"Eureka Street" (1996)

spots on the Troubles

Robert McLiam Wilson - "Eureka Street"

about Robert McLiam Wilson

review of "Eureka Street" (Seattle Times)

review of "Eureka Street" (Observer)

interesting reader's view

literary analysis: satire and parody (L. Pelaschiar)

literary analysis: urban narratives (L. Pelaschiar)

Troubles fiction (A. Koenig)

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about Robert McLiam Wilson

Life, works, criticism & much more | click |

"Ripley Bogle" (1989) | extract |

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reviews of "Eureka Street": Seattle Times

The story that unfolds as these two friends criss cross the city is both a funny enjoyable read and a serious political satire on the poisonous politics of Northern Ireland.

The prominence of the street names is significant, for the novel is partly a paean to Belfast and its people. In the middle, McLiam Wilson briefly pauses the plot to voice a lyrical ode to his hometown. In a typically daring piece of writing reminiscent of the style of the American Thomas Wolfe, he describes how, in the wee hours of the morning, he can sense Belfast's stories in the quiet of its streets, when "all the streets are poetry streets."

Yet if that sounds sentimental, the novel is not. Though written with love, the book is also a penetrating satirical portrait of his troubled birthplace.

While being "dead satirical," as Chuckie puts it, McLiam Wilson manages also to be very funny. He plays with the routine Belfast absurdities that have developed after almost thirty years of the "Troubles." One running joke refers to the litter of acronyms-used as shorthand for political parties, paramilitary groups, slogans, and curses-that covers the city's walls. His rich cast of characters conveys superbly the mordant comedy of Belfast conversation as Jake and Chuckie meet regularly with their friends Slat, Septic, and Donal. Then there is Aoirghe, the middle-class Irish Republican radical whose name sounds like a bad cough; Chuckie's mother Peggy, a typical working class martyr-mother who in the course of the novel achieves a surprising liberation; and Max, a beautiful American woman who inexplicably succumbs to Chuckie's approaches.

In the novel's second half social satire gives way to sharp political satire. Although he grew up a Catholic in the same part of Belfast as Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, McLiam Wilson has no time for the evasions of Irish Republican politics. In a disturbing chapter he confronts the realities of terrorism and the political fudging of those realities. The chapter is a pure set-up; a new character is introduced but one senses that she is going to be there only briefly.

The predictability of the tragedy that ensues does not detract from the passionate anger with which McLiam Wilson writes. Afterwards the author takes aim directly at Adams (called Eve in the book; no need for too much subtlety) and at his nationalist party, Sinn Fein. That party's name is usually translated as "Ourselves Alone." In a brilliant flight of satirical invention that may well catch on in Belfast pubs, McLiam Wilson plausibly translates it a shade differently, and lampoons Sinn Fein throughout the novel as the "Just Us" party.

To any young novelist Belfast presents a dramatic gift of a subject, but one that is liable to blow up when unwrapped. This is a city where real life holds more drama than fiction and objectivity is impossible; how to address the grim political violence is a consuming question.

In his brilliant first novel Ripley Bogle, McLiam Wilson had wisely used the Troubles only as background. In Eureka Street, he shows himself ready to face the subject squarely. He does so with notable courage and with a fire in his belly.

Source: Seattle Times, book page, Dec. 14, 1997 (quoted from http://united_states.vacationbookreview.com/Nevada/Eureka/Eureka_2.html )

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review of "Eureka Street" (Observer)

The way he gets his start-up money is a comic gem. He advertises giant dildos (of which he has only one) in a sleazy newspaper, banks all the cheques and postal orders he receives, then mails to everyone who has sent money in refund cheques with the words Giant Dildo Refund stamped on them. 'Can you honestly imagine,' he says, 'anyone toddling down to their bank to lodge a cheque that has Giant Dildo Refund stamped all over it? Isn't capitalism wonderful?' Chuckie's best friend is Jake Jackson, a Catholic, who since childhood has slept with his windows open because he finds the nightly sound of the helicopters hovering overhead lulls him to sleep. Ditched by his English girlfriend (she hated the helicopters), Jake, a reformed hard man, directionless at 30, scuffles a living while looking for a new love.

Although non-political, Jake can't ignore the random violence and the politics all around him. It impinges even when he just goes for a drink in his favourite drinking haunt he can't work out how to be with a couple of bouncers. With one he's scared of being too Catholic, with the second of not being Catholic enough.

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. Puzzling that out is one of the incidental pleasures of the book.

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'.

But 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.

