including Solar Bones, are landscapes. This is the dark centrepiece in portrait. Is it a purgatorio? I don’t know.”

McCormack believes his writing has changed not because of parenthood but because of the wisdom of age. His 1996 debut collection, Getting It in the Head, is full of explosions, fires and guns, “big swinging amplitudes”. There is a knife in Solar Bones, but it is a kitchen knife, worn smooth with age, symbolic of domesticity. “I’m glad my characters have grown up with me. There is more of a focus on family.”

Even the soundtracks he writes to have mellowed, from Scandi death metal to Hank Williams, George Jones, Tony McMahon’s An Buachaillín Bán and Burial’s second album, Untrue. “I was thinking, How can that be made into a novel? Is there a dubstep novel?”

This book was so long in gestation that McCormack had forgotten one of its influences, “the stars under which it is written”, until his former creative-writing student Brenda Romero, the award-winning video-game designer, heard him read the opening pages and pointed out its similarities to the architecture and storytelling of a video game, something McCormack’s fellow Mayo author Colin Barrett also recognised in his blurb. “I’m not even a good game player. Eco is the only game I played to the end, but I found it compelling, the world building, the way it pushes and pulls the character along.”

McCormack was born in London to emigrant parents from Mayo, but at the age of three, having spent the summer with his grandparents on their farm in Doohoma, he announced he was staying, and he did. “Isn’t that crazy? I lived with my grandparents and aunts on a farm in north Mayo. The older I get the more vivid and valuable it becomes to me. My grandfather was a big hero. I followed him around like a lamb. He seemed to me to be a giant. I drew on it heavily in Crowe’s Requiem. My brother said he was only a small fellah, but I can remember him clear as day walking out into a field of oats with a scythe.”

[ Mike McCormack: ‘A lot of people had faith to stick by me in the difficult years’ ]

Connacht, Mayo specifically, is subconsciously core to McCormack’s writing. “My pen seems to think that that is where my mother-lode is. I never made any conscious decision, but this obsession with place is more than just landscape, even though landscape is a huge part of it. It’s an imaginative standpoint, the light, the interactions. The first transatlantic flight and cable came in and out of the west. Mayo is full of penitential shrines and pilgrim paths. The whole Mayo, God help us thing. I lived under Croagh Patrick, and there used to be a night pilgrimage, lads getting into cars after dance halls to climb the Reek, a continuous stream of light up Croagh Patrick, till the bishops knocked it on the head, for there was too much blackguarding.

“I worked on a project on emigration in the Linen Hall in Castlebar. Our imagination stretched from Kilburn and over to Boston and New York; that’s where our families were. Lads in the midlands working for Bord na Móna: what were their horizons? Our conception of the world was actually very big.”

If he rejected London for Mayo aged three, it feels as if the metropolis was never on his wavelength either.

“Do you know, it’s funny: I’ve never worked with an English editor. Robin [Robertson at Cape] and Francis [Bickmore at Canongate] are Scottish. I don’t think English editors get what I do. When I did my fourth book with Lilliput, I found it really striking, the amount of things I didn’t have to explain or nuance. I realised before I’d been translating myself, continually in explanatory mode. It reminded me of an essay by Desmond Fennell: there is no such thing as Irish literature as long as we are trying to win the ear of Oxbridge graduates. He overstates the argument for effect, but he has a point. It was a smoother process again bringing Solar Bones to Lisa [Coen of Tramp], who is from Cross, outside Ballinrobe. In retrospect it was obvious that it had to have an Irish publisher.”

This Plague of Souls is published by Tramp Press