Why the Wild West inspired Ireland’s top experimental novelist

Mike McCormack lives galway, Ireland lies on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, with rocky, unforgiving cliffs that reveal thin, hard soils. As the author explains, the western edge of Europe looks a bit like the American West.

“This is a fishing village, it’s very beautiful, but it’s also very rough,” McCormack said via video conference. “Despite our kind of artistry and urban sophistication and everything else, this wild hinterland is still just around the corner. We like to think of it as untouched and untamable.”

McCormack’s 2017 novel “bones of the sun” was nominated for the Booker Prize. In his new work, “this plague of soulsLike its predecessor, the story is set in the west of Ireland, but a man named Nealon returns home from prison to find his wife and children gone, and his house stripped to its bare bones. His cell phone rings – a call from an anonymous man. Nealon must act, but he is completely alone in the world. What’s next?

“It’s hard to impress on anyone how important the idea of ​​a cowboy was to my father’s generation,” McCormack says. “These were lonely, strong, square-jawed men who rode tall in the saddle and had a code of honor and all that.” His father’s library of such books — by Louis L’Amour, jack schafer, Zane Gray – had a great influence on McCormack’s imagination. “By the time I was about 12 years old, I knew better. mojave desert More than anywhere else in Ireland. ”

It should be noted that McCormack was by no means a Western writer. His work is much more difficult to classify. Although “Solar Bones” was advertised as consisting of one sentence, McCormack says it was actually “made up of several passages that begin long before you open the book and continue long after you close it.” It is said that it is a sentence. “This Plague of Souls” has a solid structure with noir elements. “Notes from coma” (2005) can be called science fiction.

But McCormack’s affinity for the Old West is evident in both his subject matter and style. Recently, Lamour’s “matagordaHe says, “Now I understand why I fell in love with this work as a child, especially the way he treated landscape and the way he interacted with people.” [it]. Landscapes taught me decades ago that they are more than just background scenery. It affects and changes the character. ”

For McCormack, writing in a particular mode is “an act of gratitude, an act of acknowledging that these books and these genres are truly sophisticated and refined.” However, his novels are not born from the concept of genre, but rather from specific images. For example, “Solar Bones” began with a mental picture of Marcus Conway fooling around in the kitchen during the day. Why was he confused? Why was he at home during the day? ”

The novel became an uninterrupted reminiscence, but at the beginning I realized that I was thinking only of what was right in front of me. I would like to leave you with this question.”

McCormack, 58, is not as famous as some of his Irish contemporaries. Anne Enright, colm tobin —partly, he believes, because it touts literary realism. That’s starting to change for the next generation, he says.

“Recently, there has been a resurgence in experimental writing; a good example of this is Eimear McBride And Kevin Barry was very helpful to me,” he says. “When I started publishing in the 1990s, I found myself contradicting what people were reading and what they were praising. thomas pynchon In the 1970s, JG Ballard, Donald Barthelme, John Barth. There was a humorous element to their work, and it was kind of crazy, so I was indebted to that experimental idea. ”

After his first experimental novel, which received good reviews, “fell off a cliff”, McCormack found that young publishers were receptive to his ideas. “The two women in their early 30s who founded the company playing card press In Dublin, it was all about their willingness to jump on Solarborns and champion it. ” He decided to return to another book he had begun writing around the same time as that novel.

“When I first started working on This Plague of Souls in 2012, I was still very close to my younger self, sitting in a room and playing video games with people. It was mostly the type of game where you had to play a game, walk around the house, open doors, etc.” A few months ago, he read from the opening of The Plague. . “Then a woman came up to me and said, ‘This is a video game.’

He realized she was right. “I was actually thinking about whether a video game could teach us something about the novel.” “This Plague of Souls” progresses through her three movements, set in three different locations. Masu. “Houses, cars, hotel lobbies – those are separated environments. I love American noir, but I was aiming for a more strictly written kind of European noir. [Georges] Simnon and andrea camilleri and fred vargas”

In the end, McCormack decided to write a book that he could never fully explain. “I can tell you everything that’s going on in the 170 pages I have, but there’s so much behind the scenes that I don’t know,” he says. “My starting point is, in some ways, full of constraints. But in other ways, it’s full of open exploration.”

McCormack has no particular connection to the protagonists of his two latest novels, but in the opening scenes of both he finds a man standing alone in the kitchen as the bell rings. In Nealon’s case, it’s a phone ringtone. Readers will be interested in the opening scene of his next book, his third in what is becoming a very loose trilogy, although he prefers the term “triptych” . I’m sure he’ll be interested as we haven’t started yet.

“It’s going to be a movie that centers around the idea of ​​humans building the world, like Solarborns and This Plague of Souls,” he says. “That’s the theme link.” It may have started with the man and the bell in the kitchen. But apart from that, you need to decide on an exciting image, and what styles, genres and experiments are combined. Although it’s unlikely it will be a Western, McCormack hasn’t ruled out a Western in the future.

Patrick is a freelance critic, podcaster, and author of the memoir Life B.