Eureka Street, by Robert McLiam Wilson

I start my project by departing from my own guidelines.  I felt I could not read what someone else considered great literature without returning to what I considered great.  So I reread my favorite novel, Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson.

Eureka Street is a beautiful and brilliantly written novel of love in its various forms.  Wilson opens the novel by declaring that all stories are love stories, and this holds true in Eureka Street.  Wilson crafts a series of stories that are defined by history and politics and, of course, love in all its forms.

We start by seeing the world through Jake Jackson’s eyes.  Born a Catholic in West Belfast, Jake was witness to the worst of the Troubles and this left him hardened, tough.  He drinks, smokes, swears, and makes a living by hitting people (as a bouncer, a repo man, etc.).  Underneath, though, lies a sensitive heart.  Jake longs for companionship, love, and beauty.  Much of the story revolves around Jake’s search for love and the humorous string of rejections he encounters.

The novel also follows the antics of Chuckie Lurgan, a man remarkable for his significant weight and for the fact that, as a Protestant, he maintains an almost exclusively Catholic circle of friends.  While Jake is poetic and sensitive, Chuckie is crass and practical, he is inelegant.  We are treated to Jake’s thoughts, his innermost secrets, desires, and his private shame, but we are limited with Chuckie.  Wilson differentiates Jake’s story from Chuckie’s by altering the narrative style, taking it a step back to the limited scope of the third person.  Chuckie’s story is almost outrageous, often providing comic relief after Jake’s brooding, but  I am partial to Jake’s chapters.  The prose is so poetic, so poignant, so wickedly beautiful that it captivates me with each reading.  When Wilson narrates Chuckie’s story, he is straightforward; the prose is unadorned and fairly unromantic.  When he narrates as Jake, though, he is quixotic and facetious.  Jake is a poet, but he’s also sarcastic, sardonic, and satirical.  Jake is complicated and his story is beautiful in its intricacy.

I love the characters and their misadventures, but it is the novel’s satirical nature that makes it great.  In this novel of Northern Ireland, nothing is sacred.  Wilson mocks everyone and everything with the same biting wit.  Irish poets, historians, and politicians are made into caricatures.  Wilson reduces Oliver Cromwell to an old man with a bad haircut and he openly mocks Irish Republican rhetoric by naming his Protestant hero a name that sounds suspiciously like the motto of the Irish Republican movement.  By subjecting Irish politics to satire and criticism, Wilson reveals the hypocrisy behind the rhetoric and hate that fueled much of Northern Ireland’s violence over the past century.

This satire masks Wilson’s best emotion, though, at times eclipsing Eureka Street’s best love story, the love the author has for his city and its imperfect citizens.  Wilson truly loves Belfast, and his love for the city permeates the novel, creeping into each story and influencing both characters and reader.  I call this the best love story because it is the most dynamic of the novel. At times the city gleams and seems magical.  Wilson even dedicates a chapter to the city, leaving Jake and Chuckie as he writes what can only be described as an ode to Belfast.  He describes the city in the tender tones that one might use to describe a lover.  His words are beautiful and haunting and this chapter, above all others, is enchanting and almost heartbreaking.

As with most dynamic love stories, though, it cannot all be poetry and rose-colored glasses.  Lovers often disappoint, and Belfast in 1994 most definitely hurt and disappointed.  Love is the constant thread that is evident throughout each of Eureka Street’s stories, but violence, too, is ever-present.  Violence dominated and defined life in Belfast.  Indeed, the entire island was affected; even in the South it seemed that one could not turn on the radio without hearing more reports of death in Belfast, a fact which proved too frightening  for my then eight-year-old self.  In Eureka Street violence is like a soundtrack, it is present in the background for a majority of the novel until, as it does too often in real life, the war strikes too close to home.  One of the warring factions launches a major attack that forces death and disappointment to the forefront of Wilson’s novel, and the tone of the subsequent pages is akin to that of a lover scorned.  Here Wilson presents prose that is biting and sharp, his pain is palpable.  It is clear that while Wilson loves his city, he hated its war.

Eureka Street is not a perfect novel, nor is it a book for the faint of heart.  Wilson’s prose is rough at times and the characters are often crude.  The novel is much like its hero, Jake; on the surface it appears rough and gritty, but underneath that hard exterior there is tenderness, love.  Both character and novel are diamonds in the rough, so to speak.  Wilson is not a Dickens or a Hawthorne or a Hemmingway, but in Eureka Street he has crafted a novel that is great for its depiction of truth, beauty, and love.

An Introduction

My Netflix account informed me last week that I had just rated my nine hundredth movie.  From time to time I click on the “Movies You’ll Love” tab to update my film queue and find more shows that I might enjoy.  The service keeps a running tab on the films I rate, and as I rated Masterpiece Theater’s recent hit Sherlock (five stars because I absolutely LOVED it), my total updated to 900.  This sparked three subsequent realizations.  First, I watch way too many movies.  I recently graduated with a Master’s Degree in history, and for nearly three months after, I was unemployed.  In between recovering, recuperating, and searching for jobs, I distracted myself by watching insane amounts of sows on Netflix Instant.  The second realization was that I really watch too much TV.  I try to maintain a standard for rating Netflix movies: I have to have seen the movie recently to rate it so I can give it an accurate rating.  Movies from my childhood--Disney cartoons notwithstanding--must be rewatched or remain unrated.  This means that my movie count is inaccurate.  This fact both frightens and embarrasses me.  And finally, I realized that I am bored.  Despite having secured a nine-to-five job I enjoy, I feel unsatisfied in a way that even an endless string of shows cannot remedy.  The past two years accustomed me to days (and, more often that not, nights) of reading and analyzing.  I am happy that I am no longer reading 500 pages a week or writing five-page analytical papers.  At the same time, I find myself craving more intellectual challenge than my current situation can provide.  Looking at that movie tally, I realized I needed a project.

So that is the motivation behind this endeavor.  In order to avoid insanity or some rotting of the brain that my mother threatened would occur if I watched too much TV, I intend to start reading.  I can’t just start reading, however.  The world of literature is too vast, too awesome to choose from.  After two years of reading dry historical theory, choosing a book to read from the shelves of a bookstore would, for me, be something like letting loose the proverbial kid in a candy shop.  I also want to read something wonderful.  After I finished college, I read Charles Dickens’ Bleak House and it was both incredible and rewarding.  I want to re-experience that.  I did a search for lists of great literature and I found The Guardian’s list of the 100 greatest novels of all time.  After looking over the list and, having read or wanted to read several of the novels listed, I have decided that this will be my project.  I will read all 100 novels and record my thoughts, reactions, and general musings in the hopes that this will help me fill the void that grad school left.  I’m hoping that this project will prevent me from adding another 900 movies to my list.