Amazon.com 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
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Winner of Britain's Betty Trask Prize, this first novel by a 26-year-old Belfast native is both a delight and a letdown. The eponymous narrator is a decrepit young vagrant who wanders the Dickensian night streets of contemporary London as he spouts this tale to You, the reader. His story, which parallels the author's history in some ways, explains his current circumstances. A child prodigy from Belfast slums who ascends to Cambridge before dropping out, Bogle is erudite yet deliberately crude. "Two years ago I was munching pheasant in oaken chambers brimming with the gentry and now I'm licking the lichens off London's lavatory walls." Before the narrative is done, he has confessed to several deceptions, and leaves us, having provided more epigrams than explanations. Wilson's neo-Joycean language and word play can be effective, but are more often intrusive. This rowdy, boisterous and often vividly shocking story is above all a self-conscious mass of words. There is true brilliance here, and there are rewarding moments for the patient reader, but the author's self-indulgence and peacockish prose are ultimately distancing.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
