Robert McLiam Wilson

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Bibliographical details
Ripley Bogle: A Novel (Belfast: Blackstaff Press 1989), 273pp.; Do. (London: André Deutsch), [288]pp., and Do. (London: Pan Books 1990), vii, 227pp.; Do. (London: Minerva), 325pp., and Do. (London: Vintage 1998), 325pp.

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Commentary
‘La verve et l’insolence’, interview with with E. N. [sic.], in Figaro Magazine [?Aug. 1998]. Pronouncements and opinions include the follow: ‘mes livres son meilleurs en français’; prefers Chartreuse de parma to Rouge et Noir; decided to write when he read David Copperfield at six; wrote depressive adolescent novel, ‘Pourtant, je n’étais pas déprimer de tout. Mais je croyais qu’être déprimé c’était bien, en littérature’; hates his books and thought his second novel so bad that he refused to let it be translated into French; his ‘franc-parler’ gets him in trouble with his ‘concitoyens’; non-practising Catholic who lives in Protestant part of Belfast; rewrites five or six times; ‘Un livre n’est jamais fini. On l’abandonne, c’est tout’; doesn’t know his biological father; conceived the day Kennedy was assassinated; on New York: ‘Trop d’Irlandais, trope difficule de fumer. Je n’y remettrai plus les pied’; wants children and is installing himself in Paris ‘dans n’importe quel quartier.’

Edna Longley, reviews Eureka Street (1996), in Fortnight Review (Oct 1996); notes twin protagonists, Jake Jackson and Chucky Lurgan. respectively Catholic and Protestant; Jake, recovering from a love afffair, now up-and-downwardly mobile; Chucky is fat and lazy and amazingly successful; Jake partly narrates; considered his most Dickensian yet, and highly recommended. (p.34).

Peter Guttridge, ‘Tales of love and sects’, review of Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson, in The Guardian (1 Sept. 1996) ‘“All stories are love stories,” Wilson declares at the start of his third and best novel. Eureka Street tells a number of them but, as you would expect from the author of the acerbic Ripley Bogle, there is nothing anodyne about them, nor is that all the book is about. Wilson’s fresh, unhackneyed, boy-meets-girl stories are set against the background of the Troubles in Belfast, against the competing truths of the sectarian divide. [...] Chuckie, who goes from poverty to wild riches in Ireland, then America, thanks to his crazed entrepreneurial vision, is one of the great comic capitalist creations, almost akin to Milo Minderbender in Catch 22 or William Gaddis’s JR. [...] Wilson’s particular strength is in his characterisations. They include Max, the love of Chuckie’s life who came to Belfast to avoid the violence in America, and her fanatically republican friend Aoirghe, humiliated by the fact her last name, bathetically, is Jenkins. Even Ripley Bogle makes a cameo appearance. / Wilson finds much to amuse us in the political rivalries of Belfast. The mysterious appearance on walls, paving stones and phone boxes of the letters OTG causes panic in the world of bully boys since nobody knows what they stand for. [...] He has a lot of fun with the Gaelic-language fanatics, satirising people with unpronounceable names saying unpronounceable things. On a business tour of America, Chuckie tries to be the good Irishman by talking what he claims is Gaelic until some Star Trek fan points out it sounds remarkably like the Klingon for 'phasers locked and ready, Captain'. ut that doesn't mean Wilson doesn't take the Troubles seriously. He demonstrates compassion through dispassion when he describes in sober detail the horrors of a bomb exploding in a sandwich bar, providing moving biographies of the people torn apart (literally) by it.’ (See full-text version in RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index, or direct.)

Gerry Smyth, The Novel and the Nation: Studies in the New Irish Fiction (London: Pluto Press 1997), pp.132-34: ‘Having rejected Irishness, England provides no answers either. It is as if despite the claims to non-affiliation, Bogle has been permanently marked by his youth and background, and there is no true escape from it, either physical or psychological. England and exile, the traditional answers to the contradictions of Irish identity, have failed also. In Cambridge he finds a cohort of Thatcher’s privileged children desperately looking for some authenticity (of the kind they suppose he has left behind in Belfast) to fill their hollow lives, while as a tramp in London he discovers at sordidly close quarters the darkness at the heart of modern civilisation. / So cultural hybridity, rather than offering Bogle a positive and enabling set of options, actually robs him of any power other than that of indicting both sides and adopting a spurious position above (or rather, below) and beyond.the real world. He has sampled both, in Belfast, Cambridge and London, has intimate knowledge of both, and disdains both. Bogie decides to opt out of history, not to start again but to retreat into some state of non-being. This leaves him, literally, with nowhere to go, except to a deeper form of exile from the “acceptable” world of the 1980s into the underworld of the drop-outs and discarded humanity living in the cracks of what passes for “normal” modern life.’ (p.133.) [Cont.]

