But the Louisburgh man, whose third book ‘Notes From A Coma’ came out in paperback this summer, is a maverick talent whose prose acknowledges not just heavyweight literary references such as Dostoevsky and Kafka, but also elements of speculative and science fiction, old school gothic, magic realism, noir, horror and Biblical allusion.

He is, as the old saw goes, a man out standing in his own field: in this case a wind-blasted pasture in a mythologised Co. Mayo where the natives veer between decent skinnery and intemperent religiosity, where speaking statues of the Sacred Virgin drive local women to apocalyptic ministry, where earthbound angels coast across bay waves the colour of hammered lead, where you can’t move but for masonry saints and shrines and visitations and plastic Jesuses luminescing day-glo green.

If the perceived dichotomy between drab rural and gritty urban in Irish literature amounts to a false partitionism (the predominant shade of homogrown fiction is still a washed out grey, whether its practitioners describe lives spent labouring in agrarian salt mines or the IT trenches) then McCormack could be John The Baptist to a new breed of dangerous visionaries touting outlandish wares.

He’s not completely alone. One might direct the reader towards John Connolly’s ‘Nocturnes’ as evidence of like minds, and there are interesting noises emanating from the margins courtesy of Stinging Fly magazine and the Hag’s Head imprint, not to mention the uneven but laudable ‘Emerald Eye’ anthology of imaginative fiction published by Aeon last year. But overall, the domestic literary scene is still more likely to cite Banville over ‘Blade Runner’.

McCormack is its most conspicuous exception. I’m surprised his work hasn’t been seized upon by legions of computer geeks, graphic novel buffs and college students clutching his books to their raincoated bosoms like holy reliquaries. The 1996 debut collection of penny dreadful short fictions Getting It In The Head deserved to be considered a cult classic on a par with The Wasp Factory or First Love, Last Rites, and if both his full length novels Crowe’s Requiem (1998) and Notes From A Coma are imperfect works, they are wonderfully, ambitiously so, melding the fantastical and future-shocked with the local and parochial.

McCormack was born in 1965 in London, but grew up in Sligo and Mayo. He graduated from the University of Ireland, Galway in 1990 with a degree in English Literature and Philosophy, and was some 60,000 words into an ambitious novel about a Mayoan millenarian sect called ‘Radio In Excelsis Deo’ before he lost the run of the plot and abandoned it to concentrate on the short stories that comprised his first book. ‘Getting It In The Head’ won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and was voted a Book of the Year by the New York Times, who ran a shrewd but supportive review by the novelist Michael Upchurch (“An almost folksy choice of vocabulary and clever placement of cliché… play deliciously off the grisly subject matter. Like parables in their easy transcendence of setting and time, the most audacious stories are classics ready for inclusion in the next anthology of Irish, Catholic or New Gothic fiction.”) One suspects it would have had an even greater impact had Pat McCabe’s ‘The Butcher Boy’ not just taken a cudgel to the modern Irish novel in the same way Trainspotting did to its British counterpart. The Monaghan man became the dragon young upstarts had to slay – or at least sneak past – before they gained entry to the crypt.

Mike McCormack managed to circumnavigate the asteroid-sized hole ‘The Butcher Boy’ had made in the landscape mainly because his instinct for the outré and uncanny was matched by his facility with language. His yarns were rendered with a rigorous, almost Anglo-Irish formalism on a par with Patrick McGrath, whereas McCabe’s feverish inner monologues traced the southern gothic bloodlines of Faulkner and O’ Connor back to their Irish origins.

“Our own 19th century gothic is criminally neglected,” McCormack says, a youthful 41-year-old whose owlish features, backpack and roll-ups give him the look of a mature student (he was writer in residence in UCG until last Christmas). “It’s even academically sidelined,” he continues. “All these twitchy Proteshtants, we couldn’t be bothered with them! But we gave some of the great gothic icons to the world. Dracula, Camilla, what a babe, the first female vampire. We forget just how great those were. ‘Melmoth’ is an astonishing book, one of the great gothic novels.

“You’re right though, I remember reading ‘The Butcher Boy’ and recognising something about small town Ireland, and the dialogue struck me as amazingly vivid. I was really sickened, because I was about halfway through the writing of the book when I read it. McCabe’s work was important, as was Roddy Doyle’s, in that it also allowed people to use popular culture, songs and comic books. My and your generation, we’re up to our fucking eyes in that; Big Brother and movies and books and songs. My head is shards and fragments; the trick is to make something of it and pull it together. But I’m a smalltown boy as well, a country lad, Louisburgh is a glorified crossroads. I was always taken with how people speak.”

