The Brooklyn Rail

Mike McCormack seems to be tuned in to a different cosmic frequency than the rest of us. Whilst almost all of his work begins in a small, sleepy village in County Mayo on the west coast of Ireland, he has a unique way of making familiar landscapes and usually quiet lives extraordinary and surreal. He sees his work as a triangulation of the science fiction writers J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick, and the Irish naturalist John McGahern.

Although McCormack published his first short story collection, Getting It in the Head (1996), which won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and followed it up with three strikingly original books—Crowe’s Requiem (1998), Notes From a Coma (2005), and Forensic Songs (2012)—it wasn’t until the publication of Solar Bones (2016) that McCormack’s books began to receive the readership and recognition they deserved. Solar Bones earned him the Goldsmiths Prize, which was set up to award fiction which “breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form.”

McCormack’s latest novel, This Plague of Souls, follows Nealon, freshly released from prison after the collapse of a vague trial of national significance. Upon returning home to find his wife and child gone, he is plagued by an anonymous caller who offers cryptic clues about Nealon’s alleged crimes and his family’s whereabouts. Part-noir, part-metaphysical cat-and-mouse, This Plague of Souls is another rich and welcome addition to what has already become one of the most refreshingly strange bodies of work in Irish literature.

I spoke with Mike about the Irish literary tradition, how working with Irish editors has impacted his writing, and how both the work of engineers and God, the Creator, has informed his own. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Tadhg Hoey (Rail): There weren’t too many writers in Ireland writing the kind of fiction like you were when you started back in 1996.

Mike McCormack: No, there weren’t. My generation weren’t given to technical and thematic experiment. I think it was one of the reasons why I might have slipped under the radar. A book like Notes from a Coma got very good reviews. It was brought out in 2005, which is right at the top of the Celtic Tiger. We know that the Celtic Tiger had lots of energy, but it didn’t have much originality. There certainly was a feeling that it really wasn’t a book for the time; it just didn’t fit in. The reviews were kind, really kind to it. People said: “this is original”; “this is something new.” But it just fell over the side of a cliff in terms of sales and publicity. It wrongly, I think, got the reputation for being an awkward book, or being radically experimental, when it wasn’t. But, I think, by the measure of the times, it might have been.

I kept going with that kind of experimental thing and wrote Solar Bones. The world was more receptive to an experiment when I brought out Solar Bones. Small presses had published things like Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013) and other books. They paved the way, I suppose, and broke through the ice a little bit. And Solar Bones went to Tramp Press because they not only believed in it, but they believed there was an audience there for it as well. They, crucially, said that they think the book industry makes an awful lot of too-easy assumptions about readership. They seem to believe that readers will only go for a specific type of nineteenth-century novel. It was their belief that if the book is good enough, there is an appetite out there for experimental works. That was part of the reason why they took the book and ran with it—and, I think, it’s fair to say made a success of it.

Rail: A couple of years ago, I read Barry McCrea’s novel, The First Verse, another overlooked novel which came out in 2005. There was a review of it in the London Review of Books, and the reviewer ends it by pointing out that it was strange a book like it couldn’t find a publisher in Ireland. Your first books were published in England, and you’ve said in the past you were very thankful to now be published in Ireland, as one of the main things you found was that you had to kind of overexplain yourself to English editors who maybe didn’t quite get what you wanted to do.

McCormack: Yeah, it was my experience. I wouldn’t have noticed it except for after Notes From a Coma came out in 2005 and just fell over the side of a cliff in terms of sales, it pretty much ended my relationship with Jonathan Cape. So with the next book, partially because of the book itself as well, I couldn’t get a publisher for years. I think it was seven years before I could find a publisher for another one of my books. It was a book of short stories, Forensic Songs (2014). I brought my book of short stories to Lilliput Press. I worked with Irish editors there, and I just found it incredibly frictionless. The number of things I didn’t have to explain; the number of things I didn’t have to elaborate on. And it struck me that we are always explaining ourselves and translating ourselves.