Here, and in a brief section discussing Belfast as an entity, Wilson briefly shifts narrative gear. He narrowly avoids portentousness to talk affectingly about the city in which: '. . . the stories are jumbled and jangled. The narratives meet. They clash, they converge or convert. They are a Babel of prose.' Otherwise, Wilson has a pleasurably flexible, easy-going narrative style. Eureka Street is very funny but that isn't all. At the start of it, Jake is 'thrillingly ecumenical', and this novel is ecumenical, too ecumenical with the truths the competing political parties offer and satirically cynical of them all.

Source: Observer Online (September 1, 1996)

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interesting reader's view

(Source http://united_states.vacationbookreview.com/Nevada/Eureka/Eureka_2.html )

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literary analysis: satire and parody

Writing the North - The Contemporary Novel in Northern Ireland, by Laura Pelaschiar (extract)

SATIRE AND PARODY: THE NORTHERN DUPES OF
ROBERT MCLIAM WILSON AND COLIN BATEMAN

A novel which states this distrust very openly is Eureka Street (1996) by Robert McLiam Wilson, one of Northern Ireland’s most promising new’ talents. Born in 1964 in Belfast. McLiam Wilson published his widely acclaimed first novel Ripley Bogle in 1989 and won the Rooney Prize for it.

As it transpires from an interview he gave to Eileen Battersby for the Irish Times - where he asserted rather polemically: "I’m not going to ignore the political questions. I am not Seamus Heaney" (Battersby 1992: 5) - McLiam Wilson believes that politics cannot be ignored by Northern Irish artists. Interestingly enough, the interview was given when Wilson was writing Eureka Street, which is, among other things, one of the most overtly political novels ever written in or about the North.

Described by its author in the same interview as "a big 19th-century novel in terms of size. with lots of characters and it’s about Belfast, finally" Eureka Street is indeed a very long, important and ambitious text which will be more thoroughly analyzed in chapter III of this book and which brings together an impressive collection of genres and styles. Perhaps because of this, because it tries to be so many different things, it is not always wholly successful in all of them, and the overt political satire which runs through its narrative is not one of its most convincing features.

McLiam Wilson chooses a very direct way to express his opinions about the political struggle in the North: in his novel, Gerry Adams and Sinn Fein make very thinly disguised appearances under the names of "Jimmy Eve" and the (much despised by the narrator Jake Jackson) "Just Us" movement. Since the events narrated take place in the months immediately before and after the 1994 IRA ceasefire, Jimmy Eve’s political career is portrayed at one of its peaks, that is during his 1994 American tour. This tour intersects with Chuckie Largan’s journey (one of the two protagonists of the book) to the United States in pursuit of his American girlfriend Max, who has left him for no apparent reason. At a certain point in the story Chuckie Largan and Jimmy Eve’s itineraries overlap. and the two men, through a very unlikely and fortuitous turn of events. end up as guests on the same television programme. Chuckie, who has no interest in politics whatsoever but who was given some amphetamine to sniff by a cameraman immediately before the beginning of the programme, launches into a tirade which stuns Jimmy Eve into silence and seriously threatens his so far triumphantly successful political mission.

Although such an explicit and merciless attack on a real political movement such as Sinn Fein may well be regarded as a brave attempt to give voice for the first time in a literary context to a political criticism often heard among Irishmen and women north and south of the border. the narrative modes employed by McLiam Wilson - satire and parody - do not quite fit into the structure of the novel, and the reader is left with the feeling that caricatures of real-life politicians such as that of Jimmy Eve, although they may perhaps amuse for a while and certainly deliver a carefully constructed message, do not find their natural environment and collocation in the overall structure of a novel such as Eureka Street. McLiam Wilson’s political discourse is much more effective when the horror of random sectarian violence is exposed through the creation of characters the reader can identify with and through the narration of events. The eleventh chapter of his book, which is one of the best descriptions of the horror of a bomb explosion ever to appear in a Northern Irish novel, is (as will be demonstrated in chapter three of this work) a clear demonstration of this.