Gerry Smyth (The Novel and the Nation 1997) - cont. ‘This search for alternative perspective is built into the very structure of the novel, taking the form of a parodic discourse which samples but offers no investment in any of the received novelistic reactions to the ‘Troubles’. The novel rehearses the three standard tropes of traditional Northern Irish fiction: the involvement of Bogie’s friend Maurice in paramilitary activities (thriller); his ‘love-across-the-barricades’ with the middle-class Protestant Deirdre (national romance); and his exile to Cambridge and affair with the English rose Laura (domestic fiction). As it turns out, however, Ripley Bogle turns out to be a ‘fiction’ in more than one sense, for these narrative tropes are exploded, revealed at the end of the narrative as an elaborate set of lies. The truth is far from the story of sexual success and proud disdain for the rat race that Bogie would have us believe in the earlier parts of the narrative; it is, rather, a story of guilt, cowardice, betrayal and failure. / Bogie, moreover, is an unreliable narrator who parodies his own unreliability, always remaining one step ahead of the interpretative game. The novel contains a metanarrative strand which constantly reminds the reader of the constructed nature [134] of this, and any other, narrative.’ (pp.133-34.)

Lire (Ête 1998), pp.83-86, review article: Ripley Bogle [trans. extract], under caption, ‘Quel sale gosse! Bogle, 7 ans, joue au débile à l’école alors qu’il lit en douce à la bibliothèque Dickens, Thackeray et Shakespeare …’; extract beginning, ‘Dan mon enfance, le ciel était clair et lumineux, il dardait ses sourires aurifiés à travers mes fenêtres grandes ouvertes ….’ Biog. notice includes sentence, ‘Bogley le flammard arrogant et abvard et génial et désopilant est devnu deopuis la parution du livre en 199 un anti-Lucien Leuwen très en vogue.’

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Ellen-Raïssa Jackson, ‘Gender, Violence and Hybridity: Reading the Postcolonial in Three Irish Novels’, in Irish Studies Review, 7, 2 (August 1999), pp.221-31: Jackson adds the comment: ‘By representing these figures exclusively in terms of heterosexual relationships, Wilson’s novel continues to treat women as symbols in a metanarraive of identity rather than agents and subjects in their own right. Ripley Bogle plays out the narratives of nation in which women are the symbols of power and hybridity and yet are unable to make use of them.’ (p.230.)

Danine Farquharson, ‘The Language of Violence in Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street’, in New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, 9, 4 (Winter 2005): ‘Why does McLiam Wilson destroy, and then recuperate, his own narrative? [...] And how does the manner in which he narrates his chapters of violence inform what is undoubtedly the ethical drive of Eureka Street? [...] Character propels the first half of the novel, and Jake Jackson articulates the ethical drive that undelies the story: empathy can stop violence. Jake's ‘hard man” ethics offers one way of reading the explosive Chapter 11, and of understanding its importance. Having written a novel that represents violence in such a way as to elicit an ethical response in the reader beyond simple sympathy, Robert McLiam Wilson demands of his readers both imagination and active empathy.’ (p.66.) [...] ‘In Eureka Street, McLiam Wilson wanted to write responsibly, to respond to the situation in Northern Irelnad, and to be able to offer a response for others. He does this with a philosophy of empathy and then a test of that empathy - the theory, and the question of the practice. The test is one ultimately placed with the reader in a potent narrative game. As Wayne Booth has written, “When we lose our capacity to succumb, when we reach a point at which no other characters can manage to enter our imaginative or emotional or intellectual territory and take over, at least for the time being, then we are dead on our feet.” (Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, California UP 1988, p.257.) If we do not feel for Rosemary Daye and for the other characters, or stories, obliterated by the bomb blast at the center of the novel, then we are dead on our feet. The language of violence in Eureka Street demands that we fully comprehend their loss.’ (p.78; end.)

James Lomax, review of Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson (9 April 2007): ‘[...]The two central narrators on Eureka Street are Jake and Chuckie, who are Catholic and Protestant respectively. Neither of them subscribe to the ideas and belief systems of their city, which are the basis for the hatred and feuding. Jake sometimes pretends to be on the other side, and rejects the partisan arguments as tired, old and irrelevant bigotry; it’s time to stop it, and move on to a more mature and humanitarian position. The novel begins by describing a day-dreaming Chuckie wandering around working class Belfast, and his belief that he is about to be very prosperous seems most unlikely. In fact this becomes a narrative weakness because he does indeed become very wealthy, on the basis of various business and money-making scams beginning with a dildo-selling scheme where he takes payments for a fictitious product, knowing that women will not deposit refund cheques in the bank when he has stamped on them the words GIANT DILDO REFUND. Although Eureka Street undoubtedly refers to very serious matters, it is tragi-comic rather than polemic, and it glistens with humour. Chuckie’s success is unlikely, but it is in the spirit of slapstick rather than serious narrative.’ (See full-text version in RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Reviews”, via index, or direct.)