Considering the matter of his home turf in an Irish Times article a few years back, McCormack wrote: “To hell or to Connaught the mass murderer said. It is one of the great historical ultimatums – pithy, poetic, worthy of Milton himself. And while hell might not be site specific, Mayo’s cliam to it brooks little argument.” Today, the novelist echoes Heaney’s line about Ireland going from the medieval to the post-modern in a generation.

“I lived for two or three years with my grandparents up in North Mayo,” he says, “and in the early 70s I remember my grandfather going off out into the field with a scythe on his shoulder and cutting a field of hay and my uncle ploughing with a horse and plough, using harrows and scufflers, putting seaweed on it – this sounds like Peig! But when I subsequently went on to read the history of technology, I found that these tools hadn’t developed since the middle ages. Ploughs and harrows are still the same basic template, it hasn’t changed. So all that kind of thing came together in my head. “Mayo is a funny place as well, all the shrines. It’s not called Mayo God Help Us for nothing, y’know? If you think about it, there’s no other county in Ireland that has Knock, Croagh Patrick, the prayer house in Achill, old pilgrim paths all over the place. We’re mad to do penance in Mayo; we come to Dublin to get beaten in All Ireland Finals! That’s become an obsession with me of late.”

Another way in which McCormack resists typecasting. Reading his stories, one imagines a pale, consumptive streak of morbidity rather than the robust figure sat before me, tucking into a chicken curry with the gusto of a man who’s spent all day picking stones.

“I was a very good club footballer, played midfield,” he says, “but reading and writing took over in my late teens in a big way. I was always bookish, but it began to consume me in the ages of 17 to 20, that’s when I did my important reading. At that age you lay down your personal and intellectual myths and establish the writers that are important to you, Kafka and Hesse and Dostoevsky and lads like that. That pantheon stays kind of fixed and very few writers will ever enter it after that, you’ll never have the same passion. AS Byatt wrote an article saying that her important reading was done and her pantheon of gods established at that age.”

On evidence of his first book, McCormack’s gods might have also numbered Ballard, McEwan, Poe and Borges. ‘A Is For Axe’ recounted a tale of patricide in chillingly ordered A to Z bullet points; ‘The Stained Glass Violations’ was a blasphemous Bradbury-esque carny fable; ‘Thomas Crumlesh 1960-1992: A Retrospective’ was a macabre mini-masterpiece about a performance artist mutilating himself and exhibiting his own body parts; ‘The Occuptation: A Guide For Tourists’ a ‘Jesus Of Montreal’ parable set in a war-torn Eastern European hellhole.

This writer’s favourites were ‘The Angel Of Ruin’, in which a young man finds himself undergoing a metaphysical transformation while working at a toxic chemical plant in New England mired in a creepy John Carpenter atmosphere, and ‘Dead Man’s Fuel’, a Stygian myth by way of McCarthy’s grandiloquent prose and Stephen King’s ‘Dark Tower’ gunslinger yarns.

“Actually a lot of it is taken out of an SAS survival handbook,” McCormack laughs.

“This is how I put these things together. Wed that handbook with parts of ‘Blood Meridian’ and the Book of Revelations and put a man standing on the lip of his own grave and give him a push and off he goes! ‘The Angel Of Ruin’ is an odd one because that’s the most autobiographical. I was that kid, I worked in that extraordinary environment, a privileged environment, this chemical plant in Maine, just weeping with decay and rust and coming down around our ears. I’ll never forget seeing a tank about half the diameter of this room and just as high, I was walking by one day and all of a sudden hydrochloric acid just started bubbling over like a fuckin’ witch’s cauldron.

“And there was a big American fella inside the building with his feet up on a console looking at Playboy, and I said, ‘Your kettle is boiling over out here, have a look’. So he goes out and all of a sudden the plant is shut down for a week. It was an incredible place, so easy to imagine, almost sort of sentient or something. Did you ever see ‘Stalker’, the Tarkovsky movie? I watched it there a while back and there are parts where the decay of it brought me back a little bit to the ‘The Angel Of Ruin’. It’s an amazing movie, three and a half hours long, it was fuckin’ penance, I couldn’t wait for it to be over, but I thought about it like no movie afterwards.”

So far, so bizarre. But when McCormack’s first full novel ‘Crowe’s Requiem’ was published in 1998, it received a somewhat more muted response than its predecessor. This was not the grand guignol tour de force ‘Head’ obsessives had expected. Mythic and lyrical, it seemed equally in thrall to South American magic realism and folk fabulists like Angela Carter.

“I haven’t actually read her, but I would have read lot of Latin American surrealists and magic realists,” McCormack says. “I’m proud of an awful lot that’s in ‘Crowe’s Requiem’, I think the cityscape in it is a fourth or fifth character, it’s one of the better things I’ve done, but I think it’s deeply marred by some lachrymose sentiment or a certain callowness of feeling that was my fault rather than the book’s fault.

