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.
Why has Nealon been away? With masterful narrative skill, McCormack breadcrumbs the reason: Nealon wants to make himself some scrambled eggs, but “having his meals handed to him on a tray for so long has thrown him completely from the flow of these things”. We finally learn he has been in prison on remand – but still, we don’t know why. It doesn’t matter: what matters is the intensity of Nealon’s reflections as he gathers himself back into his life. McCormack’s language is evocative, perfectly suited to the noirish atmosphere he builds throughout the book. “There is something coercive in the flow of the house, the way it draws him through it.” External forces press against Nealon as he attempts to make sense of what has gone before and what is to come.
This is the house he grew up in, alone with his father: “a house without women” – Nealon never knew his mother. But he had not expected to return to darkness and emptiness: “So where is Olwyn? Where is she?” Olwyn is his wife, mother of his little son Cuan, both of them missing. Eerie flashbacks describe Nealon rescuing Olwyn from heroin addiction; his son suffered from nosebleeds, a small domestic drama made dark in Nealon’s recollection of how, in clearing up the aftermath, he would sit “on the side of the bath in the small hours of the morning watching the water rise up over the folds of material before turning pink with his child’s blood”.
These memories make up the first third of the novel. In the second section, Nealon sets off at dawn for a nearby city where he has a meeting to attend; he looks forward to the “vacant pleasure of driving”. As in Solar Bones, McCormack displays his gift for describing landscapes and situations that might seem unlovely, but for the fact that they are loved by the author’s observing eye. “He slows down for a newly resurfaced section of the road that runs through a neat little village. The approach is marked with traffic lights and the soft margin along its length is lined with a series of small lanterns. Like hallowed ground, Nealon thinks. The surface is so frictionless that the car seems to rise up off it, edging on flight.”
The novel’s denouement sees Nealon readying himself for that meeting, one so immensely consequential it would be a shame to give any details of it away. Some momentous world event – Nealon refers to it simply as “this terror thing”, but it remains opaque – is unfolding as he prepares to meet his fate. It is here, in this final section, that the mysterious paths this novel has taken converge. And not just because we begin to reckon with what actually happened in Nealon’s past, and what it might lead to, but because of the way in which McCormack makes everything connect. Little fragments of other lives we have seen – men working on a road, a woman thumbing through a catalogue – have a bearing on what is to come.
And then we hear the Angelus bell, a call to prayer and to good will. This is a strange novel, sinister yet hopeful, a descent into darkness that somehow manages to rise into a ringing light.
• This Plague of Souls by Mike McCormack is published by Canongate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