Source: http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/bibdbs/pelaschiar1.htm 

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literary analysis: urban narratives

Writing the North - The Contemporary Novel in Northern Ireland, by Laura Pelaschiar

Urban narratives

Eureka Street is a very long and ambitious text which in some respect aims at putting together many genres and styles and is almost Dickensian in its scope. As it states at the very beginning ("All stories are love stories") it is a romance narrating two parallel love stories, that of Catholic Jake Jackson and that of his Protestant friend Chuckie Largan. It is a twentieth century picaresque novel with Chuckie Largan playing the role of Tom Jones, his American girlfirend Max as Sophie and contemporary America substituting eighteenth century’ England. It is at once a satire of sometimes Swiftian overtones, a burlesque with Northern Ireland and its political foibles and hobby horses as its target and a version of pulp-fiction Quentin Tarantino style. It is also an honest attempt at writing about the tragic North from the refreshing Sternian perspective that human life is a comedy and that it is not, in spite of its slings and arrows, such a bad thing after all, not even in contemporary’ Belfast. And it is, first of all, a crafted lyric and a moving love-song for the city of Belfast and its people.

The events narrated take place in the months immediately before and after the 1994 IRA ceasefire but the readier has little sense that Jake Jackson and Chukie Largan are living in a city divided along sectarian lines which is home to danger, violence andi unhappiness: their pub friends all belong to that very’ recently’ developed species of young Irishmen who, after spending a few’ years abroad. have come back to Ireland.

Their lives are pretty much the same as those of their counterparts anywhere else in Europe and they do not seem to be particularly affected by the politics of the North. The same may’ be said of all the other characters (with one remarkable exception, as we shall see.)

Jake Jackson has his roots in West Belfast, one of the dangerous Catholic areas of the city, but he seems to have left that particular part of his life behind, although of course he has not forgotten about it. He has had a rough life, he was separated from his family by social workers and brought up by two wonderful foster parents. He is well-educated, lives in Poetry Street (a romantic-sounding street in what McLiam Wilson calls leafy Belfast) and thanks to his girlfriend Sarah, an English correspondent covering the Troubles for a London newspaper, he has even managed to give up his life-long career as "bouncer, bodyguard, general frightener, all-purpose yob" (61) which his innate gifts as a fighter make him so perfect for. By the time the book begins Jake has already been abandoned by her: "She didn’t want to live in Belfast anymore. She was English. She didn’t need it any more. There had been a lot of killings back then and she decided she’d had enough. She wanted to go back to somewhere where politics meant physical arguments. health debates, local taxation, not bombs, not maiming not murders not fear" (5). Without Sarah and her nice, bourgeois normality to "iron him smooth" (62) Jake is inevitably’ drawn back to his rough life-style of "punching heads and baring teeth" (63).

Politically speaking Jake is fiercly a-political ("Politics are basically antibiotic, i.e., an agent capable of killing or injuring living organisms. I have a big problem with that". 96) and he has a particularly deep dislike for nationalist hardliners, a dislike which is reinforced by the fact that his West Belfast origins make him interesting to them. Yet he expresses feelings about visitors who expect to find derelict houses and bomb-sites everywhere in Belfast which are very similar to those voiced by Drew Linden in Fat Lad.

Jake's love hatred relationship with Aoirghe, a girl who is as politically committed to the cause of a united Ireland as Jake is dismissively cynical about it. Chuckie Largan’s relationship with Max, and Chuckie’s mother’s lovestory with her best girlfriend, all have very happy and satisfactory endings. unlike most love stories in Northern Irish narrative. For the first time ever, Belfast streets are "love-friendly", so much so that even a love story between a Muslim man and a Jewish girl is possible. Again irony’ is present but it is neither corrosive nor sarcastic, on the contrary, it is rather soft and affectionate.

Yet, no matter how much these writers represent Northern Ireland as a normal and modern place with much in common with other European cities, they still retain an awareness of the constant possibility of violence. Thus, in Fat Lad James’s idyllic immersion in Belfast’s romantic-sounding streets is brutally interrupted by’ the sound of distant shooting. Belfast’s harmonious postmodern reality, interrupted by a shocking and totally unexpected eruption of violence, is brilliantly portrayed by Patterson in musical terms.

In the same way, in spite of its reasurring beauty and normality, McLiam Wilson never lets us forget that we are indeed in Belfast Although none of the characters is directly involved in any sectarian scheme, they are still "tender, murderable" Belfast people. They’ are part of a world that. in spite of its blissfully normal appearance. has still to come to terms with the fact that the odd bomb does go off from time to time. The indirect way in which McLiam Wilson chooses to deal with Belfast violence is strikingly effective.

