I am the sort of reader who likes to put a pencil mark beside lines that I particularly love in a book. The marks stop about halfway through my copy of Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones because there were too many phrases to note. Here is an observation of a bread knife given as a wedding present 20 years ago, held out to the narrator by his wife: “it had become rounded and worn with the bevelled edges of the ash handle faintly bleached from continual washing”.
Marcus Conway, the narrator, considers how the knife had its beginnings “in the murk of prehistory as a blunt river cobble or shard of flint, through all its brittle bronze and ferric variants . . . till it arrived safely in her hand”. Marcus is an engineer who lives with Mairead in the west of Ireland, their two children grown and living their own lives; a long-married couple finding a way through their later years along the path of language that McCormack has built for them. This is an ordinary story told in the most extraordinary words, and I was thrilled, as a judge of this year’s Goldsmiths Prize, to be able to add it to the list of worthy winners.
Content from our partners
