"Solar Bones" by Mike McCormack (Canongate, 2017)

It starts with

the bell    the bell as    hearing the bell as       hearing the bell as standing here       the bell being heard standing here

and is advertised as being one long sentence (it uses commas, line-breaks, paragraphs, dashes and italics). But it's not experimental, it's stream-of-consciousness - "A portrait of the artist ..." plus a little "Lincoln in the Bardo". Marcus Conway, an engineer, wakes to the sound of bells in an empty house, wife and kids gone. His thoughts drift, thinking about topics in the news, County Mayo, the economic crisis, unclean water supply, his kids. There are longuers - e.g.

falling to ruin in that specific way which proved it never existed even if all around us now there is that feeling of something massive and consequential having come asunder, as when certain pressures exceeded critical thresholds to admit that smidgen of chaos which brings the whole thing down around itself so that even if we believe this collapse is essentially in some adjacent realm there is no denying the gravitational pull we fell in everything around us now, the instability which thrills everywhere like a fever, so tangible you have to wonder/ how come we never noticed those tensions before (p.16)

There are interjections -

we took leave of each other with no intention whatsoever of further meetings or keeping in touch so that it was     bridge building, Mairead choked     the story of another man from another age, something remembered     standing here in this kitchen     only because it is woven into that memorial arc which curves from childhood to the present moment ... (p.20)

There are more longeurs - low density paragraphs, passages that go on and on in the cause (I presume) of realism, the narrator having time on his hands

I seemed to be taking it in my stride, having readily interpreted it as another extension of that ordinary contentment which had come to me in marrying Mairead, so much so that now I found myself marvelling, not at the dullness of my response, but at the realisation that if she had stood there telling me she was not pregnant this indeed would have been shocking news, this would have stopped me in my tracks and caused me something deeper than the mild surprise which kept me sitting there at the kitchen table with my wife repeating desperately that yes, she was pregnant and with that settled there should have been a finality to the moment which would have allowed us to acknowledge it with a tearful embrace and congratulations before setting the whole thing aside for the time being - fuller discussion later that evening - as I was anxious to return to my breakfast and squeeze the last drop of peace and quiet from those few remaining minutes before going to work - all of which was my normal way of going about the morning but which now I now saw, from the look on Mairead's face, the normal way of doing things would not suffice any more as a new set of circumstances had just supervened (p.38)

and more

it was a beautiful summer's afternoon when we set out, a high, clear sky over us so that you could see the whole of the bay in every direction, from Westport Quay in the east, out to the horizon beyond Turk and Clare as we passed back the coast, keeping close to the shore so that the sea opened out to its full reach ahead of us and we could see across to Mulranny which, in the afternoon heat, was a blur, a distant shadow of coastline where sky and sea came together and once again the whole expanse of this blue day recalled my childhood conviction that here was nothing greater than the sea, no other width or breadth which could surpass or encompass it (p.99)

and more

I wondered what they relationship was as there was obviously some close connection - professional or romantic - but it was hard to say because while the woman's anxiety was very real, palpable to any onlooker, it could have fitted either scenario as there was not only the pleading of romantic breakdown, but also an urgent need to persuade this older man in a way which inclined me to believe that this might be a professional matter and that some workplace drama had occurred which still needed clarifying or smoothing over in some way or other because there was no mistaking the look on the woman's face as anything other than a visible fear she was being misunderstood, the fear that some gain or position has been jeopardised, or that some reputation, hard won but fragile, had been sullied in some way or other but, whether this was the case or not, one thing was obvious and it was that the man would rather not have had to hear about it on his lunchbreak (p.248)

The dialogue's snappy though, and characterisation rich. There are worthwhile anecdotes that could have been the symbolic centre of a story - his father and sonar, the mile-long ghost ship. There are poetic slides from one topic to another.

Is "highjack" on p.170 a typo?

Other reviews

• Ian Sansom (an extraordinary novel by a writer not yet famous but surely destined to be acclaimed)
• Martin Riker (a wonderfully original, distinctly contemporary book, with a debt to modernism but up to something all its own. ... For all its apparent stylistic complexity, “Solar Bones” is a beautifully simple book. Death has not solved Marcus’s worldly problems, only offered a shift of scope, and this is what McCormack’s novel offers as well. Where modernism took a world that appeared to be whole and showed it to be broken, “Solar Bones” takes a world that can’t stop talking about how broken it is, and suggests it might possibly be whole.)
• Rob Doyle (Occasionally McCormack over-eggs the entropic pudding, as if anxious to show that he hasn’t abandoned the wilder concerns of his youth in favour of Establishment-friendly, McGahernesque domesticities. Mainly, however, his visionary intensity is not only convincing but spellbinding: the sci-fi imagination has receded, giving way to the awareness that illimitable awe and terror reside right here in the mundane, phenomenal world.)