“It’s not that long ago actually that a woman I’d never seen before tapped me on the shoulder in Tesco’s and said she’d stayed up all night reading it, bawling crying, and I said, ‘Oh god, thank you very much!’ Actually, some of my own family, they love my first book and my last book, but ‘the middle book’… my youngest brother won’t acknowledge it as one of our own at all!

“So I’d a big setback with the writing and reception of Crowe, cos it wrongfooted a lot of people who wanted me to deliver more noise and explosions a la the first book. But I knew what I was doing with ‘Getting It In The Head’. It is a book of the head, it’s all imaginative obsession, it makes no bid for your heart, it was designed that way. But ‘Crowe’s Requiem’ is a book of the heart, it’s about feelings and emotion and loss and love and erotica. So I saw the two books as opposite companion pieces. And ‘Notes From A Coma’ is designed in some ways to be summative of the first two books.”

The central character in ‘Notes’ is one JJ O’ Malley, a troubled youth who grows up in west Mayo after being rescued from a Romanian orphanage. Cursed and blessed with a brilliant but unquiet mind, JJ suffers a breakdown after the death of his best friend and volunteers as a guinea pig in a controversial pilot EU penal scheme called the Somnos Project, which proposes deep coma as an economically viable alternative to present systems of incarceration. Floating in a prison ship docked in Killary harbour, his comatose form constantly monitored online, JJ becomes a national icon (in one scene, assembled masses at the Witnness festival bow before his image on the big screens, chanting, “We are not worthy.”).

The book’s structure is contrapuntal: straightforward testimonies from key figures in his JJ’s life alternate with stylised and hypercerebral footnotes rendered in a Comaspeak whose vaulting complexity suggests Philip K Dick undergoing Jungian regression therapy. Perhaps the best indication of the book’s atmosphere might be Radiohead’s ‘Amnesiac’ by way of Eno’s ‘Here Come The Warm Jets’. While undergoing the painstaking (and bank-breaking) seven-year process of writing ‘Notes’ – 58,000 words scrawled in longhand mostly between the hours of 11pm and 3am – McCormack subsisted on an aural diet of superior prog-rock and composers such as Benjamin Britten and Arvo Part.

“I used to weep listening to ‘Tabula Rasa’,” he says, “I think actually his secular music is even more spiritual than his spiritual music.”

In the latter stages of the work, searching out albums with coma references in the title, McCormack stumbled across The Mars Volta’s ‘Deloused In The Comatorium’ and ‘Frances The Mute’, two records whose central concepts are remarkably similar to the book. Add to this the influence of classic sci fi, and you get a cross-pollination of Brave New World and plain Hibernian.

“I’ve always had a great grá for science fiction,” McCormack admits. “I read Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ when I was 18 or 19 and I didn’t understand it – and don’t to this day, but I still think it’s a great book. I read JG Ballard’s ‘Crash’ in the same year, he’d written a brilliant introduction to it in which he talked about science fiction being speculative and philosophical and one of the few artforms that has interrogated technology and the idea of reality, and it’s put in place a vocabulary and idioms and genres to deal with these things, like Last Man novels, novels of artifical intelligence, Frankenstein novels.

“When I was casting about for how to write ‘Notes From A Coma’, one of the parlour games I played with myself was I went back and tallied up my favourite books from the 70s onwards, and immediately the books that stuck out, not necessarily the best, but the ones that I covet, that meant something, were ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ and ‘Crash’ from the 70s, (William Gibson’s) ‘Neuromancer’ and (Russell Hoban’s) ‘Riddley Walker’ from the 80s, and then in the 90s the English writer Christopher Priest, sorely neglected, he wrote a brilliant book called ‘The Extremes’, and then the American writer Richard Powers, certainly the most important writer iof my generation, he wrote ‘Galatea 2.2’ about artifical intelligence and ‘Ploughing The Dark’ about virtual reality.

“But I remember reading ‘Neuromancer’ back in the early 1980s, this was at a time when we had wind-up phones, and trying to get your head around the concept of the internet was just ridiculous. I found the book so difficult, but I reckon it’s the most influential novel of the last 30 years. It nailed down a whole culture, gave them the anoraks and the glasses, opened up a whole universe, the idea that the geeks would inherit the earth. It’s criminally neglected, that book. I’ve seen a couple of books go into Penguin classics recently, works by Don DeLillo and people like that, but that’s one that should go into it cos it is a really formative text. In many ways I don’t think it’s a good book, because he’s incoherent in the way that an Old Testament prophet is incoherent, he’s like a man straining for a language, and he did find it in his subsequent books, but ‘Neuromancer’ is the book where he had his formative ideas.

