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.
