:00:00. > 3:59:59need not fear, he will be setting out on a tour of the UK. Strong
:00:00. > :00:00.wires, I hope! There isn't a single full
:00:00. > :00:00.stop in Mike McCormack's The story is a monologue that reads
:00:07. > :00:10.like a string of thoughts, sometimes poetic, sometimes
:00:11. > :00:13.rough, often disturbing. And they tell us about one man
:00:14. > :00:16.in one hour, on one day, His hopes and his disappointments,
:00:17. > :00:23.his fears and loves. A character is revealed,
:00:24. > :00:26.and so is the world This is a adventurous storytelling
:00:27. > :00:32.by a master craftsman. It's quite a bold thing to do,
:00:33. > :00:55.to write a novel of more than 250 It is, but you write the books that
:00:56. > :01:02.present themselves to you, and that's the way the book,
:01:03. > :01:04.the way Solar Bones You mean in its content,
:01:05. > :01:09.in the thoughts that you were dealing with,
:01:10. > :01:11.and not as a conscious It just seemed that was the way
:01:12. > :01:15.you should write it down? Very early on in the composition
:01:16. > :01:18.of the book, I realised that the narrator was the sort
:01:19. > :01:22.of person he was, and that he would speak
:01:23. > :01:26.in a continuous rolling rhythm. And once I had got that in my mind,
:01:27. > :01:33.it became second nature. And it recalled in it one
:01:34. > :01:36.of the exercises I had set myself years ago as a writer,
:01:37. > :01:40.to come in every morning and sit down at my desk and write whatever
:01:41. > :01:47.it was that came into my head. And the only strictures I put
:01:48. > :01:50.on it was that it had to transition neatly from what I had done the day
:01:51. > :01:53.before and that it had And so when I realised the book
:01:54. > :01:59.was going to be written in a continuous ongoing rhythm,
:02:00. > :02:03.I recalled that exercise. There is a natural feeling, I think,
:02:04. > :02:07.most readers will have, of a kind It would be hard to think that
:02:08. > :02:13.you didn't have Joyce somewhere in your head when you were producing
:02:14. > :02:19.a book of this kind. People have spoken about the book
:02:20. > :02:23.as a stream-of-consciousness novel, It doesn't have that kind
:02:24. > :02:30.of telegraphic staccato rhythms that you associate
:02:31. > :02:36.with stream of consciousness. It's much more an attempt to write
:02:37. > :02:38.something continuous, However, as an Irish writer,
:02:39. > :02:42.I've always been conscious of the fact that our great writers
:02:43. > :02:46.are experimental writers, I've always admired their
:02:47. > :02:50.recklessness and courage, So I would like as a writer
:02:51. > :02:56.to think that you had a part of that yourself,
:02:57. > :03:00.so that was where I took my... And of course, you're writing not
:03:01. > :03:05.just about an individual whose thoughts are happy and sad
:03:06. > :03:09.and confused, and sometimes crystal clear, and whose
:03:10. > :03:12.emotions are laid bare. And you are writing about a feeling
:03:13. > :03:20.of a country coming out of, really, an economic catastrophe which has
:03:21. > :03:24.impacted on people's lives in a very direct way,
:03:25. > :03:27.so it's a very contemporary novel I didn't set out to write a novel
:03:28. > :03:36.of the crash, or post-crash. Basically, what I set out to do
:03:37. > :03:39.was to capture the mind and life of this one
:03:40. > :03:43.man, this engineer. And as an engineer,
:03:44. > :03:45.as a civil engineer, that puts him at a nexus of a whole
:03:46. > :03:49.series of forces, politics, economics, all sorts of social
:03:50. > :03:56.movements and everything like that. Even civic catastrophes,
:03:57. > :03:59.like contamination of water The allure for me about Marcus
:04:00. > :04:04.Conway is that he's an engineer, God gave us heaven and earth
:04:05. > :04:10.and then He hands it over to engineers, and engineers make
:04:11. > :04:13.the world, and I was interested in seeing this man, who has this
:04:14. > :04:18.complete involvement with the world So that was what I found
:04:19. > :04:23.attractive about him. Well, you talk about
:04:24. > :04:25.the engineering, you also dropped in God there,
:04:26. > :04:28.and of course the book unfolds on All Souls' Day,
:04:29. > :04:34.the idea that there are these souls It begins with the tolling
