Mike McCormack captures with tenderness and feeling, in continuous, flowing prose, a whole life, suspended in a single hour
Mike McCormack
Mike McCormack’s monosentence Solar Bones failed to win the Booker Prize but it did win the Dublin Literary Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize and was the Irish Books Awards novel of the year
McCormack describes himself as ‘an ordinary farm boy over in the west of Ireland’. As a novelist, however, early success came to a sudden halt in the early 2000s when he lost his publisher and he ‘disappeared without trace’. Experimental fiction such as his, is, he believes, an Irish trait – ‘Our Mount Rushmore is Joyce, Beckett and Flann O’Brien’ – and when it came back into favour, so did he. McCormack first intended to become an engineer like Marcus Conway in Solar Bones since ‘God is no less obvious to us in our machines than he is in our flowers.’