When Solar Bones won, in a strange way, I did too!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

When Galway-based writer Mike McCormack won the Goldsmiths Prize for his novel Solar Bones, I was just a little bit too excited. His triumph brought with it a minor victory for me, on both a personal and professional level.

Throughout my life I’ve had a difficult relationship with literature. Thrust ahead a year at school by educators who didn’t understand the difference between intelligence and academic ability, I found myself surrounded by incredibly clever students. English Public Schools exist to produce candidates most likely to succeed at Oxford and Cambridge.

While many from that class did just that, for me, university was never an option.

Every teenager needs to go through a phase when nobody appears to understand them, and this was mine.

Everyone in my life kept telling me how clever I was; that my failures were the result of sloth and indifference; that if only I worked a bit harder, I might just surprise myself.

Every single school report said the same thing: ‘Could do better.’

Nobody listened when I tried to explain that I had genuine trouble assimilating information from text books. Then a powerful cocktail of hormones and Punk Rock met this onslaught of expectation, and I reacted in a predictably adolescent way.

It went something like this:

‘You insist that I read your books? Well I won’t read them. I won’t even go to university, because I’m fed up to the back teeth with being told to learn.

‘Yes, of course I want to learn, and will continue to do so joyously throughout my life, but there’s more to learning than books by old fogeys and fathomless farts whose language I cannot take in.

‘I will work in a warehouse, ride a motorbike and reject your academic world, where I feel inadequate and stupid. I will hitchhike thousands of miles and learn from that as much as your high literature will ever teach me.’

So I did, and along the way devoured books that I chose to read of my own volition. Woody Guthrie’s autobiography Bound For Glory served to rip apart the cosy confines of my bourgeois mind, showing me a braver way. Inspiring and wonderful, I still read it every couple of years.

To read Charlie’s column in full, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.