“I didn’t set out to establish a canon of science fiction, but these are the works that came up when I drew up that list. So I said, ‘Obviously there’s a hint there.’ When I went to university I studied the Philosophy of Technology. I was supposed to be doing a Master’s Degree on it and I read high up and low down and didn’t write a word on it. So part of ‘Notes From A Coma’ developed out of an infatuation with machines and technology. I’ve great respect and a great fondness for them, and that’s why in ‘Notes’ there’s actually hymns to these machines, they’re songs of praise, ’cos we’re so quick to demonise technology, and we never see the better angels of ourselves in it. We see the best aspects of ourselves in poetry and music and stuff like that, but we never see the aspirational part; we either fetishise it as we do i-Pods or something like that, or we’re deeply sceptical of it and resent it being able to do the things that we should be able to do.”

For all the book’s technological hymning and hypnagogic babble though, ‘Notes’ is primarily concerned with the stuff that goes on between human beings. JJ’s hyperintelligence only serves to isolate him from his friends and family, a situation compounded by the fact that he’s an orphan in an adopted country.

“I’d always wondered about these Romanian children who came to Ireland,” McCormack says. “When the ’89 revolution happened I was cheering them on. They were the last ones to make a bid for freedom, and their bid for freedom was positively French in nature: blood on the streets, tanks in the streets, kings and queens being toppled, summary executions, everything. I knew that the currency had collapsed and that a box of cigarettes was the gold standard for about two or three weeks after the revolutions. I’d heard stories about children being bought and swapped for televisions and things like that. Then the orphanages opened up and this terrible secret about these kids began to be unveiled, and when I read about the degree of neglect that they had, it didn’t seem to be such an acute piece of soothsaying to say that these kids were going to grow up with terrible behavioural and psychological problems.

“But if there’s an original idea in the book it might be this: there’s now a calcified orthodox myth about small town Ireland, that it’s full of psychos and young men jacked up on Class A substances and people whacking each over the head with blunt instruments, and that’s an aspect of it, and I’ve contributed to that myth in some of my own work. But my experience of small town Ireland is that it’s full of ordinary decent people living ordinary decent lives. People who won’t see you stuck. Part of the book is a hymn to neighbourliness and the best aspects of smalltown Ireland. I wanted it to be warm and human and yet I wanted it to be analytic and forensic. I saw the book as a cyborg, a warm heart thudding inside a metal-silicone chassis (laughs).” And if such imagery smacks more of HR Giger than Frank O’ Connor, McCormack admits he’d fraternised with visual artists for years in college before he’d met another writer.

“I start from visual images,” he says. “I always had this image of a kid lying on his back in a prison ship in Killary harbour. That closing scene where they come off the ramp is my version of the closing scene of ‘Close Encounters Of The Third Kind’, the silver aliens, it’s lit like that. Even the scene in the middle where JJ and Owen and Sarah have this kind of mock trial, it’s actually built a little bit on the scene in ‘Blade Runner’ where Sean Young sits across from Harrison Ford and he gives her a psychometric and finds out that she’s not human, but she doesn’t know that she’s not human by that stage.

“But the movie rights to ‘Notes From A Coma’ sold just after Christmas, John Boorman’s wife bought the rights to it, she’s a Brazilian girl about my age, really brainy, really sharp cookie. She was very understanding of the book, she had a great feel for it and saw it as a… I was asked to describe the book towards the ending of my writing of it, and I say this respectfully now the man is dead, and I respected his work hugely, but I used to always say that the book was like if you imagined John McGahern and Philip K Dick were contracted to write an episode of the X Files, this would be the result.”

The next project on McCormack’s plate, ‘Head’ fans will be glad to hear, is a return to short fiction.

“I was always going to return to the short story, but I didn’t know when,” he says. “But a friend of mine, a poet, Gerry Hanberry, he said, ‘You owe your first book another book of short stories. If you don’t, your first book will only ever be seen as a series of exercises that you did to cut your teeth.’ I would’ve returned to it anyway, but he lit a fire under my arse by pointing that out to me. And I had about 20 or 30 stories lying around, like a breaker’s yard for stories, some of them had no suspension or steering, no engines in some of them, so I went back and went through a lot of them, and I’m nearly finished, I have two more stories to write that are lying around the place in bits and pieces. I’ve a feeling it’ll be early the year after next. But I love being back at the short story, ’cos I feel like a fuckin’ stonemason blundering around in a quarry when I’m writing a novel, whereas I feel like a jeweller when I’m working at the short story. Just small amounts of precious material and terrifying degrees of accuracy needed.”

One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.