As we read, we hear a few bombs placidly exploding in the distance and their meaning, cause and effect are kept faint. Just when we are either beginning to forget about them or more likely’ starting to become a little impatient with McLiam Wilson’s smart nonchalance with regard to this violent reality, we are gently taken away from the main events of the book and led into chapters ten and eleven. Chapter ten consists of six pages of poetry in prose (the effect is reinforced by’ the fact that the right-hand margins are uneven), in which McLiam Wilson sings his beautiful, nocturnal love-song for sleeping Belfast:

Nowhere else in Irish literature, not even in Ulysses, had a city been celebrated and recreated with such deep intensity’ and loving lyricism.

Chapter eleven presents the morning after, when the reader encounters a certain Rosemary Dave. a young woman never seen before in the book. We pleasantly stroll with her through the sunny Belfast streets, enjoy’ her happiness at the thought of Sean’s love for her, blush with her at the memory of what he said about her hips the night before. buy an expensive green-linen knee-length skirt in a chic shopping Arcade. anxiously’ check her hair in a dark window, phone Sean and listen to his still love-inebriated voice, emerge with her from Arcade Street. head for lunch into a small sandwich shop, turn to murmur some thanks to the young man who is keeping the door open with a flirtatious smile on his face and then, as McLiam Wilson puts it. with Rosemary we ‘stop existing’. After this, the author proceeds in a very matter-of-fact, almost scientific way to describe the effect of the bomb on Rosemary’s body.

He does the same for the young man with the flirtatious smile and for all the dead customers of the shop, for some of the passers-by and some of the witnesses, and concludes:

McLiam Wilson’s novel is not about the Troubles, and yet few bombs in the many pages written on the Troubles have had such a devastating effect on the reader. With the exception of Peggy Largan, Chuckie’s mother, who, although she remained unhurt, was one of the closest witnesses to the slaughter (an event which will completely change her life), none of the main characters in the book has been directly involved in the explosion, and the reader, in an experience that mirrors that of the people of Belfast. may rapidly forget the victims’ names and proceed. slightly numbed, with the rest of the book. We are led through the short power.

In stating this so powerfully. Eureka Street follows a well-established tradition in Northern Irish narrative, which very often has its Troubles victims killed by accident or chance. In Jennifer Johnston’s The Railway Station Man. Roger and Jack, respectively Helen’s lover and son, are blown up in a freak accident, while her first husband was also shot by mistake by the IRA. In Maurice Power’s Lonely the Man without Heroes, Brigadier Brazier, the army’s secret agent, shoots harmless Tim Pat Duffy instead of his son Fergal. an IRA sympathizer. because he was wearing his son’s coat. The same happens. as we have seen, to Charlie Quinn in Madden’s One by One in the Darkness, while the only person to die in Daniel Mornin’s All Our Fault is shot by mistake. In McLiam Wilson’s Ripley Bogle Muire, the little neighbour girl, gets horribly maimed again "by mistake" and in Patterson’s Fat Lad the absurdity of random death is pushed to its extreme in the story of Con, who dies while driving his car when a lamp post hit by the "monstrous" back wheel of a Saracen which came off its axle after the soldier driving it took his hands off the wheel to protect himself from a flying bottle falls onto it. In Colin Bateman’s Cycle of Violence the sequence of people who get killed by mistake or by accident is endless. Yet of all of these novels, McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street makes this point with particular care, with compelling force and deep humanity, and the bomb chapter, which like the explosion it describes blows the reader off his/her feet. is certainly one of the most forceful pages ever written in Northern Irish writing.

Source: http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/bibdbs/pelaschiar3.htm#urban 

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Troubles fiction (A. Koenig)

“Troubles” Fiction: Promising Young Writers Build Careers on Sectarianism

by Andrea Koenig | click for complete article |

the following quote is just an extract, dealing with "Eureka Street" 

Robert McLiam Wilson’s novel, Eureka Street, appeared roughly contemporaneously with Cornell’s collection, and though unendorsed by the Heinz family, the novel announced itself in sufficiently cheeky terms to be noticed. Drenched in “Troubles” folklore, ideology, and myth, confusion over the meaning of language is largely absent from Eureka Street because 1) this was the first of Wilson’s novels to be published in the States and he writes it from the ground up for an American audience, 2) his style is satirical to the nth degree. His modus operandi? “Take the piss” out of sectarianism to neurotic and over-the-top proportions. While an informal poll of my writer and scholar friends produces four-for-four thumbs down for this “novel of Ireland like no other,” and while it is true Eureka Street lacks the emotional depth of McCann’s”Hunger Strike,” this young writer, who, unlike Cornell and McCann, is a native of Belfast, innovates Northern Ireland and sectarianism sufficiently to merit a look.

