There was much to enjoy here, but I found I couldn't connect with it. I'd read more from this author in the future though.

Even if, like me, one has never read Ulysses, James Joyce is still the name that springs to mind when one picks up Solar Bones.  This is not so much because McCormack too is an Irishman, but rather because the book itself consists of one long continuous sentence.  Having always taken punctuation for granted, it was surprising how the lack of it made for a disorienting and even disconcerting read.  At the centre of the story is Marcus Conway, husband and father and civil engineer.  The day is November 2 2008, All Souls' Day, the day when the dead can return to the earth.  He hears the Angelus bell and he walks forward, considering his life, his marriage, his children, career, politics - the world.  

Having received the book from Netgalley, I did not have access to the apparently rather spoilerific blurb.  To my perspective, Marcus Conway was a man going into town and taking stock on life.  He considers his town, this 'a county with a unique history of people starving and mortifying themselves for higher causes and principles'.  Set just before Ireland's boom became a bust, Marcus looks around the landscape and as an engineer feels in some way responsible for the rash of buildings that have altered the landscape.

As an engineer, Marcus has a fascination with how things work.  He recalls a fateful trip to the Museum of Torture in Prague, of gazing upon these instruments of torment and feeling alarmed that his own profession - engineering - had been applied so something so diabolical.  Later Marcus will be fascinated by the sight of his daughter's birth certificate, 'the document scarcely less miraculous than the child' in how it marks her place in the world.  The scope of Marcus' vision takes in every detail from the economy to the roads and infrastructure to the very stars in the sky.

McCormack has admitted in an interview that God gave us heaven and earth but 'the world is the product of engineers' and Solar Bones is something of a him to the engineering profession.  We hear his battles with between the developers and the contractors, his concerns about the future consequences when work is not done well.  There are hints that not all is well.  Chaos lurks and occasionally lunges - the sight of a broken tractor brings back childhood memories, local government incompetence visits a plague of contaminated water upon the population, causing Marcus' wife Mairead to become seriously ill.

Solar Bones is a powerful book, often more poetry than prose and determined to capture the full gamut of human emotion.  One moment Marcus recalls the look on his father-in-law's face when he went to beg his wife's forgiveness, the next it is twenty years later and he is chatting on Skype to his younger child, son Darragh who is doing a gap year in Australia.  It runs from moments apparently prosaic to poignant and all of it seamless.  For me the most painful though was when Marcus and Mairead go to the opening of daughter Agnes' first solo art exhibition and realise that the text on the walls - transcripts of local court appearances - have all been written in Agnes' blood.  We feel Marcus' whirl of horror at what his daughter has done, the creaking pain of a broken heart and panic at how he might be responsible, 'let it be some vision ahead of her and not torment behind responsible for this'.

This does feel like a novel that had to be set in Ireland and not just because whenever Marcus spoke, the gravelly vowels of the Irish male sprang from the page.  I was reminded of Sebastian Barry's The Temporary Gentleman  which saw another Irish engineer, Jack McNulty, meditate on his destructive choices and their consequences - a clear metaphor for the actions of the country as a whole.  McCormack is on the record as believing in Irish fiction as a specific sub-genre and that it is a 'a three-part harmony of experiment, comedy and metaphysics' and if that is his thesis, Solar Bones is perhaps the ultimate example.

The book has done well in picking up various prestigious awards, not least the Goldsmith prize for books that break the mould and extend the possibilities of the novel form.  Solar Bones is almost without plot, it comes in with a bell and goes out with an expletive but it has such a roar about it - novels written with such an overt intent to be experimental can often be off-putting but here is a voice both compulsive and compelling.  McCormack's dialogue is so pitch perfect that I felt I could hear it in my mind, these characters seeming alive even as the novel's ultimate conclusion becomes clear.  The book is a hymn - a swansong - to humanity and all its failings and flaws, and in particular its 'rhythms that bind us together and draw the world into a community, those daily/ rites, rhythms and rituals/ upholding the world like solar bones'.

