Crowe's Requiem

by Mike McCormack Narrated by Roger Clark

Overview

Originally published in 1998, the first novel from the author of Booker-listed Solar Bones, Crowe's Requiem is an eerie, fable-like work that confirmed Mike McCormack as a stunning new voice in world literature.



McCormack's myth-tinged debut novel gives us the unforgettable Crowe and his endlessly curious and self-mythologizing stories. Crowe is born in the remote village of Furnace in the West of Ireland and raised by his grandfather, a man of "madness and bullying love," who teaches him grim lessons about existence. Entirely silent until his third birthday, Crowe becomes an observant and isolated teenager, eventually leaving Furnace for university in a "wrong-footed" and bewildering city. There he meets a woman who will change his life and outlook, but a diagnosis with a rare and fatal aging disease means that his time with her will be cut tragically short. A profound, philosophical, and darkly funny meditation on childhood, aging, and the nature of life and death, Crowe's Requiem challenges us with the powers and limits of stories to capture the pains, wonders, and mysteries of being a person in a "wrong world."

Editorial Reviews

bn.com

In his debut novel, Mike McCormack, author of the stylish and disturbing collection of short stories Getting It in the Head, presents a surreal gothic allegory about an otherworldly child doomed by his quest for happiness and love. Crowe is born into the village of Furnace in the west of Ireland, where he is raised by his strange and forbidding grandfather. As a young man, Crowe turns away from his grandfather's grim lessons and ventures out into the world with "nothing but the riddle of my own heart to guide me." He decides to enter the university and make a new life for himself, but the city and its maze of "obstacles and barriers" prove baffling. Only when he collides with the worldly young grad student, Maria, does Crowe find his bearings. For a time, Crowe and Maria become enthusiastic lovers, until the bill for Maria's tuition jeopardizes both her degree and her relationship with Crowe. Desperate to be reunited with Maria, Crowe raises money by volunteering for a paid medical experiment. But his selfless act proves to be a Faustian bargain: Infected with a rare disease that causes premature aging, Crowe discovers too late that he has purchased Maria's happiness at the price of his own.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Crowe is a young Irishman desperately seeking to apply a mythic gloss to his brief, awkward life in McCormack's bleak first novel, following his praised collection of short stories, Getting It in the Head. As the book begins, Crowe is only 20 but dying of progeria, a rare aging disease. Like any old man, he looks back upon his life and tries to invest the past with some meaning. Raised in the backcountry Irish village of Furnace by his grandfather, he was an indifferent student; yet he won a place at university in the city, and fell in love with a fellow student, Maria Callas Monk. As Crowe recounts his tale, however, he recollects Furnace as a land of "chthonic gloom," which "opened up before me like a wound in creation," and his enigmatic grandfather as a "harrowed visionary" who spikes his dysfunctional lessons about life with fatalism and violence. A few years older than Crowe, Maria becomes not simply his troubled girlfriend but this image of an enchanted princess, and when she faces financial crisis, he submits to a suspicious pharmacological trial in a misguided effort to save his damsel in distress. Maria furiously and accurately accuses Crowe of always seeing himself at the center of a drama, as if the world arranged itself in order to cast him in a pivotal heroic role. Although McCormack fashions Crowe's as "a story of death and enchantment, madness and delusion, faint hearts and fair maids," this is a stretch for his protagonist's more humble range. In caging his readers within the mind of a boy possessed of a vivid imagination who is destined never to grow up, literally or figuratively, the author's subversive triumph is in revealing Crowe's failure to transform himself from an ordinary luckless soul (albeit with an extraordinary disease) into a tragic hero. (Mar.) FYI: Getting It In the Head won Britain's Rooney Prize in 1996.