The paperback announces itself with half (yes, half) a dead-ringer for Brad Pitt on the cover, dressed in suit, vest, dress shirt, the tie loosened just enough to suggest a long day in the yuppie grind. Turn the book over, though, and the Pitt resemblance fades into Michael J. Fox circa Bright Lights Big City, a reference to which I’ll return. The protagonist, Jake, does indeed live in the posh south of the city, in a nice flat filled with his ex-girlfriend’s gorgeous furniture (fed up with the violence, she’s returned to her native England). We’re given to understand Sarah has polished up this working-class guy from the wrong side of the tracks, couldn’t hack it, leaves, the lovable bloke deep-sixes. Hardly a new scenario. Here, the wrong side of the tracks is Catholic west Belfast, heartland of the PIRA, toxic dumping ground of sectarian waste. Jake’s origins provide the “street cred” necessary to laugh at all that is wrong with Belfast. If he’d been spawned higher on the food chain, he’d be in danger of sounding patronizing and classist when he pronounces “very Belfast” (22) the rivalry for wall space that exists between an old man (who wishes it clean) and kids (who wish to splatter it with paramilitary graffiti).

Wilson is at his best when he sticks to satire; attempts at character development fall flat. His hapless hero has debarked a train because the Provisionals have booby-trapped the line (like Jake-O, I’ve had this experience.) He’s got his eye on a woman, of course, a “peaceful, soulful type…with a line of pursed, inept lipstick” (188). The joy of pursuit keeps the specter of turning 30 at bay, makes him feel “all springtime.” The problem? “She was very pretty. Too pretty for me perhaps. I’d always preferred slightly plain girls. It was always so much sexier when they took their clothes off” (191). How is that, exactly? Rather than explore what could be a compelling insecurity (or is this solely glib language play?), Wilson skirts the issue—contradicting, in the process, without rhyme or reason, the Jake entrenched in our minds at the novel’s outset, the Jake who has located glamorous and lovely Sarah at the center of his universe, who weeps at the sight of her handwriting, and to assuage his loneliness, is hot on the trail of Mary, a young woman who wears “smart dress and hose...like something in a crime novel” (2), a woman he “wouldn’t even have pissed on” (18) at sixteen.

Just as Jake winds up to deliver the “Reluctant Look” or “RL,” as he calls it, to the “soulful type,” a genuinely funny moment, a microphone is shoved into his face: “Do you think it’s ironic that the peace train has been halted by a bomb on the line?” (189) to which Jakes responds: “Wha?” The film crew presses him. What message does Jake have for the people who planted this bomb today? Instead of fielding this rhetorical opportunity straight, as any of the aforementioned writers would, including MacLaverty, Jake stares at Shague Ghintoss, Northern Ireland’s “greatest living poet” (a swipe at our Seamus?) and inquires “what the fuck” a poet does in the afternoons (190).

In Eureka Street, Wilson is, in many ways, a one trick pony. With a couple of chords to his name, he bangs out the same tune. However, in passages where he puts Belfast into the grinder and spews out global analysis of its dog eared fulminations (163), related, in principal, to the formal articulations of scholars, his tune is pretty good:

The tragedy was that Northern Ireland (Scottish) Protestants thought

themselves like the British. Northern Ireland (Irish) Catholics thought

themselves like Eireans (proper Irish). The comedy was that any once-

strong difference had long melted away and they resembled no one now

much as they resembled each other. The world saw this and wondered,

but round these parts folk were blind. (163)

It’s not at all true that Jake has access to what the world thinks; he’s spent his life in this divided city, but what is thoroughly original about sentences like these is how Wilson uses the slightly distanced tone of journalists and scholars (O’Malley, David Beresford, Jonathan Stevenson) and spikes it with the disaffected air of his occasionally poetic protagonist.

Another hallmark of Wilson’s originality is his postmodern habit of abrupt and unannounced shifts in points of view (he is working within the space of the novel, it should be noted). No sooner do we become accustomed to Jake’s “I” voice, than it gives way to the third person, so as to facilitate Chuckie’s fall for the beautiful American, Max. The assumption is that Jake has effaced himself, in a rather gentlemanly fashion, to allow Chuckie his moment in the spotlight. Chuckie’s romantic bits are really quite funny as Wilson reduces their first night of lovemaking into a laundry list of “she dids” (114). Indeed, the novel fairly hums with energy as we learn more about Max—that her father, a diplomat well versed in brokering peace deals, was assassinated as he stepped out of Aldergrove Airport and that, grief-stricken, Max hit the road back home in the States; she arrives one day in a bus station coffee shop, looks at her watch and, in a most lovely turn of phrase, realizes that two years have passed. Before long the glass doors at Aldergrove glide open again and she steps carefully over the spot where her father bled to death (120-130). Max stays long enough to shag Chuckie into domestic bliss, then she’s off, tired, like Sarah, of the violence. Because her father was taken by the Northern Irish conflict (both the UVF and the PIRA claim responsibility), she is above the criticism that is often leveled at American journalists, academics and aid-workers (not to mention tourists), that they always, always have a return ticket to safe streets in their back pocket.

