Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson
To borrow from the author, this book made me laugh like a drain. Tragic and witty in a Northern Irish way, it portrays ordinary people trying to live their lives in the midst of the Troubles. On the surface, Belfast may seem as tame and leafy as Oxford or Cheltenham, but violence and the fear it engenders are daily challenges for our protagonists and their friends.
Early in the book, McLiam Wilson alludes to the Protestant corner bookie’s, which is “doing powerful trade.” The reason is simple. Following “a couple of massacres” in their own betting shops, “Catholics are becoming “too frightened to bet” in them.
Later, the author will provide a chillingly intimate portrayal of a violent terrorist attack. He will relate with passion and outrage and bitter irony what it is like to experience such a situation.
He will tell us that “Such bombings, such murders, do not really involve the people involved,” but “are demonstrations. Look at what we can do…to you.”
Meanwhile, though, we follow Jake the repo man as he essays a romantic comeback after Sarah, his former girlfriend, has been “repossessed” by England. In a bar where he’s hoping for a date with the barmaid, Jake avoids the big Protestant bouncer who flashes his UVF tattoos, for fear of “saying something too Catholic.” The next night is no better. He can’t converse with the big “Saturday-night type of guy” with Republican tattoos, for fear of “not seeming Catholic enough.”
Though Mary agrees to have a drink with him, Jake’s attempt at romance does not go well. First, he misrepresents his job, calling himself a debt counsellor. He soon realizes the futililty of this untruth. “That’s the thing about when you lie. If they don’t believe you, you despise yourself; if they do believe you, you despise them.” Later, alone in his bed, Jake listens to “the helicopters chuckling comfortingly as they hovered over all those Catholics out west.” The ominous sound that drove Sarah back to England is one which always helped him sleep as a child.
Yet, as the opening line promises, “All stories are love stories.” The bromance centres around narrator Jake and his Protestant pal Chuckie Lurgan. There’s also the minor mystery of the “new graffito on the wall beside the police station.” OTG is painted in white in letters a metre high, seeming to vie with “the usual stuff of both sides: IRA, INLA, UVF, UFF, UDA, IPLO,” and the ruder FTP and FTQ (if you object to bad language, don’t ask).
The author takes us into a world where certain expectations must be met. Jake doesn’t like his friends to surprise him — “that’s not what they’re for.” And Chuckie’s single mum, though her son feels a prescient dread that she will one day “make her mark,” maintains her disguise as an “archetypal working-class Protestant Belfast mother.” She deviates from her doppelgangers along Eureka Street and Sandy Row neither by “an inch of her headscarf nor a fibre of the slippers in which she shopped.”
Belfast is “like a necropolis.” Coffee jar bombs are a craze, a “wheeze,” a “caper,” and taxi-drivers have suddenly become fashionable victims. Even so, Jake feels the bombs are “no big deal,” explaining that “we used to be much more scared” following “the biggests blasts in the seventies (recently revived for a successful season.)” When his doorbell rings after midnight, before opening up, he has to overcome the fear of seeing “two men in bomber jackets with Browning automatics standing at my door with sincere political objectives.''
Jakes refuses to give up on Belfast and he doesn’t give up on love. Not even when he agrees to go on a double date with his friend, only to find himself in the company of a rabid Republican girl with the “impervious faith of the bourgeois zealot.”
Nor does the course of Chuckie’s love run smooth. He once dreamed modestly of buying Ireland — "a fine old country, recently partitioned, in need of minor political repair.” Instead, he falls in love with an American and finds himself obliged to travel to the terrifying US cities of New York and San Diego. Belfast seems tame by comparison.
Political trouble drags on, and Jake continues to hide the fact that he’s Catholic from his Protestant workmates. When “a lot of South Belfast’s concerned classes” organize a peace train “as a protest against all the IRA bombs that had been planted on the Belfast to Dublin line,” the train barely gets out of the city before it is stopped due to another bomb threat. It takes the protesters most of the day to get back to town.
Meanwhile, Jake observes the tragicomic nature of his country’s civil war. “The comedy was that the Northern Ireland (Scottish) Protestants thought themselves like the British. Northern Ireland (Irish) Catholics thought themselves like the Eireans (proper Irish).” In reality, “any once-strong difference had long since melted away and they resembled no one now as much as they resembled each other. “ Belfast, he says, persists in a special kind of “lumbering hatred that could survive comfortably on the memories of things that never existed in the first place.” Grudgingly, he admires the stamina in that.
Waiting to get back to Belfast after the doomed peace march, Jake is once more overcome by a romantic impulse. This time the attraction is a fellow demonstrator. With his heart “so full and his mind so empty,” he convinces himself that she’s “the kind of girl I would die for.” After the repeated rejections of Sarah, Mary, Aioghe and the others, his self-esteem is so low that he believes if Rachel said anything too nice, he’d “lick her hand and fetch sticks for her.”
But it is not to be. Instead, he is left alone, to brood about his native city, “where people are prepared to kill and die for a few pieces of coloured cloth.” He accepts that there are divisions. “Some call it religion, some call it politics. But the most reliable, the most ubiquitous division is money… You see leafy streets and…leafless ones,” and can imagine “leafy lives and leafless ones.” Yet he does not lose heart. Though the earth of Belfast ”is richly sown with its many dead,” its surface is also “thick with its living citizens” and “a repository of stories.”
Indeed, it is one of the living stories of Belfast — the tale of Roche the street urchin — that changes Jake. He in turn reveals the boy’s plight to a woman who is also changed. This moment of flexibility, of potential, brings them unexpectedly together.
As the author has promised on page one, this is a love story. That love is not limited to the happy endings for Jake and Chuckie, or other friends who pair off, including Chuckie’s mother. We are party here to the love the author feels for his deeply flawed home city, and for the love of language that enables him to portray so very well the conundrum of civil war with its mad human contraditions. When all is said and done, “the frail and the harmable have to be loved.”