McCormack - Notes from a Coma

Praise for Notes from a Coma

Mike McCormacks Notes from a Coma is a bold formal experiment, buttressing a surface text of domestic realism with a footnote-bound underworld of sci-fi dystopiaand between these two worlds hangs McCormacks voluntarily-comatose JJ OMalley, whose life story shuttles us back and forth across the novels many thrilling junctions of the global and the rural, the scientific and the spiritual, the intellectual and the heartfelt. Ambitious and accomplished, Notes from a Coma is the finest book yet from one of Irelands most singular contemporary writers, a daring reinvention of the gothic for the age of machines.

Matt Bell, author of Cataclysm Baby

A cross between 1984 and The X-Files. Notes from a Coma establishes McCormack as one of the most original and important voices in contemporary Irish fiction.

Irish Times (original review)

At times wickedly funny, at others almost unbearably sad.

Sunday Tribune

McCormacks language is lovely, lyrical his humor is dark, macabre; the words glimmer like a spell.

Time Out

The greatest Irish novel of the decade just ended.

Irish Times, Jan 15th 2010

Praise for Mike McCormack

When venturing into the realm of the macabre, a writer gains a distinct advantage if he has a sense of discipline and a sense of humor Mike McCormack has both to spare. Like parables in their easy transcendence of setting and time, the most audacious stories are classics.

The New York Times Book Review

McCormack displays the satiric sense, religious knowledge, dark humor, cutting insights and incredible imagination that made Swift famous. Then McCormack adds an overcast of modern doom and gloom with the skill of Edgar Allan Poe. The result is stunning and irresistible.

USA Today

I am a huge admirer of Mike McCormacks work. From sentence to story the writing is by times intriguing, funny, surprising, disturbing and profound.

Lynn Freed

Gives Ian McEwan and Edgar Allan Poe a run for their money. Decay and ruin seep through this book, driven by some of the finest prose to have emerged in over a decade.

London Independent

McCormacks debut crackles with wit, is laced with black insight and places him right up there with McCabe as a master of the new Irish Gothic.

Sunday Tribune

Copyright 2005 by Mike McCormack

Originally published in 2005 by Jonathan Cape

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved.

Published in 2013 by Soho Press, Inc.
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McCormack, Mike, 1965
Notes from a coma / Mike McCormack.
eISBN: 978-1-61695-233-4
1. ComaPatientsFiction. 2. Prison hulksFiction. 3. Identity
(Psychology)Fiction. 4. Psychologicla fiction.
5. IrelandFiction.
6. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PR6063.C363N68 2013
823.914dc232012029318

v3.1

When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist.

David Hume

My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.

Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony

Event Horizon

because he is now both stimulus and qualia. His name, blurting through the nations print and electronic media, is also one of those synapses at which the nations consciousness forms itself. Firing in debate and opinion polls, across editorial maunderings and the antiphonal call-and-response formats of radio phone-ins, his suspended mind is one of those loci at which the nations consciousness knows itself and knows itself knowing itself

His existenceit is not too strong a wordis now a continuous incident report. Each day, the newspaper of record carries an abstract of his EEG tracings across a six-column spread inside the front page. All over the country children above and below the age of reason chart the peaks and troughs of his delta waves across the walls of their classrooms. Cast out over the earths cortex also a continuous stream of his MRI and EEG tracings. They have the appearance of meteorological reports from another startroughs and banks of high pressure, depressions and tidal movements. Electronically flayed, these images are drawn down to our bedrooms and workstations, pegged out to dry across screens and monitors. Bootlegged already by the fashion and design industry they are now protected by retroactive copyright and patent legislation; the author has asserted his moral right

He evokes a response and this is to our credit. Contrary to ongoing analysis the nations compassion reflex has not been habituated. There is real concern, a genuine anxiety beyond the compassion flash fires of the latest crisis de jour. He touches our soul and, in a happy congruence of myth and politics, the public interest is now of interest to the public. We are not entirely mindful of him but we do bear him in mind

My heart went out to Anthony that day, thats no lie. Nearly twenty years ago now but I remember it like it was last week.

It was about two oclock in the afternoon when the cars and the cattle truck came up the road. I followed them up and when I got to the yard the truck had reversed into the barn door and the vet and the bailiffs were already loading up the herd. Anthony was standing at the back of the house with the collar pulled up around his ears. I went over and stood beside him and said nothing. What could I say?

A dirty day it was too, pissing rain all morning and a wind blowing through the yard that would shave you. No one said anything but it didnt take them more than twenty minutes to load up the whole herdeight Friesian cows, a couple of yearlings and two calves. One by one they marched up that ramp without a bit of bother and I remember thinking wed often had more trouble loading up two or three beasts of a Monday morning for the mart.

They pinned up the tailgate and moved off and I saw the sergeant, Jimmy Nevin, coming over to Anthony. But whatever was on his mind he thought better of it and stood off holding the gate for the truck. Anthony turned into the house without a word. I watched the truck down the bottom of the hill and saw it turn out on to the main road. Jimmy Nevin closed the gate and walked over to me.

Before you go, he said, give him this.

He handed me a brown envelope.

Its the quarantine order. Six months.

Anthony got barred from Thorntons that night and it was years afterwards before he could have a drink in it.

There was a time when Anthony had a reputation for being able to start a fight in an empty room: a short temper and tidy with his fists. Id seen him in action a few times, London and elsewhere, and he wasnt a man you wanted to do battle with. But that was all in the pastor so I thought. It all came back to him that night in Thorntons.

Hed been drinking since mid-afternoon and by eleven he was well on it. Ger, behind the barhe was only young at the timewouldnt serve him any more. He came outside the bar and tried to lead Anthony to the door. Anthony of course was having none of it. Hed come in under his own steam, hed go out the same way. And he did too a few minutes later when he saw he was getting no more drink. But that wasnt the end of it. Youd want to get Eileen Flynn to tell you this story, she was there that night and she has a better telling of it than I have. She laughed about it afterwards but she was lucky she wasnt killed the same night. Bang! The big window inside the door bursts in and this yellow gas bottle hops off her table and skids along the floor to the counter. Anthony is outside in the pissing rain, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up and the jacket down beside him in the channel. Any man, he was roaring, any fucking man!