Wilson shifts several times between the ambiguous third of the “Chuckie” chapters (who, exactly, narrates here?) and Jake’s “I.” By Chapter Ten the third and second person are conflated and for the first time we’re truly outside Jake’s body: “That night, on Poetry Street, Jake slept like Chuckie…like all the city’s citizens…Belfast lay like an unlit room” (212). Before we know it, we’re morphing into a Jay McInerney Bright Lights Big City-ish second “…from anywhere you stand, from anywhere you look, the streets glitter like jewels, like small strings of stars…deep at night Belfast whispers in cool breaths that hatred is something like God…if you fight and follow it blindly enough, it will keep you warm at night” (214).

Wilson says some compelling and perhaps truthful things about the lengthy Northern Irish conflict and about the peace process that was halted in a generally sullen climate at the time this novel was originally published. While Cornell and McCann (and MacLaverty) play the conflict straight, Wilson peels it off the wall and drop kicks it out of the park. He throws his hands up and pokes deadly fun at it. His protagonist, Jake, is the only one, it seems, who can clearly see the foibles of his fellow city dwellers, Protestant and Catholic alike. Lacking sectarian hatred to cleave to, to define and shape him, Jake drifts. His raison d’etre becomes chasing women.

Bernard MacLaverty of the aforementioned Cal and Lamb fame has been on the Northern Ireland scene too long to warrant analysis here (these writers may now be merely young-ish but they aren’t yet gray); nevertheless, his young man, Cal, begs comparison with Wilson’s Jake. I’ll make my comments brief. Jake meets and is spruced up by a rich English woman (though she leaves him), he buys and grinds expensive coffee, lives in a posh neighborhood, has a friend, Chuckie Lurgan, who grew up in Sandy Row, one of the fiercest Loyalist enclaves in Belfast. He enjoys privileges MacLaverty’s Cal could never dream of, mired as he is in neighborhood Republicanism. Unsurprisingly, Cal is an accessory to murder of a police officer. Jake, on the other hand, has the privilege to pursue Mary, whose boyfriend is a member of the RUC. Though Jake shares working-class Catholic roots with Cal, his middle class lifestyle has taken him so deep into posh Belfast, he can’t even recall what an explosion sounds like.

The embedded assumption in Eureka Street is that women of class refine the wildness, the grunge out of a man, that women are indeed the fairer, nobler sex. I’ll apply my energies to deconstructing this myth in another article, another time. We are given to understand in MacLaverty’s novel that the very absence of the mother (she died when Cal was a child and thus can be immortalized in his memory) is what sets him adrift and makes him vulnerable to the PIRA. This is at odds with O’Malley’s assertion that boys fall into paramilitary activity as a result of a perceived (or real) affront and because everyone else is doing it. It should be noted that in Cornell’s “Undertow,” as well, the boy, Ricky, whom I skirted in my earlier analysis because he’s on the margins of the narrative, is invulnerable to the potentially pernicious influence of the mural(ist). He has a mother and father, a settled home life, is the implication, and though 13-year-old Ricky considers his father daft beyond reason (he’s the same age as the boy at the center of “Hunger Strike”), nevertheless, he is shaped and most certainly saved by his nurturing presence.

The obvious commonality these writers share is Northern Ireland. Wilson and Cornell have yet to publish follow-ups to the work examined here while McCann has added to his oeuvre an ambitious imagining of the life of Rudolf Nureyev. Northern Ireland meanwhile remains uncharted fictional terrain; with very few exceptions, overlooked by writers in the south. (McCann is at present a New Yorker.) “Troubles” nonfiction, of course, sags book shelves, and genre writers have extracted what they can by way of espionage possibilities. Six, now seven years and counting for the cessation of paramilitary activity.14 Perhaps greater economic prosperity and lasting stability mean increased literary experimentation. One hopes. My own Belfast novel continues to compost in Washington State.

Source: http://english.okstate.edu/faculty/fac_pages/koenig/troubles.htm 

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