Solar Bones

   just before the world collapses
   mountains, rivers and lakes
   acres, roods and perches
   into oblivion, drawn down into that fissure in creation where everything is consumed in the raging tides and swells of non-being, the physical world gone down in flames
   mountains, rivers and lakes
   and pulling with it also all those human rhythms that bind us together and draw the world into a community, those daily
   rites, rhythms and rituals
   upholding the world like solar bones, that rarefied amalgam of time and light whose extension through every minute of the day is visible from the moment I get up in the morning and stand at the kitchen window with a mug of tea in my hand, watching the first cars of the day passing on the road, every one of them known to me

I've seen Solar Bones described as one book-length sentence, but as the first word isn't capitalised and the last isn't followed by a period, it would seem more likely a book-length excerpt from something theoretically even longer; something cosmological and metaphysical and deeply personal all at once. I can't say that I loved the format – thoughts randomly assembled, breaking off midway, no space at all for the reader to breathe or have a clue when a thread has ended and the book can be put down for a bit – and I also can't say I totally understand everything that author Mike McCormack was trying to convey, but I admire this book's inventiveness and recognise its place in that great canon of Irish stream-of-consciousness writing. It's unsurprising to see this type of challenging novel on the Man Booker longlist; and while it was also unsurprising that it didn't make the cut to the shortlist, I am happy to have been prompted to read it. 

   why these bleak thoughts today, the whole world in shadow, everything undercut and suspended in its own delirium, the light superimposed on itself so that all things are out of sync and kilter, things as themselves but slightly different from themselves also, every edge and outline blurred or warped and each passing moment belated, lagging a single beat behind its proper measure, the here-and-now beside itself, slightly off by a degree as in
a kind of waking dream in which all things come adrift in their own anxiety so that sitting here now fills me with
   a crying sense of loneliness for my family – Mairead, Darragh and Agnes – their absence sweeping through me like ashes

We are in the mind of Marcus Conway – a forty-six-year-old Civil Engineer from a small town in west Ireland's County Mayo – as he putters around his kitchen alone at midday; a rare event that leaves him at loose ends. He tells us several times that he's prone to blather on, to rant, and as his thoughts skip around from event to event in a way that eventually lays bare his entire life, he indeed proves himself a blatherer; yet one prone to philosophy. As an Engineer during the Celtic Tiger years of Ireland's boom, he often felt pressure to sign off on slapdash building projects – from the politicians who live in four year election cycles and want frequent ribbon-cutting ceremonies in the local papers, and from the builders who are only concerned about the immediacy of a few months' labour – but only Marcus saw his work as part of a larger scheme; as part of the long course of human history with its inherently sacred duty to the future; this work being the solar bones that uphold the world. Much of what Marcus is recalling on this afternoon was set in motion when he and his wife, Mairead, attended their adult daughter's first solo art exhibition – an installation of rural news articles written out on the gallery's walls in Agnes' own blood – and in the conversation that follows at a restaurant, it's apparent that through her art, Agnes is also seeking to discover and explore the human in history; these hidden solar bones. Also at this dinner, Mairead will be exposed to a cryptosporidium parasite that will see her, along with hundreds of others, approaching the brink of death with violent vomiting and diarrhea – a circumstance that allows Marcus to expound upon the political and engineering failures that led to the contamination of the city's water supply, and also what those failures mean. As Agnes joins a group of artists protesting the city's response, and Marcus and Mairead's genius/slacker son, Darragh, Skypes from his backpacking trip through Australia – ranting about the outbreak's “ontopolitical” implications – Marcus has an epiphany about how hearing about the contamination on the news while taking care of one of its victims showed him that history was personal and politics was personal: it seems to me that this was the entire point of the book (and I am definitely handpicking savoury details from a varied stew of ingredients to demonstrate this point). Marcus eventually has a more uplifting epiphany:

   I was now completely overtaken with a foolish excess of gratitude for this half hour in this coffee shop, a quiet spell among decent people, good food and the careful work of those who ran it so that for one moment in which time and space seemed to plummet through me in terraced depths which had me reaching out to grip the edge of the table, I had a rushing sense of the cosmic odds stacked against this here-and-now, how unlikely and how contingent it was on so many other things taking their proper place in the wider circumstance of the universe and exerting their right degree of pressure on the contextual circumstances so that for one moment, sitting there with a cup of coffee in my hand and the chair bracing my back I had a clear view down the vortex of my whole being, down through all the linked circumstances that had combined to place me here at this specific moment in time and this wave of gratitude and terror swept through me with such violent force that I feared I would mortify myself by breaking down in tears, an ecstasy of joy and terror for the world and everything in it, an unbidden feeling that was so overpowering that it was as much as I could do to hold myself together for as long as it took me to get up and make my way between tables to pay the bill at the cash register where, in a voice ridiculously choked, I replied to the girl's kind query as she totted up the bill that
   yes, everything was fine, thank you very much

I recognise that I have probably included overly long passages here, but I can't see how else to give a flavour of this book. I found the format to be dull at times, and frustrating at times, but also beautifully lyrical at times. Like all the best Irish writers, McCormack wonderfully captures the Irish people and their landscape, but he also wrote a book decidedly rooted in its own time: this could only have been written after Ireland's economic bust, exploring as it does the humanity in history; exploring the fact that humans are the makers of history – its solar bones – not its helpless victims (unless I'm misunderstanding everything; always a possibility). Four stars is a rounding up.

The Man Booker 2017 Longlist: 

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster 
Days Without End by Sebastian Barry 
History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund 
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid 
Solar Bones by Mike McCormack 
Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor 
Elmet by Fiona Mozley 
The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy 
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders 
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie 
Autumn by Ali Smith 
Swing Time by Zadie Smith 
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead 

Eventually won by Lincoln in the Bardo, I would have given the Booker this year to Days Without End. My ranking, based solely on my own reading enjoyment, of the shortlist is:

Autumn

Exit West

Lincoln in the Bardo

Elmet

4321

History of Wolves