:04:35. > :04:39.of the Angelus bell, and that bell seems to toll right
:04:40. > :04:41.through the book. I mean, you talk of its rhythmic
:04:42. > :04:45.character and the way it rolls on, and I suppose the sound of that
:04:46. > :04:50.as a kind of call to prayer, it really goes right
:04:51. > :04:52.through the book from beginning The book is an hour
:04:53. > :04:55.long and it's suspended One is the divine marker at 12:00
:04:56. > :05:02.and the other is the temporal marker for the 1:00 news at 1:00,
:05:03. > :05:11.so the book is spanned between... It's an hour long but in
:05:12. > :05:14.that hour he gets... He's inundated with a cascade
:05:15. > :05:18.of memories of his whole life. He's a soul who's susceptible
:05:19. > :05:21.to that kind of thing. And he himself remarks about that
:05:22. > :05:24.hour in the middle of the day. He always found it a soft,
:05:25. > :05:28.strange hour, in which the morning's best energies are gone and it's too
:05:29. > :05:34.early to sit down for the dinner, and the 1:00 news hasn't happened
:05:35. > :05:38.yet, so it's betwixt and between, and it seems to be susceptible
:05:39. > :05:41.to people like him. There's a fatalism running
:05:42. > :05:43.through the book too, a sense that things aren't random,
:05:44. > :05:46.that they appear And he talks about putting one foot
:05:47. > :05:52.in front of the other We're doomed to go through this
:05:53. > :05:56.journey in a very deliberate Is a nobility in itself
:05:57. > :06:06.and a heroism in itself, The book is a hymn to the everyday
:06:07. > :06:13.in many senses, and it's a hymn to a world that he has put his faith
:06:14. > :06:17.in, not only has he built, I think the longer I've dwelt on it
:06:18. > :06:22.after I've written it, the more it has kind of revealed
:06:23. > :06:25.itself to me as a book about faith. He went looking for God
:06:26. > :06:28.at an early stage in his life, and God effectively gave him two
:06:29. > :06:31.fingers and told him to go away And he turned from God
:06:32. > :06:36.and he became an engineer. And as his son says,
:06:37. > :06:39.his son puts it, he says, "You turned from the cross
:06:40. > :06:42.and you took up the theodolite, You laid that on the
:06:43. > :06:47.world and that." So it's a book about faith
:06:48. > :06:55.and a book about the everyday. It's a hymn to engineers
:06:56. > :06:57.and engineering. You talk about the experimental
:06:58. > :07:00.tradition in so much Irish writing. And that sort of heartbeat
:07:01. > :07:10.in his dramatic prose is the kind The heartbeat and the idea
:07:11. > :07:25.of a pulse was very much a concern with me in the book,
:07:26. > :07:29.and I don't know whether I managed to capture it or not,
:07:30. > :07:31.but it was certainly one Of course, being steeped in Beckett
:07:32. > :07:36.as well, you assimilate these things by osmosis,
:07:37. > :07:39.and they become a part of your fabric as a writer,
:07:40. > :07:45.as an Irish writer. You talk about being
:07:46. > :07:48.an Irish writer. Do you ever find that it's a bit
:07:49. > :07:56.weighty and a bit imprisoning? I've always considered myself
:07:57. > :08:01.to be an Irish writer, whatever that means,
:08:02. > :08:05.but for me it meant tapping into that reckless and generous
:08:06. > :08:10.tradition of experiment that Our greatest writers
:08:11. > :08:14.were unusual, I think, in that our greatest writers,
:08:15. > :08:17.our greatest fiction writers are exclusively our
:08:18. > :08:20.experimental writers. Beckett and Joyce and Flann O'Brien,
:08:21. > :08:25.the father, son and holy ghost, And if you're talking
:08:26. > :08:29.about any other writers, you've lowered your eyesight,
:08:30. > :08:31.you've lowered your So I wanted to take my cue
:08:32. > :08:39.from their experimental tradition, and did it tentatively
:08:40. > :08:43.in Notes From A Coma, my prayer novel, but I think grabbed
:08:44. > :08:48.it a bit more two-handedly in Solar Mike McCormack, thank you very much
:08:49. > :09:10.for talking about Solar Bones. A decent enough day across most of
:09:11. > :09:14.the UK today. We have a bit of rain in the forecast a night, mostly
:09:15. > :09:16.across northern areas, and it has been raining in Northern Ireland,
:09:17. > :09:17.Scotland, the Lake