Zigzagging Down Belfast’s Perilous Streets

A mysterious figure dressed in black prowls Belfast by night painting “OTG” on the walls. Northern Ireland’s capital has been, all but forever, a city of warring graffiti: IRA and INLA for the armed bands on the Nationalist, or Catholic, side; UDF, UVF and UFF for the Loyalist, or Protestant, militants.

“The city keeps its walls like a diary,” writes the Irish novelist Robert McLiam Wilson in his angry satire on the endemic conflict. The OTGs are an anti-diary. The dauber, it turns out, is no real person but a spirit: the spirit of sanity.

Specifically--and this is the thesis of “Eureka Street”--it is the spirit of the mute majority on each side, cowed less by the guns of minority extremists than by their narratives: two separate and impacted histories in which force is honor; honor, force; and compromise is betrayal.

Where the militants’ graffiti are virulently specific, OTG can mean anything at all: “Order The Gammon,” “Octogenarians Tote Guns,” “One Titular Gesture.” Freedom, in other words, to stand for whoever you want to be and to have your own story. A multiplicity of stories--one for each person in Northern Ireland--is the flag that Wilson raises against the tyranny of the two extremist narratives that began in confrontation and have mutated into lethal complicity.

The book’s most arresting section briefly tells a few of the stories. There is Rosemary Daye on her lunch hour, luxuriating in the afterglow of a love affair that started the previous night. Stopping off at a sandwich shop, Wilson writes, she “stopped existing.” A young man in a green suit smiles and holds the door, hoping for a flirtation, before he too stops existing.

Eight-year-old Natalie Crawford, her sister, Liz, and their mother, Margaret--who had stomped out of a quarrel with her soon-to-be eternally regretting husband to take the girls for a sandwich--all stop existing.

Kevin McCafferty, serving sandwiches and dreaming of being famous and on television, stops existing.

He also gets on television. A hundred-pound bomb has gone off, leaving 17 dead. As the latest installment of one of the two deadly stories, it extinguishes all the others.

Wilson’s image for the Northern Ireland’s tragedy--a diversity of living stories held at ransom by two dead ones--is suggestive and compelling. (So is his feeling for Belfast itself; few others have written of its stony, bony, recalcitrant charm.) But in his advocacy of stories, unfortunately, the author is awkward at telling one.

The insights of “Eureka Street”--named rather grandly for Archimedes’ cry of discovery--are hung on the loosely written tale of Jake, a Catholic, and his best friend, Chuckie, a Protestant. Neither has the slightest sympathy for the warring bands; each deals with the Situation, as it is called, as with a case of bad weather and tries as best he can to figure out his own complicated life.

Jake, a bit of a thug but good-hearted, quits his job as a repo man when his malevolent co-gorillas dump an old woman out of her invalid bed and beat up her protesting husband. He is mainly concerned with finding someone to love; his standards are impractically high.

Chuckie, stout and cuddly, has remarkable success with women. He ends up, sexily and devotedly, with Max, a well-born, well-to-do American ex-hippie. Years earlier, her father, an internationally renowned peacemaker and conciliator, was shot dead the moment he set foot in Belfast. It was a rare, though not unprecedented, act of cooperation between the armed men on both sides.

After drifting amiably for years, Chuckie strikes gold. There is a lot of money available from Britain, the Irish Republic and the United States, on the principle, perhaps, of dosing troubled waters with quantities of oil. Chuckie finds the spigot: a series of farfetched ideas--importing sweaters from Romania and exporting them as Irish, selling twigs abroad as leprechaun’s walking sticks--are lavishly financed.

One or two of the schemes are witty, but for the most part Wilson’s humor is lazily farfetched. His satire can be trowel-thick. Gerry Adams features as Jimmy Eve, darling of television and American politicians and an inveterate liar. What would be fine for a polemic can be troublesome in a novel; if you believe Adams is a con man, it’s legitimate to say so, but a novelist plays God and risks abusing his power. A caricature of Seamus Heaney as the vain and opportunistic poet Shague Ghinthoss is plain offensive.

The author’s belief in the multiplicity of story works as a theme, but it lets “Eureka Street” zigzag disconnectedly. Several of the characters and episodes seem to have wandered in from two or three other books. As for this one, its seriousness is often marred by a lyrical self-indulgence, and a good deal of the comedy is not so much written as brainstormed.