Book review: This Plague of Souls by Mike McCormack

By Simon Demetriou

In a recent review, I wrote about how unease and pretty sentences aren’t enough to make a good novel. This week, I find myself reviewing another novel that is packed with even more unease and even prettier sentences. But This Plague of Souls has something more; it has narrative impetus among the disquiet, and meaning resonates through technical skill. It has more than enough for me to call it more than a good novel.

The words ‘Welcome home’ can be two of the most reassuring in the language. When spoken by an unknown voice calling you on your phone in the dark when you’ve just arrived home from a long absence, they can also be among the most unsettling. These are the words uttered to John Nealon just after he crosses the threshold of his house in the rural west of Ireland by a male voice claiming that ‘only a friend would call at this hour’, and belonging to someone who seems to have a preternatural knowledge of Nealon’s past and, more disconcertingly, his present – extending to his movements and sometimes his thoughts.

Nealon’s empty, post-return existence – empty because he finds his home bare of the wife and child he was hoping would be waiting for him – is punctuated only by the ongoing sequence of these phone calls, ever trying to goad and lure him into a meeting with the promise of knowledge and information. Between them, we get associative flashbacks that give us glimpses into Nealon’s past, from his youth as a talented artist to giving it all up to rescuing Olwyn, who became his wife, from heroin addiction, to a mysterious arrest and prolonged time in custody.

Finally, as the reader both dreads and craves, Nealon heads off to meet the voice, and in doing so allows McCormack to display his virtuosic gift for evocative description and for dialogue both musical and authentic. In this final conversation much is revealed, and much more is left uncertain. Ultimately, as the Angelus bell rings out over the unnamed Irish city and a potentially momentous – but also potentially illusory – world event unfolds outside the window by which Nealon and his interlocutor sit, we are left with the sense of a universe in which terror, isolation, loss and hope simultaneously coexist as we complete a book in which a writer manages to produce a beautiful whole out of a sense of profound incompleteness. If all this sounds paradoxical, that’s because it is. McCormack’s capacity to make paradox compelling and satisfactory is a work of writerly magic that is far better to read than to have explained.