Crowe's Requiem

by Mike McCormack

Genres: Coming of Age; Family Life; Magical Realism

Synopsis

The first novel from the author of Booker-listed Solar Bones, Crowe’s Requiem is a dark fable that cemented Mike McCormack’s position as a stunning new voice in world literature.

McCormack’s myth-tinged debut novel gives us the unforgettable Crowe and his endlessly curious and self-mythologizing stories. Crowe is born in the remote village of Furnace in the West of Ireland and raised by his grandfather, a man of “madness and bullying love,” who teaches him grim lessons about existence. Entirely silent until his third birthday, Crowe becomes an observant and isolated teenager, eventually leaving Furnace for a large and bewildering city. There he meets a woman who will change his life and outlook, and also finds himself diagnosed with a rare and fatal aging disease. A profound, philosophical, and darkly funny meditation on childhood and the nature of life and death, Crowe’s Requiem challenges us with the power of stories to capture the pains, wonders, and mysteries of being a person in a “wrong world.”

Release date: April 6, 2021

Publisher: Soho Press

Print pages: 264

Sample

1
 
Sometimes, in spite of all I know I think of it this way . . .
     Falling, falling, falling through the heavens, this tiny seed of myself plummeting with the speed of a cast down thing. For how long? I don’t know, there are no signs in the darkness to mark out the progress and duration of my descent. All I know is the speed and breathlessness of it, the rush and pull of the air which sucks away my buoyancy and tightens the night around me.
     That and the sense of loss. Deep in the wound of myself there is a terrible sense of forfeit, some rare and priceless thing gone forever. It is the chief torment of this terrible descent. And where are my brothers? Surely I am not alone, this limitless darkness cannot be mine alone. There must be others like me, equally anguished, equally disoriented, all in the same headlong pitch. And yet I feel alone—the darkness hums with a vast indifference, my descent causes only the slightest disturbance, a tiny thread pulled from the limitless fabric of the night.
     My wings are gone, long gone, shorn by the terrible speed of my descent, burned and scattered to dust throughout the heavens. More than anything it is these I will miss most, these fabulous accoutrements of my one-time grandeur. I will never cease to grieve for them. In fact a time will come when I will think of them as the fundamental grievance of the entire world. Beneath all the despair and wretchedness there is only this one fundamental misery. This dim but unforgettable memory of flight, the heartbreak of an entire race.
     I will arrive without blemish, mewling in infant perfection. It is as if the descent itself, the attrition of the winds and darkness, has moulded and polished me for arrival. This is an outrage, a betrayal of my ordeal. I need lesions, scar tissue, testimony of some sort, not this bogus perfection.
     And so on down, down, down, unseaming the darkness as I go. There is no going back now, not that there ever was. Suddenly a thickening of the air, I am entering a new element. I feel the dampness and a sudden breaking into light; the stony ground rushes up to meet me . . .
     . . . It was the end of the world.
     I am talking of my birthplace, Furnace, a small village in the west set beneath hills which looked out over the hammered lead surface of the Atlantic towards the distant precipice of the horizon where it spilled over into the abyss. Outside those hills lay the world but the world to Furnace was little more than a rumour, a thing of myth and half truth which sometimes you could believe and sometimes you could not. Now, when I’ve seen enough to know that the rumour was indeed largely the truth, I find it difficult to believe there was ever a time when the world had the substance of a child’s tale.
     I was born in the winter of that year, a winter so long and hard that tough mountain lambs were stricken with frost and left dead as far into the year as April. All I know of my birth I have from my grandfather and he told me that right from the beginning I was wrong. When I was washed and placed in my mother’s arms it was obvious to even the most biased observers in the room that, despite my aura of infant perfection, there was about me also a miasma of ineffable error. My grandfather said that I exuded a tension, a black effulgence which set me apart even in Furnace. I was wrong in the same way that pale crows and black lambs are wrong.
     Worse than being wrong I seemed to know I was wrong. On being born I cried solidly for three days and three nights, a long, harrowing howl which broke only for air but which died mercifully at the end of the third night by which time my throat was lacerated and my blanket flecked with blood. By then my cry had deteriorated to a low croak and my whole appearance was that of a raw, infant demon. Despair had shredded my father’s nerves and reduced my mother to a sobbing hulk. I think this was the moment they surrendered me and I do not blame them for it. How terrible I must have been, a maddened ingrate who forswore sleep, the breast, maternal succour, all for the sake of one long cry of outrage. But my grandfather recognised something different. Hovering through the room, gaunt and decisive as a raptor, he pounced suddenly and wrested me from my father’s grasp. In that instant I stopped crying. I stared up at that old man and into his blue eyes and immediately I was at peace. I had found my mentor, my guide, my oracle. This was the moment I passed into the care of that fearsome old man and it was the moment also that I entered into that most awkward and soul-destroying of all disciplines: self-knowledge.
     My parents were powerless in the face of my grandfather—I was his and that was that. I was the small moon which fell through the heavens and he was the giant ochre planet within whose gravity I’d come to wheel. He would tell me later that he recognised my cry as the kindred note of despair which sounded in his own heart and he told me also that it was not so much the theme or passion of my cry which impressed him but the sheer length of it. Any child who had the endurance and wherewithal to protest his condition for three days and nights without sleep was a child after his own heart.
     So from the very beginning I came under his sole influence and a time came when I passed so completely from my parents’ reach that now I have lost all sight and memory of them—they are now no more than ghosts reaching out of the ether of memory towards me. Maybe they could have been saved to me had I just once spoken some words of filial love and affection, words which would have assured them that our parting was not their fault. But if they were powerless in the face of my grandfather’s influence I was powerless within it. Words of love and assurance were impossible to utter from out of this gravity—the only possible words were words of query, words of extremity, words of madness.
 
