An interview with Mike McCormack
Liam Harrison | Tolka, Web Only, October 2023
This Plague of Souls is Mike McCormack’s fourth novel. It follows Nealon, an artist who has returned from prison following the collapse of a criminal trial against him. His family home in rural Mayo is empty, and he is besieged by phone calls from a stranger determined to meet up. The third act of the novel stages this meeting against the backdrop of a national security crisis. Through a breadth and style that is typical of McCormack’s writing, the distinctions between the local and the global begin to break down: ‘Those oil spills and poisoned lakes, those great gyres of plastic waste spiralling in the southern Atlantic. There were things coming apart, falling from their proper being’.
McCormack is the author of the novels Crowe’s Requiem (1998) and Notes from a Coma (2005), as well as the short-story collections Getting It in the Head (1995) and Forensic Songs (2012). McCormack’s last novel, Solar Bones (2016), was first published by Tramp Press. After initially struggling to find a publisher, it won the Goldsmiths Prize in 2016, the Dublin Literary Award in 2018, and was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017. Narrated by the posthumous Marcus Conway, Solar Bones is written in a single sentence, which flows along a stream of ‘post-consciousness’, as McCormack puts it, while Marcus looks back on his life as a civil engineer.
McCormack’s writing depicts a world always on the edge of collapse – a national school in Solar Bones is built upon shaky foundations, destined to crumble before it is built; inmates are kept in a comatose state on incarceration ships in Notes from a Coma. And yet, McCormack is resistant to ending things – the last line of Solar Bones is ‘keep going to fuck’. This Plague of Souls concludes, in a scene redolent of Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, with an unresolved coin toss.
Liam Harrison (LH): Where did This Plague of Souls begin?
Mike McCormack (MMcC): I’ve always wanted to write my own noir. I have a great regard for genre fiction, and I’ve written science fiction and a Western. Noir books are short and sudden; they deliver a quick clip on the ear, then they’re gone and leave a black watermark on the soul. I wanted to do that with this book. Instead of murder and revenge being the issue, or a beautiful woman or a Maltese Falcon being the prize, I wanted a metaphysical prize. I wanted reality itself to be the issue. Writing This Plague of Souls, I immersed myself in reading European rather than American noir, the likes of Pascal Garnier, Frédéric Dard and Georges Simenon. There’s no tough guys or fancy gunplay here.
I set myself a challenge: would it be possible to write a book which I could not explain? I don’t know what happens in the end. I’m not sure whether he’s guilty or not. All of those aspects made writing it more difficult, but that’s the book – the noir thing, the metaphysical thing and the cluelessness thing – and I tried to bring them together in a three-part harmony. It’s not as free flowing as Solar Bones. The more I got into writing it, the less I knew about it, and when my cup of cluelessness overflowed I knew it was finished.
LH: I love the description of noir as a sharp clip around the ear. I started reading snatches of This Plague of Souls on the bus. At first, I struggled to make sense of it. Then I started reading it in a calmer environment, and I could see my confusion might be a valid response. I like the contrast you make with Solar Bones, which on one level is very complicated in terms of the stream of consciousness, the single sentence and the posthumous narrator, but, in many ways, as a narrative, it’s very legible and cohesive. This Plague of Souls is almost the opposite – it’s opaque.
MMcC: Solar Bones is fluid, riverine and flowing, while This Plague of Souls has rhythms that are sudden and staccato. It’s also a book that’s divorced from its own origins, from its own story, and there are things I don’t know about them. This book is the middle part of a trilogy. Solar Bones is one part, This Plague of Souls is another part, and I’m going to write one more, another meditation on men building worlds, whether it’s engineers, artists/scam artists or engineers as artists. It’s not a trilogy of progression with a sense of deepening discovery. I think of it as an altarpiece, a triptych. Solar Bones is the lefthand landscape panel, and it’s brightly lit with sunshine. This Plague of Souls is the dark portrait piece in the middle. The third book will be more expansive, like Solar Bones. The three books come from the same idea of men trying to build worlds, and world building to me is synonymous with engineering but also with family, with the building of home, house and hearth.
