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tv   Meet the Author  BBC News  July 13, 2017 8:45pm-9:00pm BST

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thatis cannot ignore. this is every shame that is morally corrupt, it is a dictatorship, it is controlling its people, deceiving people of other countries. when we deal with this country, we must take human rights issues into consideration. we cannot just play one policy field against another. we have to abandon the idea that ——. our democratic life has been affected. our condolences for the loss of your friend liu xiaobo, and thank you for talking to us about him. if you have taken a cheque to the
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natural history museum, you will have been greeted by dippy the dipper dopers, but now another creature is taking the display, the skeleton creature is taking the display, the s keleto n of creature is taking the display, the skeleton of a giant blue whale called hope. it has been suspended from the ceiling so it appears to dive down onto visitors as they enter the building. fans of dippy need not fear, he will be setting out on a tour of the uk. strong wires, i hope! now it's time for meet the author. there isn't a single full stop in mike mccormack‘s novel, solar bones. the story is a monologue that reads like a string of thoughts, sometimes poetic, sometimes rough, often disturbing. and they tell us about one man in one hour, on one day, all souls' day, in rural ireland. his hopes and his disappointments, his fears and loves. a character is revealed, and so is the world in which he has to live.
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this is a adventurous storytelling by a master craftsman. welcome. it's quite a bold thing to do, to write a novel of more than 250 pages in paperback in one sentence. it is, but you write the books that present themselves to you, and that's the way the book, the way solar bones presented itself to me. you mean in its content, in the thoughts that you were dealing with, and not as a conscious matter of form? it just seemed that was the way you should write it down? very early on in the composition of the book, i realised that the narrator was the sort of person he was, and that he would speak in a continuous rolling rhythm. and once i had got that in my mind,
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it became second nature. and it recalled in it one of the exercises i had set myself years ago as a writer, to come in every morning and sit down at my desk and write whatever it was that came into my head. and the only strictures i put on it was that it had to transition neatly from what i had done the day before and that it had to sustain rolling rhythm. and so when i realised the book was going to be written in a continuous ongoing rhythm, i recalled that exercise. there is a naturalfeeling, i think, most readers will have, of a kind of joycean inheritance here. it would be hard to think that you didn't havejoyce somewhere in your head when you were producing a book of this kind. people have spoken about the book as a stream—of—consciousness novel, and i would dispute that. it doesn't have that kind
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of telegraphic staccato rhythms that you associate with stream of consciousness. it's much more an attempt to write something continuous, ongoing and rolling. however, as an irish writer, i've always been conscious of the fact that our great writers are experimental writers, and i wanted to... i've always admired their recklessness and courage, and the generosity of those writers. so i would like as a writer to think that you had a part of that yourself, so that was where i took my... recklessness is a very good word. yeah! and of course, you're writing not just about an individual whose thoughts are happy and sad and confused, and sometimes crystal clear, and whose emotions are laid bare. you are writing about ireland. yes. and you are writing about a feeling of a country coming out of, really, an economic catastrophe which has impacted on people's lives in a very direct way, so it's a very contemporary novel
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in that sense. it is, and again, that was... you never set out to... i didn't set out to write a novel of the crash, or post—crash. basically, what i set out to do was to capture the mind and life of this one man, this engineer. and as an engineer, as a civil engineer, that puts him at a nexus of a whole series of forces, politics, economics, all sorts of social movements and everything like that. even civic catastrophes, like contamination of water systems and everything. the allure for me about marcus conway is that he's an engineer, and engineers make the world. god gave us heaven and earth and then he hands it over to engineers, and engineers make the world, and i was interested in seeing this man, who has this complete involvement with the world he makes, and that. so that was what i found attractive about him. well, you talk about the engineering, you also dropped in god there,
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and of course the book unfolds on all souls' day, the idea that there are these souls drifting around all over the place. it begins with the tolling of the angelus bell, and that bell seems to toll right through the book. i mean, you talk of its rhythmic character and the way it rolls on, and i suppose the sound of that as a kind of call to prayer, it really goes right through the book from beginning to end, doesn't it? the book is an hour long and it's suspended between two temporal markers. one is the divine marker at 12:00 and the other is the temporal marker forthei:00 news ati:00, so the book is spanned between... it's an hour long but in that hour he gets... he's inundated with a cascade of memories of his whole life. he's a soul who's susceptible to that kind of thing. and he himself remarks about that hour in the middle of the day. he always found it a soft, strange hour, in which the morning's
