Mike McCormack: ‘If I’ve one gift as a writer, it’s patience’ | Fiction

Mike McCormack was born in London in 1965 and raised on a farm in County Mayo in the west of Ireland. He published his first story collection, Getting It in the Head, in 1996, followed by three novels that have marked him out as an experimentalist. Notes from a Coma (2005) interspersed its narrative with a fragmentary commentary at the bottom of each page. His work reached a wider audience with 2016’s Solar Bones, in which a lonely Mayo engineer recalls his life in one unending sentence – it won the Goldsmiths prize and was longlisted for the Booker. His latest novel, This Plague of Souls, follows a painter named Nealon as he returns home from prison and sets out to find his wife and child amid brewing global unrest. McCormack lives in Galway with his wife, artist Maeve Curtis, and their son.

What sparked the new book?
I started writing it in 2012, around the same time as Solar Bones, which then asserted priority. It seems that I was very interested in how worlds collapse, but coming into Covid, the focus changed from how the world collapses to how do we put it back together. Both books are about men trying to build a world – one as an engineer, the other as an artist – and both books seem to think that world building has to do with the making of family.

Why start two books at the same time? How does that work?
Two books? [laughs] Usually, I’ve got four or five on the go at the same time. Why one jostles into the lead as opposed to another is something I cannot explain. I certainly got swept up in the character of Marcus Conway [in Solar Bones], he was just such a vivid presence. And I think I had to have that light before the darkness of Nealon could be properly brought into focus.

There are similarities between yourself and Nealon. Your father died when you were 18, as did his.
Fathers and sons are a recurring theme in my work. That doesn’t make me any different from lots of other writers, but my fathers tend to be decent men who love their families and want to do best for them, though they don’t always succeed. Losing my father was a shock to me [he died from a heart attack in bed in his late 40s] and I think it’s given me that hankering that’s recurred in my work.

What was he like?
He was a good and decent man and he would have gone on to more success as a father if he had been allowed to live. I was just getting to know him, and he me. There’s no good time to lose your father, but I think there is a special awkwardness about losing them at the age of 18… you’re just trying to make your own way in the world.

This isn’t the first time you’ve written about imprisonment in your work: it also featured in Notes from a Coma, where convicts are placed in comas in an experiment to eradicate actual prisons.
I’ve often wondered about that myself. I can only trace it back to the fact that, for eight or nine years, I lived in a bedsit above a pub in Galway that was about the width of my arms outstretched and twice as long. I lived happily enough in that for years – my first and second book were written there. So I laid down my themes and concerns in that single cell.

Why do you think the Irish literary scene is so vigorous at the moment?
It has to do with the gifted generation of book and magazine editors. All the writers that you are admiring – the likes of Nicole Flattery, Colin Barrett, Lisa McInerney, John Patrick McHugh, Claire-Louise Bennett – they’ve all cut their teeth on a really vibrant journal and magazine culture in Ireland and they’ve all had their first writing polished by Irish editors. That’s absolutely crucial. My generation went away and had our first editorial contact with English editors and that worked out OK. But I worked with some editors in England, and trying to explain things to them – Jesus Christ! I remember trying to explain an idiomatic expression: “You won’t feel until Christmas.” You won’t feel what? And I remember then returning to Ireland and being edited by an Irish editor, and the amount of things I did not have to explain or translate, I found that absolutely amazing.

Do you still teach?
Yes, I direct the MA in creative writing at the University of Galway. Before that, I taught adult education for about 15 years. I had students that I had to bring up to first-year essay standard over a year. Their first writing exercise was “How to make a cup of tea” and you can see straight away the people who could write. It was good, honest work, and certainly the most important teaching that I’ve done. The stakes were high: this was their chance to get back into the educational system.

What have you been reading lately?
One of the best books I’ve read this year is Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital. It’s set on the space station and tells the stories of six astronauts. I was like: ‘Damn, how did she get to that idea before me?’ It’s a beautiful, brilliant book. Claire Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor is a ferocious account of heartbreak and early motherhood. I think men should read it and lower their heads and look penitent. It’s an astonishing book, the best novel I’ve read in quite a while.

How do you write?
I write longhand. I love using pen and paper. There’s something slow and intimate about the process that allows you to creep up on the subject. I can pursue an idea for years. If there’s one gift I have as a writer, it’s patience. Sometimes, I think that I just out-patience the idea, and after four or five years, it just comes out with its hands up. “You’re still fucking here? I surrender.”