 
Nothing good grows in the shade, and in Furnace, where the light was thin, all children were pale. But in a village of pale children I was paler than the rest by virtue of the fact that I was also bald. I was born hairless, born even without that protective fuzz over the soft blue pulse in the middle of the skull which makes all children so vulnerable. And I would remain that way, blue, hairless and pulsing until my second year and the moment I took it upon myself to grow.
     In spite of this lunar appearance I was a healthy child. Germs gave me a wide berth, so much so that not once did I succumb to any of the croups, colds or colics which beset other infants. But if I was a healthy child I was also a reluctant one. At six months I was no bigger than a newborn and by the time my first birthday came round I had gained only three pounds with little appreciable lengthening of my frame. Good health in a child is nothing without growth and I refused to grow.
     I refused to do other things as well. It was after I cut my teeth that they realised there was something wrong with my mouth, more precisely, my tongue. After the long howl of my birth I settled down to become an eerily silent child. All through the agony of teething I sat on the floor, red-faced, outraged, and enduring bitterly, making a low canine whimpering in the pit of my belly. But no howl passed my lip. My tongue languished like a slug, rooted and speechless in the floor of my mouth.
     My parents were worried. Furnace thronged with imbeciles. Clutches of half-wits, all of tangled provenance, wandered through the village, chewing heels of bread with blank expressions on their faces. In desperation my father prised my mouth open, gripped my tongue between thumb and forefinger and pulled it out over my lips. It was there all right and it looked normal enough, why then wouldn’t it sound? He brandished trinkets and tools in front of my face hoping I would grasp the world and speak it.
     “This is a fork and this is a knife,” I was told. “You take one in each hand and use them to eat three square meals a day. Eat enough and one day you’ll be big and strong like me.”
     “This is a dog, his name is Rex. He eats bones and herds sheep. One day he’ll be your friend and you’ll be his master. Until then be careful not to vex him.”
     But I wouldn’t be coaxed. I sat in silence and drank in his words, hoarded them up like coins, already careful in these things. I was taking stock of the world and had made a decision not to pronounce on it until I was in full possession of the facts. I would not be lured so easily. So throughout my infancy I stayed dumb, a watcher on the kitchen floor, piling up information in my heart, waiting for my moment. When it came I was going to make sure that all things were clear and understood.
     This silence caused anxiety in everyone around me. Everyone that is except my grandfather. He hunkered down in front of me and tilted my face up with the tips of his fingers. He looked into my eyes and my plan was as clear to him as if I had passed him a note. He nodded his head approvingly.
     “Leave him alone,” he said quietly. “Give him time.”
     And so I was given time.