I read the opening pages of the novel in Kennys bookshop a year ago. Brenda Romero, a former student who is a game designer, was in the audience and came up to me afterwards and says, ‘that’s a video game’. The first pages describe walking through hallways, opening doors, going into rooms, a voice on the phone that causes the lights to come on, an exploration of a landscape, and she said, ‘That’s pure video games’. The early draft files of this novel go back to 2012, when I was playing games like Silent Hill. Colin Barrett also wrote saying that, ‘It feels like wandering through the beautifully rendered, hauntingly empty levels of a compelling video game’. That’s part of the guiding aesthetic of the novel – wandering around a vacant place, you’ve done it yourself. Have you played video games?
LH: Yeah, quite a bit. And we’ve got an essay in the new Tolka by Conor Dawson about Silent Hill. Conor explores an Irish country landscape during lockdown, and the kind of uncanny nostalgia of revisiting simulated or imagined versions of places in real life. Sometimes these explorations can be less creepy and more pastoral. I’m playing lots of Zelda at the moment. I’ve broken my foot, so the game is providing some sense of going outdoors, even if I can’t myself. Sarah Maria Griffin wrote a great essay in the Stinging Fly about Zelda and lockdown, touching on something similar. I think people are now more open about how video games intersect with what is considered the literary world. Obviously, the history of literature, especially modernist literature, is wrapped up in popular culture and technological developments.
MMcC: I remember stumbling across Thomas Pynchon’s V., and in the opening pages there’s a bar-room brawl, jazz, comic and cartoon references. I thought, This is how it’s done. It was an incredibly mind-expanding moment. I’d read a book like McGahern’s Nightlines – which I admire and saw a big part of myself in, I’ve lived that life and walked those roads – but where are the cowboy movies? Thirty years down the road, and of course video games are going to be a formative influence on literature. It’s been a while now since I’ve played them. I wonder, have they evolved? They were kind of stiff and wooden when I played them, and coercive. There’s a deliberate sense of that in the novel, that there are doors that have to be opened, and halls that have to be walked. You don’t have a choice in a game – that’s the pact you enter into. If there’s a door, you have to open it.
LH: In the first issue of Tolka we published an essay by Rob Doyle, which spans the clunky SEGA Mega Drive era to the more sophisticated and ethically fraught video games today – Papers, Please, Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption – where there is a lot more freedom, even if this freedom becomes coercive in its own way. There’s another pop culture reference I want to ask about. Both Solar Bones and This Plague of Souls conclude with transfer deadline day. Cesc Fàbregas is about to head to Barcelona in Solar Bones, and there’s a young striker on the TV who keeps arresting Nealon’s attention in This Plague of Souls.
MMcC: You’re right, there’s always the transfer deadline. I had agonised about the sequencing of real-world events, and whether they correlate with the real world. And then I thought, I’m not a historian, and this isn’t a work of history. The national security event that governs the book didn’t take place either. I’ve always held that it was fiction’s job to take reality, to bracket it, and then twist it slightly out of shape so that we get another view of it.
LH: Solar Bones describes a Cryptosporidium outbreak in Galway, which in some ways anticipates the Covid lockdowns. I was rereading the passages where Mairead gets sick during the pandemic, and it made the novel feel very prescient. History has a way of repeating itself, and This Plague of Souls explores the rhetoric of the war on terror in ways that feel pertinent once again. Your books are very cyclical in terms of their relationship with history and temporality.
MMcC: Did I read that there are loads of schools closed in England because of bad concrete?
LH: Yes! That’s another one straight out of Solar Bones.
MMcC: The day that Solar Bones was launched, they had to put up a boil water notice in County Mayo because of a Crypto outbreak! This Plague of Souls started with how the world comes apart, how it breaks down, and how we lose family. But gradually, and this is one of the ways Covid shaped the form of the book, it became about not the world coming apart, but how we put it back together. I was really impressed in the early days of Covid how artists stepped forward with their talents and time, and put on concerts and readings. Cúirt, in Galway, was the first literature festival in the world to go online and it was a brilliant success. It was comforting, sitting at home with my wife, tuning in to listen to people read and talk. It was a steadying thing. That idea wove itself into This Plague of Souls – what part does an artist or a scam artist play in putting the world back together?
