This Plague of Souls

By Mike McCormack

Soho Crime 2024

This Plague of Souls, the deeply unsatisfying new novel from Mike McCormack (he of 2016’s weirdly overpraised single-sentence novel Solar Bones), opens with a simplicity that’s so stark it’s almost an act of trolling: a man named John Nealon returns to his farmhouse in the shadow of the Sheeffry Hills in McCormack’s own childhood home of County Mayo and finds the house empty. There’s no sign of his wife Olwyn or their little son Cuan; he’d hoped they’d be waiting for him during his recent remand (it hadn’t been all that long; he’d escaped conviction at trial), but the house is dark and deserted. 

But somebody knows he’s home: his phone rings. The man on the phone offers him a welcome home and asks to meet. Nealon thinks it’s a wrong number and brusquely hangs up, then putters around the house. The next day he makes himself some breakfast and takes in the sight of his modest old farm spread under the rain-brooding Sheeffry Hills. “The day outside is wet, this weather given to sudden gusts of rain that drift by and swallow the distance,” readers are told, in one of the book’s small but lovely evocations of the West Coast of Ireland. “This is one of those days, the light saturated, time itself congealed in its bleak hold.” 

The man calls again and again, always asking for an in-person meeting and gradually hinting that he knows where Olwyn is and why she’s avoiding Nealon’s calls. Each time, Nealon spurns the idea of a meeting, but each aborted call spurs more of his own memories: readers learn a bit about his past, a bit about his time in prison, a bit about his marriage (he abducted a drug-addicted Olwyn from the city, wrapped her in a bedspread, and brought her to the farm for some involuntary detox preceding their happy married life). It becomes a kind of ritual – the more curt Nealon is with his mysterious caller, the more fulsome he is with his woolgathering. 

Then at some random point, it changes. He does some more puttering. He goes looking for the man who rents his land but doesn’t find him. He makes himself some food. Then suddenly he’s in his car, driving at night, heading to the city to meet his mystery caller. Before they can speak in the lobby of a hotel, Nealon starts to become aware of some kind of national emergency; police checkpoints have been thrown up on roads, troops are marching in the streets, and there are conflicting reports on the lobby TV – is it an airborne pathogen of some kind? Terrorism? Readers are told “there have been attacks on Madrid, Bali and London” (and the Oxford comma, apparently). Nealon briefly worries that his own country might be next (in the book’s only glint of admittedly unintentional humor, he bases his worry on the fact that the Irish “lack experience” when it comes to terrorism). 

Everything that follows in the novel – 90 of its 180 pages – is the conversation Nealon has with his unnamed caller in that hotel lobby. The action of the entire novel, never much to speak of when the excitement pinnacles with Nealon spreading some scrambled eggs on toast, comes to a complete halt and is replaced by two guys talking. 

The caller has a wild, sprawling conspiracy theory about what Nealon was really doing underneath the deeds for which he was acquitted. Nealon is committed to revealing nothing. The talk is so prolonged and so boring that every one of the sixteen times Nealon tells his interlocutor he’s going to walk out, the reader will be praying for him to do it. The caller recites all the details of Nealon’s life that Nealon himself has already gone over, often in the same words. The caller hints a few times at the whereabouts of “the fair Olwyn” (or, more horrifying still, “Olwyn the fair”), but Nealon doesn’t seem all that interested and never presses the point. They come to no conclusion. They reach no agreement, on anything. They never find out anything about this mysterious terrorist event. McCormack is in the middle of tediously describing their vague back-and-forth and then sighs, stands up, says “Where’s the time gone?,” and simply leaves the room. 

There are brief flashes of good writing: the “hours of brittle enchantment” in the nighttime countryside, the “episcopal” spread of a fat man, etc. But so what? Eight-year-olds can come up with flashes of good writing, usually without having their names bandied for the Booker. There’s no story here – or rather, there are the beginnings of two: in the first 90 pages, one about a man feeling estranged from his own life, the other (the one full of misspellings, missing punctuation, and typos) about two men chatting in a lobby. Is the fair Olwyn OK? We never find out. Is the terrorist threat real? We never find out. Is the mystery caller nefarious, intent on bribery, delusional? We never find out. Is Nealon actually the evil mastermind the caller says he is? We never find out. Do the two men punch each other, or make love, or go into business together? We never find out. 

It’s all the premise of what might have been an emotionally charged novel. Someday, when he gets a bit of free time, McCormack should write that novel. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News