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Abstract
Robert McLiam Wilson has become one of the most influential literary voices to emerge from Northern Ireland since the Troubles began, and he has challenged the understanding of contemporary Irishness. His novels are gritty, acerbic and he constructs images of Belfast that are as startling as they are affectionate. Both Ripley Bogle (1989) and Eureka Street (1996) involve characters from broken families who, in spite of sectarian violence around them, find emotional support from unlikely individuals. Failure of parenting is a persistent motif in McLiam Wilson, but so too is the triumph of love because the protagonists of Ripley Bogle and Eureka Street both turn to unlikely individuals for guidance. Although traditional parenting fails, pseudo-adoptive parents mollify both Ripley Bogle and Jake Jackson by granting them support and love.
Notes
1. CitationMills, ‘“All Stories Are Love Stories”’, 76.
2. Robert CitationMcLiam Wilson, ‘Baseball Bats and a Brutal Endgame’, 5.
3. CitationMcLiam Wilson, Ripley Bogle, 14. All other references will be from this edition and cited parenthetically in the body of the article.
4. CitationHughes, ‘Town of Shadows’, 142.
5. Eamonn Hughes makes this connection as well and he links it to Bogle's belief that Belfast is diseased and corrupt (‘Town of Shadows’, 147), especially when Bogle states: ‘Yes, mine was a shitty city, leprous and not too pretty’ (161).
6. CitationCrewe, ‘Biting the Bullet’, 18.
7. CitationJackson, ‘Gender, Violence and Hybridity’, 229.
8. CitationJeffers, The Irish Novel at the End of the Twentieth Century, 137.
9. This is a typical experience for the homeless in London and, according to Sarah Lonsdale as she paraphrases Robert CitationMcLiam Wilson, ‘most young street people go through an almost identical experience, six weeks of rootlessness and confusion before they are adopted by the more experienced roofless, who teach them how to survive’. CitationLonsdale, ‘Cold Comfort of Joyless Homeless’, 8.
10. Jeffers, The Irish Novel at the End of the Twentieth Century, 138.
11. CitationSmyth, The Novel and the Nation, 133.
12. Abortion is a central motif in CitationMcLiam Wilson's work. Fearing the responsibility of parenthood, many of his protagonists disallow the possibility of childrearing before it even begins (as we have seen, Bogle himself aborts his own child). In Eureka Street, Sarah flees for England not just because it is where she was raised, which is a return to childhood in itself, but also because abortions are illegal in Northern Ireland. Even though the Abortion Act of 1967 granted all British women the right to such procedures under the National Health Service, governmental funding has never included Northern Ireland. Thus, Sarah had to leave in order to get an abortion.
13. CitationMcLiam Wilson, Eureka Street, 24. All other references will be from this edition and cited parenthetically in the body of the article.
14. The event is almost certainly drawn from the Abercorn Restaurant bombing which occurred on Saturday 4 March 1972, and resulted in four deaths and 130 injuries. As a matter of further interest, Castle Lane (where the Abercorn was located) is contiguous off Fountain Street, which means that the location of this fictional bombing is deliberate. McLiam Wilson wants us to think of the Abercorn.
15. CitationCleary, ‘“Fork-tongued on the Border Bit”’, 241.
16. A point that McLiam Wilson makes again when he states: ‘In Belfast, sticks and stones may break your bones but names will blow you to pieces on a regular basis.’ McLiam Wilson, ‘Sticks and Stones’, 136.
17. CitationKirkland, ‘Bourgeois Redemptions’, 215.
18. McLiam Wilson, ‘The Dreamed’, 303. All other references will be from this article and cited parenthetically.