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Marcus Conway is a husband, father, son, engineer, lover and, most of all, exceedingly ordinary. Award-winning novel Solar Bones deals with this very normal character in an extraordinary way, thanks to author Mike McCormack.
Solar Bones was published in 2016 to great acclaim, but was brought back to the forefront this June after winning the International Dublin Literary Award, with a prize of €100,000. No small feat for a writer from Co Mayo.
“I was brought up in Louisburgh and it’s about as rural as it gets, and I was as rural a lad as it gets as well,” he says.
“I was an altar boy, a GAA player, a small farmer’s son, that kind of thing. Writers didn’t come from that background. Writers were some of my heroes in the same way that footballers and heavy metal singers were my heroes too… well, I was never quite good enough to make it to county level as a footballer and there were no heavy metal bands in Mayo, so…,” he adds.
Writing rural Ireland
Solar Bones is written in an experimental style as a stream of consciousness with minimal punctuation and no full stops. However, the greater experiment in McCormack’s mind was writing an interesting book about a middle-class man in rural Ireland.
“I have written about rural Ireland in a way that other people don’t want to countenance and don’t want to acknowledge, and other people have found difficulty with seeing the merit in that. I sometimes think that urban Dublin want their rural characters written simply. They want the Fisher Price version of rural Ireland, the blunt lines, the melodrama,” he says.
“One of the things that I have tried to do in my work is to illustrate that rural Ireland is full of decent people, living decent lives and being neighbourly. Most depictions of rural Ireland are that it is a place of sometimes violence, stupidity more often than not, that sort of backwardness. That is not my experience of rural Ireland.”
The engineer
Marcus in Solar Bones has a loving wife, two adult children, a steady job and middle-class income. It may be nothing to write home about, but plenty with which to fill a novel.
“When I was in university, I gradually realised that engineers make the world: writers write about it, painters paint it, photographers photograph it, but engineers make it. I have always been interested in people who can make and do stuff, because I can’t do it myself.
“For the longest time I have had a sign hanging out in my imagination saying: Engineer Wanted,” says Mike, who originally studied engineering before switching to philosophy in NUI Galway – the college he now lectures creative writing in.
The world of publishing
Despite the great reception of the book, publishers weren’t exactly barraging him with deals.
“Everyone turned the book down for various reasons,” he says. “My agent is Marianne Gunn O’Connor and to this day she will not tell me how many people turned it down, but I know that everyone turned it down because we had nowhere else to send it to.”
In the end, the book was published by independent Irish publishers Tramp Press.
Oddly enough, McCormack says he has no memory of writing the book or the process involved.
“One of the things that happened is that I sent it [the first draft] to my agent at half two in the morning. Then myself and (my wife) Maeve got into a car eight or nine hours later to the hospital and we became parents. My little boy kind of rose up between myself and the book. It is like he has eclipsed the book completely and that’s grand with me.”
Future
Despite this success, things haven’t always come up roses for the author. He has written three other novels and several short story collections, which have received great critical acclaim, but sold poorly.
“There were years when no one wanted to know my work. There were years when I couldn’t give my work away… Maeve has a great saying: ‘Publishing isn’t your job, your job is to write,’” he explains.
Mike is nowhere near stopping and is currently working on a novel that has been on the go for around eight or nine years. What is the plot, you might be asking? Well, you’re not the only one.
“I’m currently working on a novel and I don’t know what it is about. I am not at all sure. I’ve had it a while in the house but I’m trying to figure what it’s about. We’ll see.”
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