Towards the end of This Plague of Souls, a familiar sound calls out to its protagonist, Nealon. The world is changing: some great alteration seems about to unfold. Nealon gazes at a television, waiting for information. “The signature tune for the news bulletin calls out. A brass fanfare over an electronic jitter snags beneath the peal of the angelus bell.” So the close of this haunting tale calls back to the opening of Solar Bones, McCormack’s previous book, in which the Angelus is ringing out on All Souls’ Day: “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”. This staccato prose poem begins a narration of the life of Marcus Conway, a civil engineer gripped by a sense of loneliness and loss, reflecting on his past with hypnotic specificity. That novel, which won McCormack the Goldsmiths prize in 2016, was also longlisted for the Booker; it brought this remarkable Irish writer into the literary mainstream.
So This Plague of Souls chimes with its predecessor. As the novel opens Nealon is returning to his family home – a farm in rural Ireland – after a long absence. “Opening the door and crossing the threshold in the dark triggers the phone in Nealon’s pocket,” is the novel’s opening line, in which action and a sense of the uncanny are immediately combined. An unknown voice, “male and downbeat, not the sort you would choose to listen to in the dark”, speaks to him as if they are old friends, assuring him that they will speak again when Nealon is settled. “Welcome home, Nealon,” the voice says, the simplicity of his greeting, his ability to apparently see Nealon’s movements, hinting at supernatural knowledge.
