Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other - Softcover

Wilson, Robert McLiam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1628724374 ISBN 13: 9781628724370

Publisher: Arcade, 2015

Synopsis

When your street address can either save your life or send it up the creek, there’s no telling what kind of daily challenges you’ll face in the era of the Northern Irish Troubles.

All stories are love stories,” begins Eureka Street, Robert McLiam Wilson’s big-hearted and achingly funny novel. Set in Belfast during the Troubles, Eureka Street takes us into the lives and families of Chuckie Lurgan and Jake Jackson, a Protestant and a Catholic unlikely pals and staunch allies in an uneasy time. When a new work of graffiti begins to show up throughout the city OTG” the locals are stumped. The harder they try to decipher it, the more it reflects the passions and paranoias that govern and divide them.

Chuckie and Jake are as mystified as everyone else. In the meantime, they try to carve out lives for themselves in the battlefield they call home. Chuckie falls in love with an American who is living in Belfast to escape the violence in her own land; the best Jake can do is to get into a hilarious and remorseless war of insults with a beautiful but spitfire Republican whose Irish name, properly pronounced, sounds to him like someone choking.

The real love story in Eureka Street involves Belfast the city’s soul and spirit, and its will to survive the worst it can do to itself.

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About this title

Review

Romantic Ireland is definitely dead and gone. With the exhilarating Eureka Street, Robert McLiam Wilson cheerfully and obscenely sends it to its grave. Jake Jackson, his thoughtful anti-hero, finds Belfast's tragedies are built on comedy: Catholics and Protestants so intent on declaring their differences "resembled no one now as much as they resembled each other.... That was what I liked about Belfast hatred. It was a lumbering hatred that could survive completely on the memories of things that never existed in the first place." He spends a certain amount of time worrying about seeming too Catholic and an equal amount worrying about not seeming sufficiently Catholic. Sometimes, after several drinks, Jake forgets that he's not a Protestant. Each position is as dangerous, and absurd, as the other. His best friend is less torn up. Chuckie Lurgan is a chubby Methodist whose only accomplishments so far have been shaking Reagan's hand, appearing in the same photo as the Pope, and having "an intense and troubling relationship with mail-order catalogues." But Chuckie suddenly surprises Jake with his first entrepreneurial scheme. Though he's placed an ad for an enormous sex toy in Northern Ireland's "only mucky paper," he hasn't any intention of ever fulfilling an order. Instead, he follows legal protocol and sends each disappointed customer a refund check, in the proper amount, stamped GIANT DILDO REFUND. The gamble is that most people will be too embarrassed to cash them. "Chuckie smiled the smile of the just-published poet." And soon he has more than 40,000 pounds in the bank and a lust for big money. He also has a rich, new girlfriend: "He hoped his dreams wouldn't suffer from all this reality."

Jake is more preoccupied with the day-to-day. His construction site job gives him ample opportunity to consider his romantic failures and the ever-present symbols of war. There's also a new graffito that has sprouted among the various deadly acronyms. IRA, UVF, and UDA make no more sense than OTG, but at least everyone knows what they stand for. OTG becomes a puzzle to all of Belfast--is it, the authorities wonder, a new terrorist group? (Jake also notes several other phrases, FTP, FTQ, and FTNP--the "T" stands for the and "P" and "Q" for Pope and Queen. The "N" is for Next.) Despite his love for Belfast, Jake loses heart with its zealots and fanatics and, halfway through, Eureka Street threatens to slide into windy bathos. It's only a momentary lapse amid energetic, colloquial poetry and comic realism.

From the Author

Robert McLiam Wilson dropped out of Cambridge University to write novels. His work has won the Rooney Prize and the Irish Book Award, and has been short-listed for the Whitbread Award. In 2003, he was named as one of the Best Young British Novelists by Granta.

Edition details

• Publisher: Arcade
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1628724374
• ISBN 13: 9781628724370
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 400