|
Robert McLiam Wilson
November 2003
One of life’s minor but
mentionable pleasures is discovering a new author that
you like. I’ve done that with Robert McLiam Wilson
because after finishing Eureka Street I know a writer
of this calibre is someone I wish to explore further,
that his talents will have crystallised into other compelling
narratives. I was not too keen initially, because the
backdrop for Eureka Street is the Irish Troubles, which
repels me. I know it’s not simple, that history
is a spectre that outsiders cannot really understand,
that Northern Ireland has been crushed, lacerated and
generally shattered in a way that cosy England cannot
judge. But from where I sit in cosy England I see psychopaths
that call themselves terrorists, responsible for the deaths
of many hundreds of innocent people. I see an appallingly
tiresome argument which originates in religious differences.
I see the profound illogicality whereby Irish people think
that killing their own Irish people is (was?) a good way
to get rid of the British. And I think wouldn’t
it be great if there were a kind of compulsory educational
institution which instructed people in How To Be Considerate
And Tolerant People With Respect For Human Life And Ideological
Difference. Level 1, 2 and 3. I grew up in the 70s and
80s with a stream of news footage telling me that the
IRA had blasted this shopping centre, that pub, killed
this many people and injured many more. Innocent, innocent
people. A profoundly stupid situation where so called
politics and so called religion are divisive options in
a cultural, intellectual and spiritual wilderness which
doesn’t offer anything else. The party of the people
A, B or C, the religion which says do this, that and this
again and you will be eternally saved. The meaning of
life = what belief system you opt into, the target for
your hatred = other people who think differently. The
trouble is there are different formulas on offer, and
everyone forgets how relative it all is: you’re
born a Hindu, you are a Hindu. You’re born into
a Protestant community, you are a Protestant; Catholic
birthright, shuzza! you’re a Catholic. What does
the random fact of individual circumstances have to do
with metaphysical and spiritual reality? Nothing at all.
But that’s not how the world operates and religion,
together with politics, is the basis for the most bitter,
bloody and agonising stains on human civilisation. The
Troubles? Why would I want to read a story about such
profound human ignorance, the result of which is decades
of world-famous bigotry, suffering and cruelty?
I also know that if someone killed my
mother, father, son, daughter, girlfriend or even best
buddy, I would be traumatised initially and then very
angry. I know that things happen in life which set people
off on trajectories which normal psychology and normal
life experience cannot account for. Dostoyevsky said he
would not accept a God who allowed the suffering of children.
I find it difficult to accept entrenched divisions based
on really pathetic so called differences, which are taken
so seriously that murdering innocent people is regarded
as a legitimate means to an end. Eureka Street? Set in
Belfast? I don’t want to read it - a tale about
depressing human failure, whereby the core level of human
civility is painfully absent: it’s not something
I wish to explore. You don’t kill innocent people,
regardless of what you are thinking and feeling. All of
which is, of course, a hot topic in year 2003 with the
global awareness of anti-human terrorist values.
I could pursue this further but the
important thing, in relation to this novel, is that I
found something very different. First and foremost, the
so called Troubles are a backdrop only, within a more
varied and subtle tapestry of human storyline. Shit happens,
life goes on, and even in Belfast there’s more to
experience, more to say, and more narrative potential
than Catholic and Protestant psychopaths killing each
other. And one of the significant achievements of Wilson
is that his story does exactly this: yes, there’s
all this horrendous suffering in the background, the whole
world knows about it, but it’s a big city full of
people with hopes, dreams, aspirations, weaknesses, desires,
individual biographies and everything else about human
life. There’s cause and there’s effect and
my personal objection is the cause of the Troubles, which
was the feuding and hatred between religious factions.
If I were Zorg from Planet X I might ask “so tell
me, earthling, what is Religion, how are the different
forms different, and why do people following different
forms hate and mistrust each other?” But that concerns
causes – i.e. a philosophical and cultural analysis
of religion – and what happened in Ireland was more
about effects that were so traumatic, they overshadowed
any deeper analysis. When loved and innocent people are
murdered, you trigger primordial levels of human emotion.
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.
Jake is the more sophisticated narrator;
he initially appears to be no more than a thug, earning
a living in the wretched business of debt repossession,
with prior experience of door work hire-a-thug activity.
Wilson’s prose is simple, direct and punchy, which
makes you think Eureka Street is going to be a simplistic
and rather macho tale. It isn’t; Jake is more sophisticated
than his fellow thugs with a university education and
the understanding that you can only enact violence when
you lack imagination, that if you could imagine thus feel
the effect of it – the smashed teeth, broken heads,
snapped bones etc, you could not do it. When one of his
colleagues turns a sick and elderly lady out of her medical
bed - which has to be repossessed – it is the final
straw in a line of work for which he is capable, but not
wholly suited.
Jake has recently lost his live in girlfriend,
and their two year relationship was a period in his life
when he felt happier than any other time. When she leaves
him, he drifts back into brutal Belfast ways and general
hopelessness, driving round his city in aimless boredom.
He is a philosopher – which is not entirely convincing
given his violent former propensities. There is a beautiful
section of Dickensian narration where Wilson characterises
Belfast in terms of multifarious human stories. It is
not Jake speaking, but this is the kind of viewpoint he
has:
Belfast
is a city that has lost its heart. A ship-building,
rope-making, linen-weaving town. It builds no ships,
makes no rope and weaves no linen. Those trades
died. A city can’t survive without something
to do with itself.
But at night, in so many ways,
complex and simple, the city is proof of a God.
This place feels like the belly of the universe.
It is place much filmed but rarely seen. Each street….is
busy with the moving marks of the dead thousands
who have stepped their lengths. They leave the vivid
smell on their pavements, bricks, doorways and in
the gardens. In this city, the natives live in a
broken world – broken but beautiful.
