Solar Bones

Solar Bones is a distinctive novel that tells the highs and lows of a man’s life through his immediate thoughts and memories. Marcus Conway is an engineer with a wife and two grown up children, with his thoughts clouded with current work projects and interfering projects, his wife’s sudden illness from a tainted water supply, and the lives of his children, one a local artist trying out a new medium and the other across the globe in Australia. The novel follows him musing over all of these and more, considering the structures of civil features, marriage, and stable life in one single sentence.

McCormack’s stylistic touches—a single sentence novel, broken up by commas and line breaks—makes the book feel strangely natural, giving Marcus’ thoughts a flowing quality that might be expected from stream of consciousness writing, but also some of the feel of poetry. The detail, especially depictions of specific moments like when his wife is very ill, is vivid and real, with the ability to make the reader feel a little queasy, for example. The nature of the novel means it is focused upon the character, his thoughts, and his life rather than a particular main narrative, though the book does have a decisive ending.

Solar Bones is far more readable than the ‘single sentence novel’ selling point makes it sound, but also it is this selling point that gives it a distinctive style, a return to the modernist stream of consciousness and a way of making prose and poetry less separate. It makes for a tender look at a life, unmissable for literary fiction fans.

If you think (as I did) that a single sentence stream-of-consciousness novel sounds rather too pretentious for its own good, you’d be wrong (as I was). This is a wonderful book, totally absorbing and engaging. It is indeed written as a single sentence, but there are commas aplenty, and line breaks, so it’s not difficult to read and is completely accessible. And being inside Marcus Conway’s mind is a very interesting place to be, although it’s certainly not a dramatic place. A fairly ordinary one, in fact. Marcus leads a rather conventional life, even if the narration of it isn’t conventional. He’s a married engineer, with two-grown-up children, a job he finds challenging but fulfilling (except when those pesky politicians get involved) and which he’s good at, and even if he doesn’t always understand his children, he loves them and he has a good relationship with his wife. He muses about work, family, life in general and I was happy to listen to him. One sentence, yes, but it’s not a tricksy literary device; rather it’s an effective and compelling way to enter into the head of another person and find it a place you’re happy to stay for a while.

Marcus Conway stands in his kitchen on All Souls Day, wondering what has happened to his family, and what has brought him to this part. Time spirals back as we learn about Marcus' past as an engineer, his training in the seminary, his life with his wife and his now adult, artistic children forging their way in the world. The parts of the book devoted to his family, particularly his daughter's disturbing exhibition and his wife's illness, both concerned with the failings of the corporeal body are by far the most compelling, possibly in contrast with Marcus' state. I would have preferred if the back cover of the book had not given away the end, but Marcus' fate was still startling and heart wrenching. It's a ghost story, a love story, a single sentence that rages against life that doesn't play fair and doesn't make sense.