Mike McCormack was born in London in 1965 and raised on a farm in County Mayo in the west of Ireland. He published his first story collection, Getting It in the Head, in 1996, followed by three novels that have marked him out as an experimentalist. Notes from a Coma (2005) interspersed its narrative with a fragmentary commentary at the bottom of each page. His work reached a wider audience with 2016’s Solar Bones, in which a lonely Mayo engineer recalls his life in one unending sentence – it won the Goldsmiths prize and was longlisted for the Booker. His latest novel, This Plague of Souls, follows a painter named Nealon as he returns home from prison and sets out to find his wife and child amid brewing global unrest. McCormack lives in Galway with his wife, artist Maeve Curtis, and their son.

What sparked the new book?
I started writing it in 2012, around the same time as Solar Bones, which then asserted priority. It seems that I was very interested in how worlds collapse, but coming into Covid, the focus changed from how the world collapses to how do we put it back together. Both books are about men trying to build a world – one as an engineer, the other as an artist – and both books seem to think that world building has to do with the making of family.

Why start two books at the same time? How does that work?
Two books? [laughs] Usually, I’ve got four or five on the go at the same time. Why one jostles into the lead as opposed to another is something I cannot explain. I certainly got swept up in the character of Marcus Conway [in Solar Bones], he was just such a vivid presence. And I think I had to have that light before the darkness of Nealon could be properly brought into focus.

There are similarities between yourself and Nealon. Your father died when you were 18, as did his.
Fathers and sons are a recurring theme in my work. That doesn’t make me any different from lots of other writers, but my fathers tend to be decent men who love their families and want to do best for them, though they don’t always succeed. Losing my father was a shock to me [he died from a heart attack in bed in his late 40s] and I think it’s given me that hankering that’s recurred in my work.

What was he like?
He was a good and decent man and he would have gone on to more success as a father if he had been allowed to live. I was just getting to know him, and he me. There’s no good time to lose your father, but I think there is a special awkwardness about losing them at the age of 18… you’re just trying to make your own way in the world.

This isn’t the first time you’ve written about imprisonment in your work: it also featured in Notes from a Coma, where convicts are placed in comas in an experiment to eradicate actual prisons.
I’ve often wondered about that myself. I can only trace it back to the fact that, for eight or nine years, I lived in a bedsit above a pub in Galway that was about the width of my arms outstretched and twice as long. I lived happily enough in that for years – my first and second book were written there. So I laid down my themes and concerns in that single cell.

Why do you think the Irish literary scene is so vigorous at the moment?
It has to do with the gifted generation of book and magazine editors. All the writers that you are admiring – the likes of Nicole Flattery, Colin Barrett, Lisa McInerney, John Patrick McHugh, Claire-Louise Bennett – they’ve all cut their teeth on a really vibrant journal and magazine culture in Ireland and they’ve all had their first writing polished by Irish editors. That’s absolutely crucial. My generation went away and had our first editorial contact with English editors and that worked out OK. But I worked with some editors in England, and trying to explain things to them – Jesus Christ! I remember trying to explain an idiomatic expression: “You won’t feel until Christmas.” You won’t feel what? And I remember then returning to Ireland and being edited by an Irish editor, and the amount of things I did not have to explain or translate, I found that absolutely amazing.

Do you still teach?
Yes, I direct the MA in creative writing at the University of Galway. Before that, I taught adult education for about 15 years. I had students that I had to bring up to first-year essay standard over a year. Their first writing exercise was “How to make a cup of tea” and you can see straight away the people who could write. It was good, honest work, and certainly the most important teaching that I’ve done. The stakes were high: this was their chance to get back into the educational system.

What have you been reading lately?
One of the best books I’ve read this year is Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital. It’s set on the space station and tells the stories of six astronauts. I was like: ‘Damn, how did she get to that idea before me?’ It’s a beautiful, brilliant book. Claire Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor is a ferocious account of heartbreak and early motherhood. I think men should read it and lower their heads and look penitent. It’s an astonishing book, the best novel I’ve read in quite a while.

How do you write?
I write longhand. I love using pen and paper. There’s something slow and intimate about the process that allows you to creep up on the subject. I can pursue an idea for years. If there’s one gift I have as a writer, it’s patience. Sometimes, I think that I just out-patience the idea, and after four or five years, it just comes out with its hands up. “You’re still fucking here? I surrender.”