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best energies are gone and it's too early to sit down for the dinner, and the 1:00 news hasn't happened yet, so it's betwixt and between, and it seems to be susceptible to people like him. there's a fatalism running through the book too, a sense that things aren't random, that they appear to be random, but... and he talks about putting one foot in front of the other and just carrying on. we're doomed to go through this journey in a very deliberate and inevitable way, aren't we? yes. i don't know if it's fatalism. endurance is his own... is a nobility in itself and a heroism in itself, and the book is... the book is a hymn to the everyday in many senses, and it's a hymn to a world that he has put his faith in, not only has he built, but he's put his faith in. i think the longer i've dwelt on it after i've written it, the more it has kind of revealed itself to me as a book about faith. he went looking for god at an early stage in his life,
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and god effectively gave him two fingers and told him to go away and not be annoying him and that. and he turned from god and he became an engineer. and as his son says, his son puts it, he says, "you turned from the cross and you took up the theodolite, and the cross hairs of a theodolite. you laid that on the world and that. " so it's a book about faith and a book about the everyday. it's a hymn to engineers and engineering. you talk about the experimental tradition in so much irish writing. you think of beckett, for example. yes. and that sort of heartbeat in his dramatic prose is the kind of thing you sense in your writing. you feel it the whole time. it was very much... the heartbeat and the idea of a pulse was very much a concern with me in the book, and i don't know whether i managed
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to capture it or not, but it was certainly one of the things i aspired to. of course, being steeped in beckett as well, you assimilate these things by osmosis, and they become a part of your fabric as a writer, as an irish writer. you talk about being an irish writer. do you ever find that it's a bit weighty and a bit imprisoning? no, i certainly don't. i've always considered myself to be an irish writer, whatever that means, but for me it meant tapping into that reckless and generous tradition of experiment that distinguishes our greatest writers. our greatest writers were unusual, i think, in that our greatest writers, our greatest fiction writers are exclusively our experimental writers. beckett and joyce and flann o'brien, the father, son and holy ghost, that's our mount rushmore.
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and if you're talking about any other writers, you've lowered your eyesight, you've lowered your gaze from those three. so i wanted to take my cue from their experimental tradition, and did it tentatively in notes from a coma, my prayer novel, but i think grabbed it a bit more two—handedly in solar bones. mike mccormack, thank you very much for talking about solar bones. thank you. a decent enough day across most of the uk today. we have a bit of rain in the forecast a night, mostly across northern areas, and it has been raining in northern ireland, scotland, the lake district. the weather front has been trundling northern areas. cloud to the south, but it has been a dry day. spots of
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rain across the north. for some, more than a few spots, but very short lived. the rain is out into the north sea by the time we get to the north sea by the time we get to the early hours of friday morning. tonight will be quite fresh but not as cold as last night. the weather is looking fine, sunny spells, and further south it is a bit warmer. wherever you are on friday, a very nice start to the day. maybe more clout across east anglia first thing, but that should be out of the way first —— very quickly, then we have a nice day, a fresh summer ‘s day, but the weather will change in the north—west a bit later. some rain getting into
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belfast and glasgow. wimbledon is looking dry, a bit of cloud from time to time, but temperatures are co mforta ble time to time, but temperatures are comfortable enough. friday evening, a nice end to the day for england and wales, but scotland and northern ireland, rain. for the and wales, but scotland and northern ireland, rain. forthe weekend, we have a child of weather front in the atlantic, they will head to the northern portion of the country, and also pushing in a lot of atlantic cloud, so the humidity will rise, the sky will be overcast, and a fair bit of damp weather. most of the rain will be heavy, but it will be warm. 0n rain will be heavy, but it will be warm. on sunday, slightly fresher, drierair into warm. on sunday, slightly fresher, drier air into scotland, northern england and northern ireland. in the south, warm and humid. that is does it compare to what we have had in spain today. one of the highest
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temperatures ever recorded in europe and the highest temperature ever recorded in spain. hello, i'm ros atkins, this is 0utside source. donald trump is in paris but the questions about his son's decision to ta ke questions about his son's decision to take a meeting with a russian lawyer have followed the president across the atlantic. i do think this, i think from a practical stand point, most people would have taken that meeting. that was during a press conference with emmanuel macron. you can see them there. of course they have major disagreements on climate change and the paris agreement. if it happens, that will be wonderful, and if it doesn't, that will be ok too. nobel prize winner and chinese dissident liu xiaobo has died. he took part in the tiananmen square protests — but had spent most
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