You should stand some night on
Cable Street, letting the little wind pluck your
flesh and listen, rigid and ecstatic, while the
infamous past talks to you. If you do that, the
city will stick to your fingers like Sellotape.
Whether in the centre itself or
the places in which people put their houses, the
city’s streets, like lights in neighbours’
houses, are stories of the done, the desired, the
suffered and unforgotten.
The city’s surface is thick
with its living citizens. Its earth is richly sown
with its many dead. The city is a repository of
narratives, of stories. Present tense, past tense
of future. The city is a novel.
Cities are simple things. They
are conglomerations of people. Cities are complex
things. They are the geographical and emotional
distillations of whole nations. What makes a place
a city has little to do with size. It has to do
with the speed at which its citizens walk, the cut
of their clothes, the sound of their shouts.
But most of all, cities are the
meeting places of stories. The men and women there
are narratives, endlessly complex and intriguing.
The most humdrum of them constitutes a narrative
that would defeat Tolstoy at his best and most voluminous.
The merest hour of the merest day of the merest
of Belfast’s citizens would be impossible
to render in all its grandeur and all its beauty.
In cities the stories are jumbled and jangled. The
narrative meet. They clash, they converge or convert.
They are a Babel of prose.
And in the end, after generations
and generations of the thousands and hundreds of
thousands, the city itself begins to absorb narrative
like a sponge, like paper absorbs ink. The past
and the present is written there. The citizenry
cannot fail to write there. Their testimony is involuntary
and complete.
And sometimes, late at night,
when most sleep, as now, the city seems to pause
and sigh. It seems to exhale that narrative, to
give it off like the stored ground-heat of a summer
day. On such nights, you cross a city street and
for a few golden minutes there are no carts and
the very hum of distant traffic fades and you look
at the material around you, the pavements and street-lamps
and windows, and you listen gently, you might hear
the ghosts of stories whispered.
And there is magic in this, an
impalpable magic, quickly gone. It is at times like
these that you feel you are in the presence of something
greater than yourself. And you are. For as you look
around the perimeter of your illuminated vision,
you can see the buildings and the streets in which
a dark hundred thousand, a million, ten million
stories as vivid and complex as your own reside.
It doesn’t get mote divine than that.
And the sleepy murmurings of half
a million people combine to make an influential
form of noise, a consensual music. Hear it and weep.
There is little more to learn on the earth than
that which a deserted city at four in the morning
can show and tell. Those nights, those cities are
the centre, the fulcrum, the very wheel on which
you turn.
Sleeping cities and sleeping citizens
alike wait upon events, they attend upon narrative.
They are stopped in station. They soon move on,
they soon start again.
And as the darkness beings to
curl around the edges, the city shifts and stumbles
in its slumber. Soon it will wake. In this city,
as in all cities, the morning is an assault. The
people wake and dress themselves as though arming
themselves for their day. From all the small windows
of all the small houses on the small streets of
this little city, men and women have looked out
on first-light Belfast and readied themselves to
do battle with this place (215-217).
|
There is a section when a bomb explodes
in the town, killing and maiming innocent people. Novels
don't often move me in this way, but I felt teary reading
Wilson's prose. He describes it with clinical detachment,
yet detailing the various lives and what they are doing,
thinking and feeling before they die. The bomb rips through
an otherwise normal day in a street like any other, full
of people like any other. Lives are decimated, damaged,
snuffed out.
Jake is introduced to a Aoirghe, a friend
of Chuckie’s new girlfriend, and they clash and
argue. Jake dislikes her vehement political views, she
despises him for failing to have any. They hate each other;
you wonder if they will eventually get together. They
do; after Jake endures quite a lot of abuse from Aoirghe
he eventually explodes in rage after a young boy has been
seriously beaten by the IRA. I enjoyed this moment; it
is a narrative conclusion and a purifying consummation
after you have heard the fearsome bigotry of Aoirghe go
unchallenged. Jake becomes a philosophical and moral reference
point; he will not accept any so-called political situation
where young children are viciously beaten. Aoirghe finally
gets her comeuppance, and you feel that the tough but
sophisticated Jake gets a lot of his anger, frustration
and despair out of his system. Shortly after this he opens
a letter from his former girlfriend containing one word,
which is central to Belfast politics and everyday human
relations, as much as their failed relationship. As with
the moment in the film Gandhi when the hero advises a
bereaved Hindu to adopt a Moslem child who has lost his
parents in the Indian religious feuds, Sarah advises him
to Forgive. No one would suggest that battered Northern
Ireland could or would become a peaceful place if everyone
forgave everyone else – this is not a fairy tale
– but clearly forgiveness has to be some part of
whatever reconciliation might finally ensue. Perhaps it
will develop in small scale situations, family by family,
street by street, man and woman towards man and woman.
Sarah’s recommendation is a perfect recipe for the
incipient romance between Jake and Aoirghe; after he rages
against her rancid politics in the hospital where the
young boy lies, she breaks down in tears at the painful
truth whereby no politics can indeed justify beating up
an innocent and already victimised young boy (albeit one
who was guilty of a little boyish naughtiness). The novel
ends with Jake and Aoirghe in bed; the former feeling
serene and content once again, no longer alone in a punishing
city which has, nonetheless, a human heart where love,
hopes and dreams can live. Best pal Chuckie has also found
love in the form of his American girlfriend. Prior to
this ending, Jake felt his friends were pairing off like
couples in a Shakespearean comedy, while he was left on
the sidelines. The novel finally finishes in this venerable
manner not with unlikely melodrama or soppy romance, but
a plausible happy ending after battle torn history.
|
