Long-listed for the Man Booker Prize 2017 Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2016 BGE Irish Book of the Year 2016
Marcus Conway has come a long way to stand in the kitchen of his home and remember the rhythms and routines of his life. Considering with his engineer's mind how things are constructed - bridges, banking systems, marriages - and how they may come apart.
Mike McCormack captures with tenderness and feeling, in continuous, flowing prose, a whole life suspended in a single hour.
the bell the bell as hearing the bell as hearing the bell as standing here the bell being heard standing here hearing it ring out through the grey light of this morning, noon or night god knows this grey day standing here and listening to this bell in the middle of the day, the middle of the day bell, the Angelus bell in the middle of the day, ringing out through the grey light to here standing in the kitchen hearing this bell snag my heart and draw the whole world into being here pale and breathless after coming a long way to stand in this kitchen confused no doubt about that but hearing the bell from the village church a mile away as the crow flies, across the street from the garda station, beneath the giant sycamore trees which tower over it and in which a colony of rooks have made their nests, so many and so noisy that sometimes in spring when they are nesting their clamour fills the church and exhausted now, so quickly that sprint to the church and the bell yes, they are the real thing the real bells not a transmission or a broadcast because there’s no mistaking the fuller depth and resonance of the sound carried towards me across the length and breadth of this day and which, even at this distance reverberates in my chest a systolic thump from the other side of this parish, which lies on the edge of this known world with Sheeffry and Mweelrea to the south and the open expanse of Clew Bay to the north the Angelus bell ringing out over its villages and townlands, over the fields and hills and bogs in between, six chimes of three across a minute and a half, a summons struck on the lip of the void which gathers this parish together through all its primary and secondary roads with all its schools and football pitches all its bridges and graveyards all its shops and pubs the builder’s yard and health clinic the community centre the water treatment plant and the handball alley the made world with all the focal points around which a parish like this gathers itself as surely as the world itself did at the beginning of time, through mountains, rivers and lakes when it gathered in these parts around the Bunowen river which rises in the Lachta hills and flows north towards the sea, carving out that floodplain to which all roads, primary and secondary, following the contours of the landscape, make their way and in the middle of which stands the village of Louisburgh from which the Angelus bell is ringing, drawing up the world again mountains, rivers and lakes acres, roods and perches animal, mineral, vegetable covenant, cross and crown the given world with all its history to brace myself while standing here in the kitchen of this house I’ve lived in for nearly twenty-five years and raised a family, this house outside the village of Louisburgh in the county of Mayo on the west coast of Ireland, the village in which I can trace my seed and breed back to a time when it was nothing more than a ramshackle river crossing of a few smoky homesteads clustered around a forge and a log bridge, a sod-and-stone hamlet not yet gathered to a proper plan nor licensed to hold a fair, my line traceable to the gloomy prehistory in which a tenacious clan of farmers and fishermen kept their grip on a small patch of land through hail and gale hell and high water men with bellies and short tempers, half of whom went to their graves with pains in their chests before they were sixty, good singers many of them, all adding to the home place down the generations till it swelled to twenty acres, grazing and tillage, with access to open commonage on Carramore hill which overlooks the bay and this pain, this fucking pain tells me that to the best of my knowledge knowledge being the best of me, that that there is something strange about all this, some twitchy energy in the ether which has affected me from the moment those bells began to toll, something flitting through me, a giddiness drawing me through the house door by door room by room up and down the hall like a mad thing bedrooms, bathroom, sitting room and back again to the kitchen where Christ such a frantic burst Christ not so much a frantic burst as a rolling crease in the light, flowing from room to room only to find this house is empty not a soul anywhere because this is a weekday and my family are gone all gone the kids all away now and of course Mairead is at work and won’t be back till after four so the house is mine till then, something that should gladden me as normally I would only be too happy to potter around on my own here, doing nothing, listening to the radio or reading the paper, but now the idea makes me uneasy, with four hours stretching ahead of me till she returns, alone here for four hours four hours till she returns so there must be some way of filling the span of time that now spreads out ahead of me, something to cut through this gnawing unease because the paper yes that’s what I’ll do the daily paper get the keys of the car and drive into the village to get the paper, park on the square in front of the chemist and then stand on the street and this is what I will do stand there for as long as it takes for someone to come along and speak to me, someone to say hello hello or until someone salutes me in one way or another, waves to me or calls my name, because even though this street is a street like any other it is different in one crucial aspect – this particular street is