SOLAR BONES

I was having lunch at Saigon Delights, on Bagot just north of Princess, a restaurant well worth your time if you somehow don’t know it. I like to hide at the back with a novel. I check emails for the first ten minutes and then I can usually get through half a chapter while I eat my soup.

This week I’m reading the Irish writer Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones. Not long ago I finished his most recent - This Plague Of Souls - a minimalist exercise in tension, terrorism, and lost love - and moved straight into the earlier work. Solar Bones is an altogether more generous novel of lives much-considered and eventful in low-key ways. It meanders, I suppose, and yet still drills mighty deep into family and life and work and marriage and responsibility, and finally into what it all might mean. I was on page 132, I swear, before I realized I hadn’t reached the end of the first sentence yet. It’s a remarkable feat, an experimental novel that doesn’t feel that way, a story both moving and transporting.

What has me mentioning it here is that one point McCormack talks about his house.  He begins:  “the house itself, which / like a child / I’ve always believed gets up to some foolishness during the night…” His description of how a house works makes it sound a lot like a machine for living in. I’ve reproduced some of the page here. Maybe you need to be in the pho-flow to appreciate it, but I’ll take my chances.

You’ll have to buy the book, of course, to see where he goes next (and trust me when I say that where he goes is pretty great).