There is an essay out there by Desmond Fennel in one of his collections. I don’t think the essay is completely about this, but he makes this point in it that as long as Irish writers are trying to win Oxbridge ears, there won’t be an Irish literature. I think he over-dramatizes the issue—says it very loudly for effect. But there’s truth in it. Certainly, when I worked with the editors at Lilliput, and then when I went on to work at Tramp, I found it a much smoother process than I had with my other books.

I was very grateful to be working for Cape, and happy up to a point. But I did find it a very different experience. I partially worked with another editor on This Plague of Souls. He’s an Irishman in England, from, I think, Tipperary. He was just brilliant. Really understood everything I was trying to do and what I was trying to say. I think that English publishers ran scared of experimental work for years. I think that runs counter to Irish literature’s instinct, right?

It’s funny. Think of our Mount Rushmore. Our literary Mount Rushmore for fiction is James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Flann O’Brien. There they are—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. They have very little in common, except for the fact that they were experimental writers. They all went to some trouble to expand the received form. And their achievement, their experimental achievement, is the spinal achievement in Irish literary fiction. It seemed to me that what they were saying was, “go forth and experiment,” and I took that seriously. I thought that’s what it is to be an Irish writer: go forth and experiment.

I think that British publishers have done their damnedest to bury their own experimental tradition, they’re not happy with it. They’re not safe with it in that they’ve marginalized people like J.G. Ballard and genuinely visionary talents like that. Even someone like Malcolm Lowry—really awkward angular sentences—they don’t know what to do with them. They know what to do with people like Virginia Woolf, and I love Virginia Woolf, but she’s the accepted face of experimental fiction.

Rail: I’m always so pleasantly surprised by the degree to which, in Ireland, when a new book comes out by you or Doireann Ní Ghríofa, or Eimear McBride, or Mia Gallagher—by which I mean, not exactly conventional fiction—the public are interested in it.

You reminded me there of Rob Doyle’s anthology of experimental Irish fiction, The Other Irish Tradition (2018), in which you feature, and which really could be just called “the Irish tradition,” because there’s so much experimental fiction, going back to Sterne and Swift. Experimental writing is the basis of Irish fiction.

McCormack: That’s what I think. I’m really glad you mentioned someone like Mia Gallagher. I think she’s a neglected talent. I think she deserves more exposure than she gets and that she’s a really serious practitioner. I have great regard for what she does. And Doireann—who would’ve thought that a book about a woman’s relationship with a poem would grow to take over the world the way it did. One of the things that’s happened in the last ten or fifteen years is that a really gifted generation of editors has grown up in journals, magazines, and small presses, and they recognize and know our Irish tradition.

They don’t get frightened if they see a manuscript coming across the table that looks fragmented or structurally different. They go: okay, let’s go with this. They recognize it as part of what we do. So now you have gifted editors out there, and magazines like Banshee, The Stinging Fly and other places like that, that are doing very, very interesting work. So Irish authors get their first editorial tuning, their first editorial encounter, with these editors who accept what they’re doing and who will try to add polish and try to further the project but won’t try to talk them out of it. They get this encouragement at an early time. That’s a really strong starting point.

An awful lot of those go on to publish with Irish presses, and then they get taken up, bought up by bigger presses in England. My own book is kind of like that. Solar Bones was bought by Tramp Press and was sold onto Canongate in England. So, there’s a different ecology out there, and there’s a different acceptance. There’s a great, busy, vibrant ecology of magazines. There’s a busy coterie of discerning editors out there, and then there’s a tier of very good publishers.

I think that people like Lilliput Press, Tramp Press, New Island, that they’re doing work which is fully the measure of anything being done in Britain—in terms of editorial work and quality. It wasn’t always like that. With the exception of—who I think in Irish kind of cultural life and literature is undervalued—Antony Farrell at Lilliput. I think his achievement over what now amounts to nearly a lifetime is quite extraordinary and is worthy of genuine celebration. He has published work that no one else would publish. And he’s shown to be right. He published Tim Robinson and John Moriarty, these really visionary writers who no one else would touch.

