Philosophy, Fiction

 This Plague of Souls by Mike McCormack review – a mysterious homecoming got my attention with is subhead line:

A man’s past comes back to haunt him when he returns home to rural Ireland, in this noirish metaphysical novel from the author of Solar Bones

Two words, precisely, hooked me: “noirish metaphysical”.

 Reading on, and this made me go uh huh:

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.

The metaphysical? It might be in here:

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.

Why shouldn't the metaphysical be noirish?  I think Albert Camus's novels (The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall)  have plenty of metaphysics and more than a few touches of the noir.

The link above goes to Philosophy Break's Albert Camus: The Best 5 Books to Read, and me think I should have included Camus' The Rebel. What is not noirish in the following?

Examining our urge to revolt and laying out his philosophical ideas with force, he declares that “real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present, and the task that’s before us is to transcend nihilism and to imbue meaning back into the world. But the challenge is that few of us know that that’s what we’re supposed to be doing.”

sch 11/5