conversation kind of like bond. the conversation about... 0k, kind of like bond. the conversation about... ok, i knew this was going to happen. we are going to run out of time, and we have left the best story until last. thank you for joining us on the papers. don't forget you can see the front pages of the papers online on the bbc news website. it is all there for you seven days a week at bbc.co.uk/papers. and if you miss the programme any evening, you can watch it later on bbc iplayer. coming up next, it is meet the author. but that's all from me, anne and john for this evening. good night. 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. 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 book that presents 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, it became second nature. and it recalled in it one of the exercises i had set myself years ago as a writer, was to come in every morning and sit down at my desk and write whatever it was that came into my head. and to...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 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 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, 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 o'clock and the other is the temporal marker for the one o'clock news at one o'clock, 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 best energies are gone and it's too early to sit down for the dinner, and the one o'clock 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, 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 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 term, 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. 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. time for a late—night check of the weather. promising brightness for much of us. things brightening up for most of us, and where they brighten up this afternoon, temperatures responded. temperatures 24- 25 temperatures responded. temperatures 24“ 25 degrees in one or two spots,

all because of a wedge of warm air between this warm front in this cold front. as we go through the rest of the night, that warm and will become confined to the southern half of the country as this cold front sinks further south. with a warm and humid air, this and murk and drizzle. temperatures 1617 degrees. cool and fresher to the west across northern ireland and scotland. the best of the sunshine tomorrow morning for a house in glasgow, blustery winds across northern scotland. a scattering of showers. things brightening up across northern england. temperatures sinking slowly south. we will start the day tomorrow with a lot of cloud, the mist and murk, tomorrow with a lot of cloud, the mistand murk, but tomorrow with a lot of cloud, the mist and murk, but italy for wales in the south—west. batty across east anglia and the south—east. temperatures already up to 20 degrees in norwich and london by nine o'clock tomorrow. with that humid air in place, any sunshine in the south—east, we should see a

little bit, it the south—east, we should see a little hit, it will the south—east, we should see a little bit, it will lift temperatures readily. up to 27 degrees. some extra cloud into the south—western parts of wales. to the north and west, more in the way of sunshine. some blustery showers continuing across northern scotland. we could see some gales. some winds for wimbledon, brightening up as we go through the day. it does introduce the risk of a shower, perhaps 30% risk at the end of the day as the weather front slides across the london area. losing that front, then on monday, high pressure building across the country. if you like dry weather and sunshine and walks, monday is looking like a beautiful day. blue skies and sunshine for the mist majority, the south coast will see the mid—to high 20s. some spots could get up to 30 degrees. another warm day on tuesday, a change on wednesday. some thunderstorms could break out. as they clear away, things turning cooler and fresher for the end of

the week. that's will for me don't all from me for now, have a great weekend —— that's all from me. this is bbc news, i'm alpa patel. our top stories: turkey's president promises to punish his enemies, as he marks a year since a failed military coup. this is the scene live in ankara, where he is due to address crowds

in front of parliament. thousands march through hong kong after chinese nobel peace prize winner liu xiaobo is buried at sea. the former british prime minister tony blair says eu leaders are willing to compromise in order to persuade the uk to remain a member. if we were looking at this from the point of view of the interests of the country, one option within this negotiation would be britain staying within a reformed european union.