Rail: I’ve been in the Lilliput office. Just taking in the range of books he’s published. It’s the least patronizing thing for him to assume that he can publish all of these and that there’ll be an appetite out there for it. A lot of Irish publishing has followed suit.

McCormack: I think it’s one of the most moving things you can do is stand in that room in Lilliput. You look around at all the books Antony has published over his life. The last time I was there, it was over two hundred. It’s now over 250 or 300, or something like that. You look at it and you see the authors he’s published, and you see that this is what a man has done with his life. This is what he has wagered on, and that’s a genuinely moving experience. His judgment was sound. I have a great regard for him for what he did, and what he continues to do.

Rail: I’ve read all your books except Crowe’s Requiem, but I found This Plague of Souls to be the most difficult book to wrap my hands—even my head—around, in parts. I really enjoyed it, but it didn’t yield to me in the way I was kind of expecting—it eluded me at every turn. And one of the things I really liked, and I’m not even completely sure what I so liked about it, is at the end of the chapters when you kind of, this kind of panning effect—I mean, there’s so many. There’s a woman reading through a Boots catalogue. there’s a woman about to go on to buy a diver’s watch for a son, there’s two men digging a foundation for a structure. I believe you said you were trying to write a book that even you would find hard to explain.

McCormack: Without prejudging the book and without hemming it in before I wrote a word, there were a couple of tasks I set myself. I’d always wanted my own piece of noir. I’d always wanted to write a piece of noir—European Noir, not the tough guy American Noir. That’s not really my home, even though I love reading it. But I was very taken with the work of Frédéric Dard and, latterly, Georges Simenon and Pascal Garnier, who wrote these brilliant 150-page novels that just walked up on you, gave you a clip on the ear, walked off, and left you there with a black shadow on your soul.

That was one of the things that I set myself to do. And the other thing was that I would be able to write a book that I wouldn’t be able to explain or answer questions about. I can tell you what happens within the compass of the 170 pages. But what’s happened before you open the book? I don’t know. There are certain things that—if it’s not in the book, I don’t know it. Let’s put it that way. I don’t know if he is responsible for what he’s tasked with. I don’t know what happened to his wife and child, and on and on.

That was, I suppose, a philosophical conundrum that I set up for myself. I’m a great believer in clarity, and I wanted the book to be clear. Even clear about the things it was clueless about. That’s what I think I tried to achieve in it.

Rail: I read it for a second time the other day and what deepened the book and confounded me was the three conflicting narrate threads. There were the basic facts of Nealon’s story—the impressions we get of him in his early life. That narrative strand is complicated by the fact that we’ve just found out that Nealon is just out of prison, following the collapse of a vague trial that was of national interest. These strands are then further complicated by the thread of the man who has effectively stalked Nealon, and who has become obsessed with him and presented him with the idea—almost a case—that Nealon is directly behind a huge web of transnational fraud, which, taken together, seems almost like a work of art. I struggled to reconcile three strands of Nealon’s story. It instead deepened the mystery at the center of the book.

McCormack: It seems to me you have a pretty good understanding of it. [Laughter]

That’s my own understanding of it as well. Nealon seems to me to be both an artist and a scam artist. And are they one and the same thing? In some ways, the book is quite simple. It’s about two men who go looking for two different things and they converge in this room. One of them goes looking for his wife and his child. The other, it seems to me, goes looking for God. And God says to him, I can’t help you. Even though he is there looking at him. He may or may not be looking at him in the face, and he says, I can’t help you. Work it out for yourself.

The project seems to me to be no less a thing than to rewrite the whole world or to remake the whole world. It seems to harken back to a recurring theme on faith. What can you believe in? What can you steer your life by? His act of faith, and the one that kind of usurps him at the end, is the placing of his hand on his child’s head. He needed that. Only that I feel I cannot believe. A variation on only that I see that I cannot believe. And your man comes looking in the same quest for revelation or whatever.

