Mike McCormack is much garlanded. He won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature with his first collection of stories; the Goldsmith’s Prize followed in 2016, along with the Irish Book of the Year Award and the International Dublin Literary Award, for his novel Solar Bones. A book-length, single- sentence analysis of a man’s life, that story sprang off the page with the force of a blow. 

This Plague of Souls, his fifth novel, is more distanced. Not a story with a beginning, middle and end, it circles in widening gyres, swooping now and then on to a tightly focused moment as its ambiguous hero tries to make sense of an impossible situation.

The basic carpentry is simple. As in Solar Bones, a man – Nealon – returns to his remote rural home after an absence, to find it empty: no wife, no child. There is food in the fridge, but no sign of occupancy, no message. Then the phone rings. A voice, unnervingly affable, is suggesting they meet. The caller seems to know everything about Nealon’s past and his present situation, talking in riddles: ‘It’s not a question of who I am but what I know, the breadth and depth of what I can tell you that’s the important thing here.’ 

Days pass and the telephone conversations persist, disquieting, grimly comic. There are wary swerves, questions left unanswered. Gradually we learn about Nealon’s mysterious detention, weeks in a cell, a collapsed trial. But for what crime? And what of his missing wife? In despair, he relives their beginnings, looping back to the traumatic night he rescued – some might say abducted – her, and the violence that followed. He recalls the tentative flowering of trust and domestic happiness – or so he thought until she filed for divorce.

Frantic to reach her and his child, he realises the caller is his only contact with the outside – a world apparently facing an unnamed apocalyptic threat. Haunted by existential guilt, Nealon summons up lost fragments: a childhood with only the equivocal attentions of a father thrust into the role by tragedy, his own abdication from a career as a successful artist, and later, ‘those other phases of his life when he lived by his wits… a man who skilfully came at the world from a different angle’.  Finally, the crucial meeting takes place. But is Nealon a victim or an unreliable witness?  

Drawing these threads of heartbreak, surreal menace and the possible imminent collapse of the world together, McCormack weaves a web that holds the reader in suspense to the end – and beyond.