This review was commissioned by and originally published on Stuff in September 2017.
Solar Bones by Mike McCormack has been awarded many impressive literary prizes and is on the Booker longlist; however, be warned that the entire book is just one long sentence, appearing at first glance to be a poem rather than a novel: “the bell / the bell as / hearing the bell as / hearing the bell as standing here / the bell being heard standing here / hearing it ring out through the grey light of this morning, noon or night / god knows / this grey day standing here and” so as the pages went on I began to have a terrible longing for a fullstop, or for any punctuation mark more determined than a colon, as apart from anything else it renders Solar Bones woefully lacking in capital letters, with each new paragraph, if that can still be considered the correct term, beginning, or continuing, in lower case
as Irish author McCormack tells Marcus Conway’s life story, all in one gruelling sentence, and as I read on I felt a deep weariness and a tired familiarity, since Marcus is a middle-aged Irish man; white, one assumes, and I realised that I have spent so very much of my life reading a particular kind of novel about the internal tribulations of middle-aged white men that it makes me wish to put down the burden of worthy literature and rest, but often entire pages would go by without even an indent in sight, so there was no stopping; the typesetter had tried their best but it was exhausting – at one point Marcus’s daughter creates an artwork that is “a continuous swathe of text … in crashing typographical waves” written in her own blood, I mean good god, who may blame her
“stop / mother of Jesus stop / this is how the mind unravels in nonsense and rubbish / if given its head” but McCormack wouldn’t take his own advice so, constantly denied the punctuation I craved, I finished Solar Bones completely worn out and there wasn’t even a fullstop on the last page; thank god for commas and line breaks I suppose but really, bloody hell
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