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A daily record of what I'm thinking about what I'm reading

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Thursday, March 15, 2018

Thoughts on the ending for Solar Bones

Spoilers here, as I discuss the ending of Mike McCormack's novel Solar Bones (2017). Honestly, I couldn't see it coming until the last 20 pages or so when the narrator, Marcus, began to complain about a burning sensation in his chest, and then, through his run-on recollections - the novel consists of one 216-pages sentence, which I will not emulate in this post - we follow M pretty closely through the next 24 hours or so as he tends to his wife, now recovering from a viral infection caused by water pollution (which particularly galls M because he is a dedicated civil engineer in public service) and heading out to a nearby town to pick up some medicine for her. On the way home his chest pains increase until he pulls over to the side of the road, gasping for breath, and by then all readers will figure out what's happening, what's happened: M's ghost narrates the entire novel; looking back briefly at the opening pages I could see now that the bells he heard tolling from a nearby church were his own funeral bells; he'd been left alone in the house - we assumed it was because his wife was at work - but now we can see that his family was at the church, and that he has a few hours at most - presumably between the first and last tolling of the bells - to recollect and "narrate" his life - not in chronological sequence but as a life might come back to one who is forced into remembrance. In earlier posts I'd noted that the novel, for all its strengths, suffers for lack of a plot - and that's still true to a degree - but at the end we see that the plot such as it is consists of the passing of this spirit from earth/life into an afterlife or oblivion; the plot is his life. (Please do not ask me what the title refers to; the narrator uses this phrase once over the course of the narrative, but it means nothing to me unless it's an attempt to find a metaphor for a life, or death, that is pure spirit and energy?)

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