I think faith is a recurring theme in my work. It was put really well to me by a woman when I read from Solar Bones at a Waterstones in some swanky part of London. She stood up in the crowd and thanked me for reading and for writing the book, and then went on to say: wouldn’t it be true to say that this is a book about faith? Wouldn’t it be true to say that this is the story of a man who went in search of God, and God gave him the back of his hand, and he turned from the cross and he turned towards family, and faith, community, and work? And wouldn’t it be true to say that the proper crisis at the center of the book, if I understand it correctly, is that he is worried that his two children will not carry on the faith of their fathers? They have no belief in work or community. She went on in this vein for three, four minutes, and I turned to the guy beside me, who was interviewing me, and I said, you should interview this woman about my book, because she knows more about it than I do. She has a clearer read on it than I do!

So, the issue of faith and knowledge, it goes back to Forensic Songs. Forensic Songs was about: what do we know? What can we believe in? What’s our evidence for what we believe in? It’s called forensic for a reason. So all of those things are webbed up into the character of kneeling and his interlocutor, the man.

Rail: You struck on something I wanted to ask you about there when you mentioned the man maybe seeing God in Nealon, or that he’s trying to project or even narrate some sort of meaning onto how he is perceiving the world. He’s obsessed. It reminded me of something that I’ve seen a lot in your work. In Getting It in the Head, there’s a lot of characters in there who are completely obsessed. There’s a woman obsessed with eating glass. There’s a man obsessed to the point of dismemberment with kind of his own death, basically. There’s a really, really great story about a young lad over in the US on a J1 summer visa who goes working upstate in a factory. There’s some sort of nefarious chemicals being made and there’s a kind of darkness to the plant, which of course he becomes obsessed with and revivified by. The lads he’s working with are distraught by this. I think the story even ends with him dancing joyfully, if I’m not mistaken.

McCormack: I’m glad you like that. That’s the most autobiographical piece I wrote. And you’re right that it’s obsession. I worked in an Upjohn chemical plant in Connecticut back in 1986 or ’87. I was wasted and pale after exams and a year in university. I went and I got this job and turned up at this Upjohn chemical plant. I think it was in New Haven. This plant had contravened all sorts of environmental laws and it was a toxic cesspit. It had gone to court several times. It had lost every case. It had paid the fine and carried on regardless. It was cheaper. This was during Reagan’s time, so the law was on the side of big business. So, I went there. It was nothing but corroded pipe and crumbling concrete. I fucking loved it. [Laughter] It was a piece of industrial gothic.

Rail: The stories are fascinating because each is a character study of an obsession. I re-read Solar Bones the other day, and there’s this passage with a woman who calls in to a radio show, talking about the wind turbines near her house. She’s become obsessed with them, developing a kind of religious regard for them.

McCormack: You’re right. There are always these people seeing religious iconography. She sees them as prayer wheels and as cruciform.

I don’t know about you, but I was an altar boy, and I was brought up in the faith. I was educated by nuns and priests right up to the age of eighteen in West Mayo. Whatever else it gave me, it certainly gave me an iconography and a deep sense of the seriousness of these things. And they have been an enduring wellspring of imagery and a way of finding my imaginative way in the world.

I never gave much thought to this until I wrote Getting It in the Head. All the iconography of my Catholic upbringing came pouring back to me. And it was because I’d been an altar boy. I used to serve mass at eight o’clock on winter mornings in cold churches. I was even of that generation that used to serve for benediction and rosary, which were quite exquisite ceremonies, full of Latin hymns. That was on the cusp of Vatican I. Vatican II [laughs] was youngish when I was a young lad. So, it gave me a calendar. It gave me an iconography. It gave me a sense of drama. It gave me a sense that the world is underwritten in some transcendental realm.

