Ripley Bogle: A Novel - Softcover

Wilson, Robert McLiam

3.8

829 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1611458900 ISBN 13: 9781611458909

Publisher: Arcade, 2014

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Ripley Bogle, one of the most memorable Irish characters since Leopold Bloom roamed Dublin, is a self-proclaimed bum, an excoriating and expectorating Irish expatriate from Belfast, and a Cambridge dropout. Penniless but unbowed, he wanders the streets of London, treating the reader to the ruminations of his teeming, romping imagination. Here lies the mystery and wonder of this book: How could anyone of Bogle’s prodigious intelligence and powers of perception end up in vagabondage?

Winner of the Irish Book Award, Ripley Bogle spreads before us a fabulous beggar’s banquet: a running commentary of bawdy brilliance and dyspeptic hilarity. No cow is too sacred for Bogle. After acquainting us with his birth and family ( the usual cast from subhuman Gaelic scumbuckets”), he relives his past ( the bathetic dribble of error and reparation”), describes his first experiences with love ( the silken clock that backs the witless levitation of the penis”), and analyzes his Irishness ( crap promoted by Americans and professors of English literature”). Though he gnaws at the fringes of society, Bogle’s keen mind can skewer its fat heart.

Chain-smoking his way around London, young Bogle looks to stitch together the pieces of his ragged life to forgive himself his sins and to find a place of warmth within his own dark thoughts.

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Review:

"I am twenty-one years old, my name is Ripley Bogle and my occupations are starving, freezing, and weeping hysterically." So announces the eponymous narrator of this alternately hilarious and horrifying novel by the Irish writer Robert McLiam Wilson, author of Eureka Street. Ripley Bogle is a Cambridge dropout from Northern Ireland who's fallen down on his luck. Having alienated everyone he knows--seemingly including the entire population of Cambridge--he disrupts an old girlfriend's wedding, attacks his landlord, and finds himself unceremoniously chucked out onto the street. The narrative follows this handsome vagrant for four chilly June days while he wanders London, ranting and reminiscing in heady stream-of-consciousness prose. Reared amid the poverty and violence of Belfast, Bogle doesn't have a kind word for anyone or anything, including his family ("the usual cast list of subhuman Gaelic scumbuckets") and his countrymen ("As a people we're a shambles; as a nation--a disgrace; as a culture we're a bore ... individually we're often repellent"). What he does have is a great Joycean roar of a voice and a prodigious talent for self-destruction. Bogle can try the reader's patience: some of his tirades read like tragicomic howls of pain, others like pure postadolescent gross-out. The novel's end takes a still nastier turn; even after Bogle's unrelentingly grim portrait of life on the London streets, his concluding confessions manage to shock. Ugliness aside, the sheer wattage of Wilson's prose carries the day, and his narrative has all the momentum--and the queasy fascination--of a car accident in progress. --Mary Park

From the Author:

Robert McLiam Wilson was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1966. He studied English at Cambridge University, but dropped out to write Ripley Bogle. His works has won numerous awards, including the Rooney Prize and the Hughes Prize. In 2003, Wilson was named as one of the Best Young British Novelists” by Granta.

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