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Once a year, on All Souls’ Day, it is said in Ireland that the dead may return. The 2017 Man Booker<\/a> longlisted book, Solar Bones<\/em><\/a> by Mike McCormack, is the story of one such visit.<\/p>\n This profound new work is by one of Ireland’s most important contemporary novelists; the award-winner of the Goldsmiths Prize and Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year. Solar Bones<\/em> is McCormack’s latest masterpiece, an ambitious and other-worldly novel that plays with form and defies convention.<\/p>\n McCormack now answers the Booktopia Book Guru’s Ten Terrifying Questions.<\/p>\n 1. To begin with why don\u2019t you tell us a little bit about yourself – where were you born? Raised? Schooled?<\/strong><\/p>\n Like many another Mayo man of my generation I was born in London of Irish emigrant parents. But we moved back to Mayo on the west coast of Ireland when I was a nipper. I was raised for a time on my grandparents farm in North Mayo but then settled back with my parents in a small village called Louisburg where I went to school.<\/p>\n 2. What did you want to be when you were twelve, eighteen and thirty? And why?<\/strong><\/p>\n When I was twelve I wanted to be a cowboy \u2013 a cattle rustler, gunfighter, bank robbing type of cowboy. I still hold to the bank robbing part of that ambition.<\/p>\n When I was eighteen I wanted to front my own heavy metal band. Oddly enough I never thought to get off my arse and form a band \u2013 such things just were not done in my part of the world. Still though, it was a definite dream.<\/p>\n At thirty I was pretty much set in my ways as a writer and all I wanted to do was write the best book I could.<\/p>\n 3. What strongly held belief did you have at eighteen that you do not have now? I believed at 18 that it was only a matter of a few years before Mayo would win an All Ireland title… over thirty years later that belief has taken some hammering.<\/p>\n 4. What were three big events \u2013 in the family circle or on the world stage or in your reading life, for example \u2013 you can now say, had a great effect on you and influenced you in your career path?<\/strong><\/p>\n The book has to be Flann O\u2019Brien\u2019s The Third Policeman<\/em><\/a>. When I lifted my head out of it, the world, and the world of books, had been changed. It showed me how infinite the novel could be.<\/p>\n A piece of music \u2013 hmmmmm\u2026. I was introduced to Arvo Part\u2019s music in my early twenties and its ability to sketch out its own silence is something which has stayed with me.<\/p>\n It is impossible to narrow this down to one particular picture. In my twenties, I shared houses and spent a whole lot of time with artists, photographers and video artists. I got a really valuable education from them \u2013 I learned to see light and colour and shade in all its mood and movement. That whole period was really important to me.<\/p>\n 5. Considering the innumerable electronic media avenues open to you – blogs, online newspapers, TV, radio, etc \u2013 why have you chosen to write a book?<\/strong><\/p>\n The obvious answer is that I am a novelist, a fiction writer, so the idea was always going to present itself to either the long form or short form fictional device.\u00a0But I think that there is something especially generous about the novel, something about the way it can accommodate the waste and repetition and glory and frustrations of a lived life with equal regard, which made it hospitable to the idea of Solar Bones.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n 6. Please tell us about your latest book\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n
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