JAKE is not happy. Since his English girlfriend left him and Belfast - six months previously, daily life has degenerated into a war of attrition with his cat and the shame of working in what he refers to as "the repossession industry". He doesn't like his job. "My colleagues were very basic human beings indeed. Crab was big, fat and ugly. Hally was big, fat, ugly and vicious. I tried not to hate people. Hating people was too tiring. But sometimes, just sometimes, it was hard." Robert McLiam Wilson allows his confident third novel, Eureka Street (Secker, £15.99 in UK), to begin its campaign through lake's disgruntled voice.
It is a bit risky to present the reader with another fiercely articulate, vulnerable loser with a conscience whose grasp of street argot is matched by equally fluent middle class student rhetoric and moments of lyricism. At no time could we mistake the good looking, lonely lake, who drives a car called "The Wreck", for a natural down and out. He has merely fallen through circumstance in his case, romantic despair. Of course, he studied politics and philosophy.
Sounds a bit like the eponymous hero of his first novel, Ridley Boyle, doesn't it? Yes and no. Jake is not quite as hellishly clever as Ripley, nor is he, as yet, as damned. McLiam Wilson's hilarious debut dazzled by sheer force of language; it was funny and brutal. Eureka Street is funny and brutal and a lot more. Its author is now experienced enough to know when to turn from lake's monologue and take up a third person narrative which allows both his plot and his other characters space to develop, with occasional, polemical asides delivered in the second person singular.
This proves a wise move. Jake's voice could not have carried this long novel. Catholic lake is intent on telling us a lot about his home town, often appearing an uncomfortably self conscious mouthpiece, launching into speeches such as: "Under the circumstances, Belfast was a pretty famous place. When you considered that it was the underpopulated capital of a minor province, the world seemed to know it excessively well. Nobody needed to be told the reasons for this excessive fame. I didn't know much about Beirut until the artillery moved in. Who'd heard of Saigon before it blew its lid? Was Anzio a town, a village or just a stretch of beach? Where was Agincourt exactly?"
Anyhow, for a man who appears to know women and just about everything else, lake is currently reduced to insulting his cat. McLiam Wilson shifts his focus to fat, unemployed Chuckie Lurgan, another man approaching 30 and "tired of the incoherence of his life ... On this momentous Monday, he was walking the long walk from Four Winds because he had concluded that he was too old to ride on the bus any more." Just as lake dreams of finding a replacement girlfriend, Chuckie fantasises about making his fortune. Through the scrambled thoughts of "double chinned, double Protestant" Chuckie, a vivid sense of Belfast is quickly built up, as is his tragic relationship with his mother. Chuckie, we are told, "had been ashamed of his mother ever since he could remember. Shame was, perhaps, the wrong word. His mother provoked a constant low level anxiety in him. Inexplicably, he had feared the something he could not name that she might do. Since he had been fourteen years old, Chuckie bad lived in quiet dread of his mother making his mark."
For a city novel which may appear to be a predictable comic rant populated by stereotypes, Eitreka Street often surprises. Chuckie's mother is not a carpet slippered monster. Although she does shop in slippers, she emerges as a gentle, disappointed character obsessed with Sixties music and her distant night of glory, clinging mini skirted atop a fleeding pop star's car. Chuckie himself soon becomes an improbable but likable hero, an engaging variation of Martin Amis's John Self in Money (1984). In fact, if there is a detectable influence in this novel it is that of Amis junior.
The Amis comic sequences help temper lake's ironic rhetoric:
it was briefly good to be doing what I was doing. Driving to my hard day's toil. In my big boots, my artisan's shirt and my rough trousers I felt dignified, I felt worthy, I felt like the nineteen thirties. Then I remembered what I did for a living." Jake's self disgust is closely tied to self love, and ensures that even if he doesn't convince, he is amusing. "Before Sarah, I'd sometimes earned my living by fighting people, hitting people or by just looking like I might do any of those things. Bouncer, bodyguard, general frightener, all purpose yob, I had had the full range." And Eureka Street is above all a violent, angry, busy, living book.
Belfast comes to life here. As the narrative alternates between lake's reports and the wider, third person sequences, the characters frequently meet up to talk, drink, argue and be frightened together - united by their shared - histories. Every girl who appears might be just the one lake is looking for. Meanwhile, Chuckie finds an unlikely partner in an American girl with her own share of horrors to forget.
The novel becomes a picaresque with Chuckie the self created tycoon travelling to America in search of his girl. Elsewhere, an innocent shopping expedition ends with horrific consequences for a young girl and several other customers at a Belfast sandwich bar. "She turned to murmur some thanks and stopped existing."
All the while McLiam Wilson is portraying ordinary life taking place against a backdrop of madness and fear: "Throughout the city, bunches of flowers lie . . . the citizens have placed these flowers on the spots where other citizens have been murdered."
As stated at the outset, Eureka Street is a novel of surprises. There are some shortcomings: it is too long and, as with most Shakespearean comedies, some of the plot outcomes are detectable long before the closing pages. Still, as a comic novel of Belfast now, this is stylish, funny, black and memorable, with Booker contender written all over it.