Library Journal

Following his debut collection of short stories, Getting It in the Head (LJ 5/1/98), Irish writer McCormack tells the unusual story of a short-lived young man named Crowe. Crowe comes from a remote village called Furnace, where "there were neither books nor history because everything was as it had been from the day of its creation." His dark-natured grandfather raises Crowe to live in this harsh, isolated world. When Crowe leaves for university in a large city, he discovers that he is not prepared for the modern world. He meets an older student named Maria who introduces him to the world of sensuality and tempers his naivete with a wholesome jolt of reality. In order to help Maria pay her loans, Crowe mistakenly consents to human experimentation that results in his infection with a disease that accelerates aging and death. Although the plot drifts from allegory to reality, the language and the characters--especially Maria--are colorful and captivating. Recommended for most collections.--David A. Berona, Univ. of New England, Biddleford, ME

Kirkus Reviews

Irish writer McCormack's first novel (after a story collection, Getting it in the Head, 1998) makes good use of his finely honed sense of the macabre, but this tale of a strange boy, raised by his even stranger grandfather, is unable to sustain the promise of its beginning. Shorn of angel's wings in his fall to earth from on high, the newborn infant Crowe is so upset that he wails nonstop for three days. His grandfather, resident dark force in their remote western Irish village of Furnace, recognizes a kindred spirit and takes over his parenting, a job he does mostly by letting the precocious boy ask whatever questions he wants, reveling in the chance to instill his apocalyptic vision in one ideally suited to receive it. Years of neglect in public education fail to tarnish Crowe's unique brilliance, so when he takes the university entrance exam, not even aware of what it is, he passes easily. The moment he puts Grandfather and Furnace behind him, however, he begins to lose his bearings, wandering hopelessly around Dublin looking for the university and even running full tilt into a street sign as he gives a passing girl a second look. This last act gains him the compassion and companionship of the girl, Maria, a postgraduate who tends his bloodied face and gives him a new perspective on life. Eventually they become lovers, and for a time all is blissful-but then Maria learns she won't be allowed to graduate unless she pays her bill, and slips into a veritable Slough of Despond. Desperate to have her back as she was, Crowe valiantly earns the money she needs by taking part in a medical experiment, but complications from the test make his triumph a hollow one. Dark energy generated byCrowe's fall crackles through the first pages, but details of the love story ultimately prove pedestrian, damping a bright vision into one fairly unremarkable. .

From the Publisher

Praise for Crowe’s Requiem
 
“The novel’s heart is a beautiful love story, the kind that takes place in a room—two people whose love and desire become their transportation to all kinds of understanding. But for all its magical realism, Crowe’s Requiem contains a very realistic magic: It makes you want to ask questions of ordinary people you meet, questions about living and dying, in case they are your guardian angels in disguise.”
—Los Angeles Times
 
 “A well-imagined first novel . . . Crowe's Requiem—through its marvelous portrait of the hero's grandfather, and scenes of student life, including romance—is rooted firmly in the heart.”
—The Irish Times
 
“A fantastical mashup of young love and doomy student alienation.”
—The Guardian

“McCormack contrives a balance, brilliantly, between fantasy and realism. If Crowe’s childhood is a grimly funny folktale, as well as a fantasy about a fallen angel, it is also a convincing account of how an eccentric, lonely boy schemes to survive.”
—The Times Literary Supplement
 
“McCormack, who first came to critical notice with a hard-hitting collection of stories, continues to surprise in this dream-like novel, which encourages the reader to find wider allegorical meanings in his everyday subject matter. The book is a triumph of economical, deeply charged language.”
—The Daily Telegraph
 
“Irish writer McCormack’s first novel makes good use of his finely honed sense of the macabre.”
—Kirkus Reviews

 
Praise for Mike McCormack

“Wonderful writing has been a leading Irish export since Jonathan Swift unleashed his vicious wit at the start of the eighteenth century. The latest example is Mike McCormack. Swift couldn’t ask for a better successor.”
—USA Today
 
"With stylistic gusto, and in rare, spare, precise and poetic prose, Mike McCormack gets to the music of what is happening all around us. One of the best novels of the year." 
—Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin and TransAtlantic 
 
