David Collard
Ghost Writing
Solar Bones
By Mike McCormack
Tramp Press 223pp £12
Thirty years ago Conor Cruise O’Brien coined the acronym GUBU, standing for grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented. He was paraphrasing a comment by the then taoiseach of Ireland, Charles Haughey, describing a strange series of incidents in the summer of 1982 that included a double murder and the arrest of the killer in the house of the Irish attorney general. The episode inspired John Banville’s 1989 novel, The Book of Evidence.
Another GUBU episode from more recent Irish history lies at the heart of Mike McCormack’s bracingly original novel. In March 2007 the mains water supply in Galway (the author’s home town, ‘the wettest city in Ireland’) and the surrounding areas became contaminated with cryptosporidium, a parasite found in human and animal excrement. Many people became very ill. McCormack investigates this ‘bodily and civic catastrophe’, as represented by the sickness of the narrator’s wife, an extended metaphor for the state of the nation.
But there’s much more to Solar Bones than a jaundiced exploration of political and moral shortcomings in Irish public life, despite the apparently conventional domestic setting. The narrator is a middle-aged engineer called Marcus Conway, contentedly married to Maireid and living in County Mayo. They have two grown-up children: Agnes
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Don't ask about the dress code, don't talk about your spouse too much, flirt with everyone
Andrew Martin on the rules, pleasures and pitfalls of living in Paris
Andrew Martin - Bobos versus Beaufs
Andrew Martin: Bobos versus Beaufs - Impossible City: Paris in the Twenty-First Century by Simon Kuper
literaryreview.co.uk
for the latest edition of @Lit_Review I worked on some excellent pieces – @MortenHoiJensen on Kafka
@ellafox_m on @mimpathy (Honor Levy)
@profrhodrilewis on Shakespeare novels
@edcumming on Kaliane Bradley
@zoeguttenplan on @NationalTheatre's Dickens show
wrote about MY FIRST BOOK (@GrantaBooks) for @Lit_Review, a book that I think makes difficult things look very easy: