It has becoming something of a truism recently to note the resurgence of the experimental Irish novel. Not without justification: if Ireland’s twentieth-century literary output is often feted as one which inaugurated a new strain of literary modernism, of which James Joyce’s Ulysses is the most cited example, closely followed by Samuel Beckett and, increasingly, Flann O’Brien, then recent novels like Eimear McBride’s acclaimed A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, markedly influenced by her reading of Joyce, have been widely seen as marking a return to (radical) form.
Though it’s tiresome to invoke the same ghosts, the style of Solar Bones, the third novel from Mike McCormack, invites familiar comparisons. Written in a single, sparsely-punctuated stream of consciousness flow broken only by line breaks – and those unexpectedly placed – McCormack’s writing is the latest in a growing canon of literature which draws self-consciously on an Irish modernist heritage to tackle contemporary concerns.
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