mine, mine in the sense of having walked it thousands of times man and boy winter and summer hail, rain and shine so that all its doors and shop-fronts are familiar to me, every pole and kerbstone along its length recognisable to me this street a given this street is something to rely on fount and ground one of those places where someone will pass who can say of me yes, I know this man or more specifically yes, I know this man and I know his sister Eithne and I knew his mother and father before him and all belonging to him or more intimately of course I know him – Marcus Conway – he lives across the fields from me, I can see his house from the back door or more adamantly why wouldn’t I know him, Marcus Conway the engineer, I went to school with him and played football with him – we wore the black and gold together or more impatiently I should know him, his son and daughter went to school with my own – we were on the school council together or more irritably of course I know him – I lent him a chainsaw to cut back that hawthorn hedge at the end of his road and so on and so on to infinity amen the basic creed in all its moods and declensions, the articles of faith which verify me and upon which I have built a life in this parish with all its work and rituals for the best part of five decades and this short history of the world to brace myself with standing here in this kitchen, in this grey light and wondering why this sudden need to rehearse these self-evident truths should press so heavily upon me today, why this feeling that there are thresholds to cross things to be settled checks to be run as if I had stepped into a narrow circumstance bordered around by oblivion while looking for my keys now frisking my pockets and glancing around, only to see that Mairead has beaten me to the job, she has been out early and bought the papers – not one but two of them, local and national, both lying in the middle of the table neatly folded into each other, the light glossing unbroken across their surface, making it clear she has not read them herself that I might have the small pleasure of opening up a fresh newspaper, hearing it rattle and creak as it discloses itself, one of those experiences which properly begin the day or the afternoon as is the case now, turning it over and leafing through it starting at the back, the sports pages, to read the headline Hard Lessons in Latest Defeat as if this were the time and the place for a sermon which prompts me to close it again quickly, not wanting any homily at this hour of the day with the paper showing the date as November 2nd, the month of the Holy Souls already upon us, the year nearly gone so what happened to October come and gone in a flash, the clocks gone back for winter time only last week and the front-page stories telling that the world is going about its relentless business of rising up in splendour and falling down in ruins with wars still ongoing in foreign parts – Afghanistan and Iraq among others – as peace settlements are being attempted elsewhere – Israel and Palestine – while closer to home, the drama is in a lower key but real nonetheless – bed shortages in hospitals and public sector wage agreements under pressure – all good human stories no matter how they will pan out, you can feel that, the flesh and blood element twitching in them, while at the same time in the over-realm of international finance other, more abstract indices are rising and falling to their own havoc – share prices, interest rates, profit margins, solvency ratios – money upholding the necessary imbalances so that everything continues to move ever forward while on one of the inside pages there is one year on a long article with an illustrative graph and quotes outlining the causes and consequences of our recent economic collapse, a brief résumé of events that culminated on the night of September 29th, feast of the archangel Michael – the night the whole banking system almost collapsed and the country came within a hair’s breadth of waking the following morning to empty bank accounts and for clarity’s sake this article is illustrated by a sidebar which gives some indication of just how outsized the nation’s financial folly was in the years leading up to the collapse, debt piling up till it ran to tens of billions, incredible figures for a small island economy, awe-inspiring magnitudes which shifted forever the horizons of what we thought ourselves liable for and which now, stacked on top of each other like this – all those zeroes, glossy and hard, so given to viral increase – appear like the indices and magnitudes of a new cosmology, the forces and velocities of some barren, inverse world – a negative realm that, over time, will suck the life out of us, that collapse which happened without offering any forewarning of itself, none that any of our prophets picked up on anyway as they were all apparently struck dumb and blind, robbed of all foresight when surely this was the kind of catastrophe prophets should have an eye for or some foreknowledge of but didn’t since it is now evident in hindsight that our seers’ gifts were of a lesser order, their warnings lowered to a tremulous bleating, the voices of men hedging their bets and without the proper pitch of hysterical accusation as they settled instead for fault-finding and analysis, that cautionary note which in the end proved wholly inadequate to the coming disaster because pointing out flaws was never going to be enough and figures and projections, no matter how dire, were never likely to map out the real contours of the calamity or prove to be an adequate spell against it when, without that shrill tone of indictment, theirs was never a song to hold our attention and no point whatsoever meeting catastrophe with reason when what was needed was our prophets deranged and coming towards us wild-eyed
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