"Pure enchantment from an otherworldly talent. I admired the hell out of this book."
—Eleanor Catton, Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Luminaries

"Mike McCormack has created a narrative of such power and precision . . . The book, ​contemporary and tragic and funny,​ is ​a delight."
​​ —​NPR.org​
 
“A new fairy tale, rich and strange. McCormack’s language is lovely . . . His humor is dark, macabre, adding to the gothic atmosphere. The words glimmer like a spell.”
—Time Out (London)

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177344591
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	04/06/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

1
 
Sometimes, in spite of all I know I think of it this way . . .
     Falling, falling, falling through the heavens, this tiny seed of myself plummeting with the speed of a cast down thing. For how long? I don’t know, there are no signs in the darkness to mark out the progress and duration of my descent. All I know is the speed and breathlessness of it, the rush and pull of the air which sucks away my buoyancy and tightens the night around me.
     That and the sense of loss. Deep in the wound of myself there is a terrible sense of forfeit, some rare and priceless thing gone forever. It is the chief torment of this terrible descent. And where are my brothers? Surely I am not alone, this limitless darkness cannot be mine alone. There must be others like me, equally anguished, equally disoriented, all in the same headlong pitch. And yet I feel alone—the darkness hums with a vast indifference, my descent causes only the slightest disturbance, a tiny thread pulled from the limitless fabric of the night.
     My wings are gone, long gone, shorn by the terrible speed of my descent, burned and scattered to dust throughout the heavens. More than anything it is these I will miss most, these fabulous accoutrements of my one-time grandeur. I will never cease to grieve for them. In fact a time will come when I will think of them as the fundamental grievance of the entire world. Beneath all the despair and wretchedness there is only this one fundamental misery. This dim but unforgettable memory of flight, the heartbreak of an entire race.
     I will arrive without blemish, mewling in infant perfection. It is as if the descent itself, the attrition of the winds and darkness, has moulded and polished me for arrival. This is an outrage, a betrayal of my ordeal. I need lesions, scar tissue, testimony of some sort, not this bogus perfection.
     And so on down, down, down, unseaming the darkness as I go. There is no going back now, not that there ever was. Suddenly a thickening of the air, I am entering a new element. I feel the dampness and a sudden breaking into light; the stony ground rushes up to meet me . . .
     . . . It was the end of the world.
     I am talking of my birthplace, Furnace, a small village in the west set beneath hills which looked out over the hammered lead surface of the Atlantic towards the distant precipice of the horizon where it spilled over into the abyss. Outside those hills lay the world but the world to Furnace was little more than a rumour, a thing of myth and half truth which sometimes you could believe and sometimes you could not. Now, when I’ve seen enough to know that the rumour was indeed largely the truth, I find it difficult to believe there was ever a time when the world had the substance of a child’s tale.
     I was born in the winter of that year, a winter so long and hard that tough mountain lambs were stricken with frost and left dead as far into the year as April. All I know of my birth I have from my grandfather and he told me that right from the beginning I was wrong. When I was washed and placed in my mother’s arms it was obvious to even the most biased observers in the room that, despite my aura of infant perfection, there was about me also a miasma of ineffable error. My grandfather said that I exuded a tension, a black effulgence which set me apart even in Furnace. I was wrong in the same way that pale crows and black lambs are wrong.
     Worse than being wrong I seemed to know I was wrong. On being born I cried solidly for three days and three nights, a long, harrowing howl which broke only for air but which died mercifully at the end of the third night by which time my throat was lacerated and my blanket flecked with blood. By then my cry had deteriorated to a low croak and my whole appearance was that of a raw, infant demon. Despair had shredded my father’s nerves and reduced my mother to a sobbing hulk. I think this was the moment they surrendered me and I do not blame them for it. How terrible I must have been, a maddened ingrate who forswore sleep, the breast, maternal succour, all for the sake of one long cry of outrage. But my grandfather recognised something different. Hovering through the room, gaunt and decisive as a raptor, he pounced suddenly and wrested me from my father’s grasp. In that instant I stopped crying. I stared up at that old man and into his blue eyes and immediately I was at peace. I had found my mentor, my guide, my oracle. This was the moment I passed into the care of that fearsome old man and it was the moment also that I entered into that most awkward and soul-destroying of all disciplines: self-knowledge.
     My parents were powerless in the face of my grandfather—I was his and that was that. I was the small moon which fell through the heavens and he was the giant ochre planet within whose gravity I’d come to wheel. He would tell me later that he recognised my cry as the kindred note of despair which sounded in his own heart and he told me also that it was not so much the theme or passion of my cry which impressed him but the sheer length of it. Any child who had the endurance and wherewithal to protest his condition for three days and nights without sleep was a child after his own heart.
     So from the very beginning I came under his sole influence and a time came when I passed so completely from my parents’ reach that now I have lost all sight and memory of them—they are now no more than ghosts reaching out of the ether of memory towards me. Maybe they could have been saved to me had I just once spoken some words of filial love and affection, words which would have assured them that our parting was not their fault. But if they were powerless in the face of my grandfather’s influence I was powerless within it. Words of love and assurance were impossible to utter from out of this gravity—the only possible words were words of query, words of extremity, words of madness.
 