LH: We started Tolka during lockdown, and our first two launches were online. There was the same sense of being part of a community. You’d build connections by running these events online, hearing all these readings and realising that you’ve made something from your living room. Then there’s the sudden moment when the screen goes blank and you’re back in the real world.
I also want to ask you about the novel’s title. The association I made is with Gogol’s Dead Souls. At the heart of Dead Souls there is also an idea of stealing people’s identities for a wider project, although one that’s more nefarious than This Plague of Souls. But the idea of taking identities and harvesting souls, did Gogol have anything to do with your title?
MMcC: He didn’t because I haven’t read it! I didn’t know about it, but I’m quite happy that it might have some sort of unconscious provenance. Is the book good?
LH: Yes! I read it years ago. You think it’s going to be an intimidating Russian tome, but it’s a riot. A charlatan landowner goes on a provincial odyssey, and he starts signing up the deeds for these dead serfs. All of the other landowners want to get these serfs off their books, because they’re being taxed on them, even after they’ve died. The protagonist’s plan is to take out a loan against these worthless deeds before anyone realises the serfs are dead and make a load of money. It’s the opposite of Nealon’s altruistic reasons for stealing people’s identities.
MMcC: What might have been on my mind for the title is that the advance for my first novel got stolen. This was when publishers used to post cheques. There was some kerfuffle, a change of address, and I was wondering why my publisher was so slow paying me. I rang them up and they said, ‘We have paid you. Not only have we paid you, but you’ve the cheque cashed’. That whole period was a bit of a purple haze. And I thought, Did I get it and spend it? I went to the bank, and they showed me the fake document used to cash the cheque. They had mocked up an ID and got another institution to frank it, went to the bank, opened an account in my name, and cashed the cheque. I got the money back, but it took two or three years. It throws you into doubt. You start to think, Did I just drink it away? So, debts and the idea of a plague of souls – it’s this idea of souls coming unmoored from their host identities and doing virtuous work that shames them in many ways, and makes their own lives look small, mean and petty. But I do like the dead souls thing. I didn’t know it was about a scam.
It happened to me once more. I was sitting down at the kitchen, and I got a phone call. The bank rang me and asked several questions. And she said, ‘Mike, have you been, have you been to Montreal in the last couple of weeks?’ I said I hadn’t, and she said, ‘OK, because your bank account has been hacked and money has been spent in Montreal.’
I says, ‘What did I buy?’, and she said, ‘You bought a fur coat.’ I said, ‘What sort of crappy fur coat did I buy for 350 dollars?’ I got a laugh out of that one but the other one was different. There was a couple of grand involved, and it was spooky to be holding a photocopy of the ID claiming to be me. I went to the place that had provided them with the ID, and I said, ‘You’ve been scammed!’ They wouldn’t believe me. They thought I was scamming them.
LH: Zadie Smith has spoken about how she started writing NW, based on an experience that she reuses in the novel. A woman knocked on her door one day and says, ‘My mum is in the hospital, I really need £30 for a taxi, and don’t I know you from school, can I come in?’ Nothing terrible happens. Both the protagonist in the novel and Zadie Smith in real life give her the £30. Later on in the novel, the protagonist is talking to her husband, and he calls her an idiot and says she’s obviously been scammed. That particularly strange feeling of being had takes hold and won’t let go. I like the idea that all these great works of twenty-first-century literature start with authors getting scammed left, right and centre. Scammers’ work and plans also work through its own kind of engineering or architecture, which has a correlative in the three-part structure of This Plague of Souls.
MMcC: I love formal constructs. Students and some artists of my own generation from working-class backgrounds take against form because they see it as soiled by bourgeois origins. They would see the sestina, the sonnet and the villanelle as an instrument of class oppression, because only a classical education would give you access to these forms, but I find that argument strange. All my work is quite tightly bound and I’m a great believer in form. I don’t think of it as corseting, but as interior support that allows us to reach higher. Many people see form as not allowing things to breathe and expand to their proper size. I see it as concentration and as an enabling structure that enables us to see further.
