Works like a thriller without a resolution. Though we occupy Nealon’s thoughts, he turns them toward everything except his arrest, so we have little sense of his alleged crimes, much less of his guilt or innocence ... A novel about opacity is bound to be gimmicky; on one level, all Mr. McCormack is doing is promising and then withholding information. But I recommend This Plague of Souls even so, as it marks a memorable attempt to evoke the murky contemporary relationship between individuals and unseen global systems.
Masterful narrative skill ... What matters is the intensity of Nealon’s reflections as he gathers himself back into his life. McCormack’s language is evocative, perfectly suited to the noirish atmosphere he builds throughout the book ... This is a strange novel, sinister yet hopeful, a descent into darkness that somehow manages to rise into a ringing light.
Interesting ... A fully fledged tale of the unexpected ... ot everyone will love this book and its mysteries — the way it acknowledges but estranges the reader — but those who do will not forget it. Imagine if all writers took this much trouble.
McCormack’s quarry...is not genre dazzlement, it is the elusive stuff of consciousness itself .... Operating in a minor key, nudging us coyly towards an eerily personal apocalypse, the new book creates an utterly distinctive, utterly contemporary mood; like Nealon’s own mind, it is prone to 'lateral segues from the present moment into the abstract, lurid reaches of the imagination' – the two fictional locales, that is, where Mike McCormack feels most at home.
Employs a more conventional format, its themes are...a world of chaos and instability, with a troubled multi-dimensional character at its centre and an exquisitely rendered rural Ireland of beauty and darkness as the backdrop ... McCormack is a cryptic, elliptical writer, forensic in his plotting and canny at teasing his readers. He isn’t in a hurry to overwhelm ... Vivid flashbacks ... McCormack coolly and arrestingly carries off his final scenes with outrageous assurance.
A standalone work ... McCormack is a singular talent, lucid sentences locking into an eerie and unforgettable edifice. It has brutal physicality and arch metaphysics. I hope the angelus rings again.
...[a] potent and pleasingly cryptic novel ... For the most part, it reads like a thriller, shot through with a pervading atmosphere of precarity and uncertainty ... This Plague of Souls is a novel about grand questions. What’s the relationship between the actions of a lone individual and 'those grand constructs that turn in the night – politics, finance, trade'? And what cost is incurred by those who try to change the system? But it’s also the deceptively simple portrait of a man at a crossroads in his personal and emotional life. His empty house, the hotel, a long, lonely night-time drive between them, memories of his time in prison: Nealon exists in a state of psychological limbo, drifting through a series of liminal spaces. This Plague of Souls is sometimes opaque, but for the most part it’s a beautifully written collision of mystery and metaphysics.