God has a real lived presence whether we like it or not. My first encounter with the idea of God was God the Creator—the Old Testament God. Not the God of wrath, but the God who was the creator. Very much the God of William Blake, where he is the God with the compass, who has his hand over the void and his beard streaming in the cosmic wind. And that was a very early encounter with that image. But I think at the back of my imagination is the creative God of the Old Testament of the book of Genesis. In the beginning, God created heaven and earth, and that’s it. It’s not the New Testament God, it’s not the Nazarene on the cross. [Laughter]

Rail: Everyone in your fiction is looking for meaning, patterns, or signs. Whether it’s in turbines, or in a stranger whose alleged acts you have formed into a narrative.

I’m not sure if this completely fits in with this, but in Notes From a Coma, one of the most striking parts—which I should add left me completely dumbfounded when I read it—was when they’re streaming footage of the main character’s coma live onto a screen at what was then called the Witness music festival in Ireland, which was attended by tens of thousands of people.

McCormack: It’s his heartbeat and probably his MRIs as well.

Rail: Exactly. I can’t explain it, and I certainly don’t have a theory on it, but there’s an interesting convergence of the political and the public in your work.

McCormack: You’re dead right. There is that convergence with JJ O’Malley. It becomes a proving ground. JJ O’ Malley, lying on the flat of his back, his whole being and body became a convergence for art, celebration, politics, technology, penal reform, familial care, and community care.

In another way, that’s why Marcus Conway recommended himself to me: he was in this unique position of being at the center of a web of family politics and art and engineering. All of those things converged, and all of those things I find interesting.

I’ve wanted to write a book about an engineer since I was in my early twenties, because I always thought engineers make the world and those of us in the arts resent them for it. We think it should be us. We think it should be us sensitive souls that make the world, but we don’t; we only write about it. This moment here is facilitated by generations of engineers. They get bad press.

That’s one of the links between Solar Bones and This Plague of Souls. Both are about attempts to make the world. Making the world in both of those books seems to be both synonymous with making buildings and artifacts, but also with the making of a family. Family is not a theme I would’ve seen myself writing about in my twenties, but it seems to have impressed itself upon me in my late forties and, in a big way, when I started Solar Bones.

Rail: I’ve heard you say that all your work starts off in Louisburgh, a quiet town in Mayo, before going off in unexpected directions. Hearing you say that now, a lot of it also takes family as a starting point in a way—a need or a concern for one.

McCormack: Yeah, and as I say, I think the lad who wrote Getting It in the Head would’ve found that very strange. As you say, they’re about solitary obsessives and young men going stone mad in Getting It in the Head. My mind seems to have, I’d like to think, broadened out into a wider attempt to embrace, and to meditate on, the world. I’d like to be able to do that with a lot of the energy and incisiveness that I had in my twenties. I don’t know if I have that anymore. I find it hard to believe that I could write stories like “Thomas Crumlish”, or “The Terms” now—seven or eight page, really snappy, sharp stories.

But that seems to be the progress of a short story writer. If you look at McGahern’s The Collected Stories (1992), you’d see that within the first 120 pages, quite a lot of his stories clock in under ten pages. Some of his most memorable stories, they clock in under ten pages. And in none of his subsequent books did he write under ten pages. You can look at Maeve Brennan, at The Springs of Affection (1974). Her stories got longer and deeper as they went on. But those early stories of five, six, or seven pages, they are just masterful in their execution. There’s something about being young and sudden that lends itself to those sharp and clear meditations. I think they’re narrower in their compass, but sharper in their point, maybe? [Laughter]

Rail: And I know you said before that This Plague of Souls you see as part of a triptych, and this is the second panel. Are you starting to get any emanations or inklings about the third book?

McCormack: I do, but I’m not gonna say anything about it. It’ll be a meditation on worlds and the making of worlds, or how worlds come apart. I started writing This Plague of Souls a long time ago, and it started out as an examination of how the world comes apart. But as I worked on it, and particularly as I worked on it during COVID, I became really interested in how we put the world back together. How do you reassemble it? And that became a kind of a guiding thematic concern in that book. I don’t like the idea of a trilogy because that suggests narrative progression and accumulation and everything. I much prefer the idea of a triptych—three loosely-linked meditations on the same thing. This is the middle panel—the dark middle piece, I think.