I really didn't think I was going to enjoy this book when I started. It's stream of consciousness and doesn't have a single full stop in the book, which I couldn't imagine getting on with. When I got going though I found it was an extraordinary novel, the distinct structure draws you on with great urgency as you learn about our protagonist's life and death. The prose is stunning and I definitely recommend it.

Beautiful book. Some of the best writing I have come across this year. Deserving winner of the Goldsmiths Prize.

Solar Bones follows the inner most thoughts of Marcus Conway, as he reflects on his loves and life based on his analytical mind, in a single hour. The story is told in a wonderfully unique way, without any limitations on punctuation. It flows almost like a stream of consciousness. It felt at once very intimate, and I felt an immediate pull to Marcus, the main character. However, I just couldn't really get to grips with the way this is written. I can fully appreciate it for what it is - it's wonderfully written, but for whatever reason it just couldn't hold my interest.

I think I'm just not a fan of these types of books, but I might retry this when I feel I can lavish the attention on it this book deserves.

i discovered one weird thing whilst reading this beautiful book: i tend to exhale and inhale when i come to the end of a sentence. since this novel consists of just one very looooooong sentence, i am sure you can imagine the problems i encountered.

I really couldn’t get into this style of writing, if maybe I had the time to read it in one sitting I might have felt differently. Just reinforced, to me, the importance of punctuation!

There’s an interesting level of cognitive dissonance that happens for me when I end up very much enjoying a book I was predisposed to not enjoy. Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones is an excellent novel and once I’d realised that the central conceit – it’s all one long sentence – does actually work for the novel, I settled into my chair to really enjoy it and stomped on my kneejerk “ugh, God, whyyyy?” reaction.

I am deliberately going to not put any actual spoilers in this review; I try not to usually, but it really is important for this one. I googled it to find a detail and the Guardian has an article (entitled ‘Mike McCormack: ‘On my fifth book I’m a debutante’ for ease of avoiding it) which spoils the entire premise of the novel in the first five lines. Kudos, Guardian, kudos.

The novel opens with an incantation, the hearing of the Angelus bell in Louisburgh, County Mayo, on 2 November, the Day of the Dead, All Souls’ Day, the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed. The narrator of the novel is Marcus Conway, a civil servant and engineer, living in Ireland in the days after the boom. Bust is just starting to hit, and Marcus’s work life is a series of encounters and incidents involving contractors and politicians.

A trip to his daughter’s first solo art exhibition indirectly leads to Marcus’s wife getting ill. She contracts cryptosporidiosis from unclean drinking water, one sufferer in a bigger epidemic. During her illness Marcus hides the truth from his son, currently living in Australia and contacted via Skype throughout the novel. And Marcus reflects on and considers his past. This is a very reflexive novel; it doesn’t look forward – Marcus doesn’t look forward. Instead the reader hears of his family and his history and all the things that made him fall in love with his wife and his life and his children.

This reflexivity makes sense at the end of the novel. It all comes clear in a hymn, a devotion. And it makes the use of the single sentence ring true.

Not entirely to my taste, but I admire what the author was doing. A particularly powerful ending.

In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode or method that attempts to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind. That is what this book does as we share thoughts of Marcus, a civil engineer working in County Mayo, Ireland. Solar Bones is written without chapters or paragraphs and has the absolute minimum of punctuation. You might think that would make it a tough read but you'd be wrong. Freedom from these strictures allows the storyline to jump seamlessly between events and timelines. , I believe it also gives each reader the freedom to weight what is written or said in empathy with their own imagined version of Marcus. His stream of consciousness becomes ours and we are drawn into a deeper understanding as a result. A unique work, cleverly written that challenges the reader, but rising to that challenge brings real satisfaction. A brilliant choice for any book-club to discuss.

Far too much stream of blather, and not consciousness

This book is sort of famous a book written as a single sentence . So what is it like ...

Well it is intense , interesting and well written , this is a book written by a stylish writer who is fully in command of his writing .

I sadly whilst admiring the work never felt engaged . You should read because it is interesting but it isnt for me anyway essential

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.

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.

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.