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Quotations

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Eureka Street (1996): ‘[Chuckie] had always delighted in lording it over yokels from the dark interior of Northern Ireland. If you were from Lurgan, Enniskillen, Omagh or Dungiven, Chuckie Lurgan would become the ultimate in urban, the complete cosmopolite. But now, as Manhatten walked and drove past him, Chuckie Lurgan was terrified.’ (p.257; cited Pauline McAllister, ‘Contemporary Irish Fiction’, EN305 UUC 1997.)

Eureka Street (1996): ‘As Belfast bombs go, it went. Little to relate. Nobody died, nobody bled. It was no big deal. That was the big deal. It was dull stuf.. Nobody really noticed. What had happend to us here? Since when had detonations in the neighbourhood barely raised a grumble? ... What were bombs life? Well ... explosive, naturally. And loud. And frightening. They were loud and frightening in your gut like when you were a child and you fell on your head and couldn't understand by it hurt like panic in your belly. They were fairly irreversible too. Bombs were like dropped plates, kicked cats and hasty words. The were error. They were disarrangement and mess. That were - and this was important - knowledge. When you heard that dry splash, that animal thud of bomb, distant or close, you knew something. You knew that someone somewhere was have a very bad time indeed.’ (pp. 14-15; quoted in Danine Farquharson, ‘The Language of Violence in Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street’, in New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, Winter 2005, p.71)

Eureka Street (1996): ‘You have seen the flags, the writing on th ewalls and the pavement flowers. Thsi is a city where people are preapred to kill and die for a few pices of coloured cloth. The city's surface is thick with its living citizens. its earth is richly sown with its many dead. This city is a repository of naratives, of stories. Present tense, past tense or future. The city is a novel.’ (pp.214-15; quoted in Danine Farquharson, op. cit., 2005, p.75.) Further: ‘[Cities are] the meeting places of stories. The men and women there are narratives, endlessly complex and intriguing ... In cities the stories are jumbled and jangled. The narratives meet. They clash, they converge or convert. They are a Babel of prose. [...] There is magic in this, an impalpable magic, quickly gone.’ (pp.215-16; Farquharson, op. cit., pp.75-76.)

Eureka Street - sundry quotations: ‘Belfast was only big because Belfast was bad’; ‘the under-populated capital of a minor province’; opposing groups ‘resembled no one as much as they resembled each other’; Jake ‘feared the withdrawal’ from violence; ‘Over 3,000 people killed ... What had it been for ... What had it achieved?’; ‘imperfectly macho town’; Jake: ‘There is little more to know on earth than what a deserted city street at four in the morning can show and tell.’

Street cred: ‘[I have] the perfect credit card. I’m a West Belfast Catholic’; ‘I’m fed up with the Irish, north and south, with their obsessive navel-gazing sectarianism and distortions of the truth, so I left for England’ (interviewed for John Ardagh, Ireland and the Irish, Portrait of a Changing Society, London 1994, p.253).

‘The Glittering Prize’ [ on Heaney and the Nobel], in Fortnight Review, 344 (Nov. 1995), pp.23-24. Wilson writes: ‘... Only Heaney himself can properly quantify his own sincerity. I’m quite a young writer myself, but already I find I’m beginning to be increasingly bothered by the question of my own sincerity. In the complex jumble of greed, vanity and ambition that provoke you to write, what space can be found for the integrity of the work itself? It is a crucial question. [/.../] I can only presume that, senior as he is, Seamus Heaney has happily settled this question within himself some time ago.’ Further: ‘Heaney lived in a country where, for twenty-five years murder and death were the philosophical cutting edge of the definitions of nationhood. Heaney doesn’t really cover it.’

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References
Adrian Rice, Signals: Anthology of Poetry and Prose [Abbey Grammar School Arts Week, Feb. 1997] (Newry: Abbey Press 1998), contains extract.

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Notes
Ripley Bogle: Having survived a dysfunctional family and a nationalist educatibon in in working-class Catholic Belfast of the 1980, he reaches Cambridge University before whimsically turning homless London street-person after an affair with an upperclass girl in his adopted milieu and the ensuing explosion of his personality. The zanily articulate narrator carries us along with a slangy salad of literary allusions (prominently including Joyce and Shakespeare) and a raft of topical allusions. Ripley ends by pulling the rug from under his own sympathetic narrative with the admission that he hasn't “quite been candid” while professing the opinion that “twentieth-century heroes must be flawed”. The novel demonstrates and demolishes ideas of cultural hybridity against an Irish historical background which refuses to render itself amenable to a postcolonial narrative of oppression and liberation. Yet it also reveals the inherently schizophrenic nature of the Irish-English composite substance, especially in the case of brilliant products of the English educational system in Northern Ireland.

Protestant writers: For Robert McLiam Wilson’s remarks on Protestant writers in a review of Maurice Leitch’s Gilchrist (Fortnight Review, Sept. 1994, p.45-46), see under Leitch, above.

Dermot Bolger, Contemporary Irish Fiction (1993), remarks that Wilson repudiates the ‘post-colonial literature’ tag (p.xii).

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