Mike McCormack Meet the Author

need not fear, he will be setting out on a tour of the UK. Strong

wires, I hope! There isn't a single full

stop in Mike McCormack's The story is a monologue that reads

like a string of thoughts, sometimes poetic, sometimes

rough, often disturbing. And they tell us about one man

in one hour, on one day, His hopes and his disappointments,

his fears and loves. A character is revealed,

and so is the world This is a adventurous storytelling

by a master craftsman. It's quite a bold thing to do,

to write a novel of more than 250 It is, but you write the books that

present themselves to you, and that's the way the book,

the way Solar Bones You mean in its content,

in the thoughts that you were dealing with,

and not as a conscious It just seemed that was the way

you should write it down? Very early on in the composition

of the book, I realised that the narrator was the sort

of person he was, and that he would speak

in a continuous rolling rhythm. And once I had got that in my mind,

it became second nature. And it recalled in it one

of the exercises I had set myself years ago as a writer,

to come in every morning and sit down at my desk and write whatever

it was that came into my head. And the only strictures I put

on it was that it had to transition neatly from what I had done the day

before and that it had And so when I realised the book

was going to be written in a continuous ongoing rhythm,

I recalled that exercise. There is a natural feeling, I think,

most readers will have, of a kind It would be hard to think that

you didn't have Joyce somewhere in your head when you were producing

a book of this kind. People have spoken about the book

as a stream-of-consciousness novel, It doesn't have that kind

of telegraphic staccato rhythms that you associate

with stream of consciousness. It's much more an attempt to write

something continuous, However, as an Irish writer,

I've always been conscious of the fact that our great writers

are experimental writers, I've always admired their

recklessness and courage, So I would like as a writer

to think that you had a part of that yourself,

so that was where I took my... And of course, you're writing not

just about an individual whose thoughts are happy and sad

and confused, and sometimes crystal clear, and whose

emotions are laid bare. And you are writing about a feeling

of a country coming out of, really, an economic catastrophe which has

impacted on people's lives in a very direct way,

so it's a very contemporary novel I didn't set out to write a novel

of the crash, or post-crash. Basically, what I set out to do

was to capture the mind and life of this one

man, this engineer. And as an engineer,

as a civil engineer, that puts him at a nexus of a whole

series of forces, politics, economics, all sorts of social

movements and everything like that. Even civic catastrophes,

like contamination of water The allure for me about Marcus

Conway is that he's an engineer, God gave us heaven and earth

and then He hands it over to engineers, and engineers make

the world, and I was interested in seeing this man, who has this

complete involvement with the world So that was what I found

attractive about him. Well, you talk about

the engineering, you also dropped in God there,

and of course the book unfolds on All Souls' Day,

the idea that there are these souls It begins with the tolling

of the Angelus bell, and that bell seems to toll right

through the book. I mean, you talk of its rhythmic

character and the way it rolls on, and I suppose the sound of that

as a kind of call to prayer, it really goes right

through the book from beginning The book is an hour

long and it's suspended One is the divine marker at 12:00

and the other is the temporal marker for the 1:00 news at 1:00,

so the book is spanned between... It's an hour long but in

that hour he gets... He's inundated with a cascade

of memories of his whole life. He's a soul who's susceptible

to that kind of thing. And he himself remarks about that

hour in the middle of the day. He always found it a soft,

strange hour, in which the morning's best energies are gone and it's too

early to sit down for the dinner, and the 1:00 news hasn't happened

yet, so it's betwixt and between, and it seems to be susceptible

to people like him. There's a fatalism running

through the book too, a sense that things aren't random,

that they appear And he talks about putting one foot

in front of the other We're doomed to go through this

journey in a very deliberate Is a nobility in itself

and a heroism in itself, The book is a hymn to the everyday

in many senses, and it's a hymn to a world that he has put his faith

in, not only has he built, I think the longer I've dwelt on it

after I've written it, the more it has kind of revealed

itself to me as a book about faith. He went looking for God

at an early stage in his life, and God effectively gave him two

fingers and told him to go away And he turned from God

and he became an engineer. And as his son says,

his son puts it, he says, "You turned from the cross

and you took up the theodolite, You laid that on the

world and that." So it's a book about faith

and a book about the everyday. It's a hymn to engineers

and engineering. You talk about the experimental

tradition in so much Irish writing. And that sort of heartbeat

in his dramatic prose is the kind The heartbeat and the idea

of a pulse was very much a concern with me in the book,

and I don't know whether I managed to capture it or not,

but it was certainly one Of course, being steeped in Beckett

as well, you assimilate these things by osmosis,

and they become a part of your fabric as a writer,

as an Irish writer. You talk about being

an Irish writer. Do you ever find that it's a bit

weighty and a bit imprisoning? I've always considered myself

to be an Irish writer, whatever that means,

but for me it meant tapping into that reckless and generous

tradition of experiment that Our greatest writers

were unusual, I think, in that our greatest writers,

our greatest fiction writers are exclusively our

experimental writers. Beckett and Joyce and Flann O'Brien,

the father, son and holy ghost, And if you're talking

about any other writers, you've lowered your eyesight,

you've lowered your So I wanted to take my cue

from their experimental tradition, and did it tentatively

in Notes From A Coma, my prayer novel, but I think grabbed

it a bit more two-handedly in Solar Mike McCormack, thank you very much

for talking about Solar Bones. A decent enough day across most of

the UK today. We have a bit of rain in the forecast a night, mostly

across northern areas, and it has been raining in Northern Ireland,

Scotland, the Lake