LH: I also want to ask you about style. I remember you saying how Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch has long flowing sentences, and that they informed Solar Bones, in terms of structure and style. Were there any works or aesthetic which formally or stylistically informed This Plague of Souls?
MMcC: When I conceived of Solar Bones, I spent a long time practising long sentences. I went to Iberian and Latin American writers, who are very good at long sentences. But with this novel I wanted the reading to be clipped. No sentences run much longer than two or three lines. One critic has already said it’s too short. My own belief is that it is too long. I was taken aback when my copy arrived and it was 170 pages. I thought it would come in at about 150 pages. There’s a plainness of language, but with no forfeit of ideation or thought. And there’s a kind of tough-guy speak that you have to master, that pulpy sudden deliverance of noir.
LH: The publication history of Solar Bones has become a part of its story. You’ve said before that Lisa Coen and Sarah Davis-Goff at Tramp Press were the only ones who could make the novel work. How did you find working with Tramp on this novel?
MMcC: Ah, they’re great. I don’t write under contract, I just turn up with a book and hopefully they’ll go for it, and they went with it again. This Plague of Souls was always going to Tramp, it’s where it belongs. I also had an editor at Canongate, Sean Costello. He was excellent. My writing moves by dint of repetition, but it also needs to be winnowed back and Sean had a great eye for that.
LH: Time and temporality feel particularly important across all of your work. Notes from a Coma has a line about the ‘precise moment when history fractures’, and Solar Bones concludes with Marcus being ‘cast out beyond darkness into that vast unbroken commonage of space and time, into that vast oblivion in which there are no markings or contours to steer by nor any songs to sing me home’. There are all these passages in This Plague of Souls about temporal ruptures and fluctuations. Nealon is also just out of prison, and there’s the incarcerated sense of ‘doing time’. You touched on how your work focuses on world building, engineered through domestic or familial time. Both the posthumous Marcus sitting in his kitchen, and Nealon, released from prison returning to the homestead, are governed by distinctive temporal rhythms.
MMcC: I once heard Margaret Atwood give a talk and she said a novel is a long piece of imaginative prose, with a clock in it. That was her definition of the novel. You’re a different person in your ordinary day-to-day life, then you pick up your pen and your preoccupations become different. Now time gets me into trouble because I demark time with birthdays and dates, and you’ve got to get those things to line up in a novel. But am I any more sensitive to the passing of time than the next man or woman? I don’t know. Certain things happened in my life. My father died when I was eighteen. That was a big temporal marker, and I didn’t become a father myself until I was in my late forties. I do have a sense of time rushing on now. I’m fifty-eight now. Things are rushing on, and my books do seem preoccupied with that. But I don’t give it too much thought.
I’m always surprised at the political content of my book. I try to stay away from political discussions among friends in bars because I’m too easily shoved off the ball. My books are never about the big political narratives. The political heroes of my book are the citizen – the man or woman with the ballot paper in one hand and the pencil in the other, and the degree to which the system is there for them and by them, and the rights and responsibilities that accrue because of it. I don’t give much thought to that when I’m walking around, but then I sit down and I start writing my books, and Joe and Margaret Citizen come towards me with all these questions. My political fascination is with citizenship within the wider arcs of the big political narratives. But as I say, I don’t seem to give that much thought except when I sit down to think about it.
This Plague of Souls was published by Tramp Press and Canongate in October 2023.
Mike McCormack’s previous work includes Getting it in the Head (1995), Crowe’s Requiem (1998), Notes from a Coma (2005), which was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award, and Forensic Songs (2012). In 1996 he was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and in 2007 he was awarded a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship. Solar Bones (Tramp Press, 2016) won the Goldsmiths Prize, the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award for Best Novel and Best Book, and the Dublin International Literary Award, and was nominated for the Booker Prize.
Liam Harrison is a founding editor at Tolka. He is a lecturer in creative writing at the University of the West of England, Bristol.
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