 
Nothing good grows in the shade, and in Furnace, where the light was thin, all children were pale. But in a village of pale children I was paler than the rest by virtue of the fact that I was also bald. I was born hairless, born even without that protective fuzz over the soft blue pulse in the middle of the skull which makes all children so vulnerable. And I would remain that way, blue, hairless and pulsing until my second year and the moment I took it upon myself to grow.
     In spite of this lunar appearance I was a healthy child. Germs gave me a wide berth, so much so that not once did I succumb to any of the croups, colds or colics which beset other infants. But if I was a healthy child I was also a reluctant one. At six months I was no bigger than a newborn and by the time my first birthday came round I had gained only three pounds with little appreciable lengthening of my frame. Good health in a child is nothing without growth and I refused to grow.
     I refused to do other things as well. It was after I cut my teeth that they realised there was something wrong with my mouth, more precisely, my tongue. After the long howl of my birth I settled down to become an eerily silent child. All through the agony of teething I sat on the floor, red-faced, outraged, and enduring bitterly, making a low canine whimpering in the pit of my belly. But no howl passed my lip. My tongue languished like a slug, rooted and speechless in the floor of my mouth.
     My parents were worried. Furnace thronged with imbeciles. Clutches of half-wits, all of tangled provenance, wandered through the village, chewing heels of bread with blank expressions on their faces. In desperation my father prised my mouth open, gripped my tongue between thumb and forefinger and pulled it out over my lips. It was there all right and it looked normal enough, why then wouldn’t it sound? He brandished trinkets and tools in front of my face hoping I would grasp the world and speak it.
     “This is a fork and this is a knife,” I was told. “You take one in each hand and use them to eat three square meals a day. Eat enough and one day you’ll be big and strong like me.”
     “This is a dog, his name is Rex. He eats bones and herds sheep. One day he’ll be your friend and you’ll be his master. Until then be careful not to vex him.”
     But I wouldn’t be coaxed. I sat in silence and drank in his words, hoarded them up like coins, already careful in these things. I was taking stock of the world and had made a decision not to pronounce on it until I was in full possession of the facts. I would not be lured so easily. So throughout my infancy I stayed dumb, a watcher on the kitchen floor, piling up information in my heart, waiting for my moment. When it came I was going to make sure that all things were clear and understood.
     This silence caused anxiety in everyone around me. Everyone that is except my grandfather. He hunkered down in front of me and tilted my face up with the tips of his fingers. He looked into my eyes and my plan was as clear to him as if I had passed him a note. He nodded his head approvingly.
     “Leave him alone,” he said quietly. “Give him time.”
     And so I was given time.

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