A write unlike any other

THE last time Robert Wilson was publicising one of his novels, he was not a happy writer: he despised Manfred's Pain, the novel he was gamely expected to eulogise, and was perfectly happy to say so. Perhaps it was a clever marketing ploy, but the fact that he and his publisher promptly, and acrimoniously, went separate ways, indicated that perhaps some of his kamikaze interview technique had been founded on a genuine distaste for the finished book, and four his publishers.

Eureka Street, his new novel, has been four years coming, and is a startling contrast to both the exquisitely hewn portrait of human suffering that formed Manfred's Pain and the precocious linguistic debutity of Ripley Bogle, the novel that first brought him to attention. Fortuitously, after four years work, Eureka Street is a novel he is glad to promote, and more pertinently, to have written.

The new work is, according to its cover, "a novel of Ireland like no other" and, whatever of its content, its author would seem unlike any other writer in Ireland. The kind of novelist that Elle journalists fight over to profile, his past has been well chronicled, kicked out of home at 16 followed by a move from the Turf Lodge, and the heart of working class Belfast, to university at Cambridge: throwing in college to write his first novel, living rough in both London and Belfast an ideally mythological background for any writer, and one made all the more so by the fact that Wilson genuinely lived it, and to some degree, fictionalised it for all to read in Ripley Bogle.

Wilson created a cameo role for Ripley in the new novel, as a down and out in Belfast making a fortune out of the ceasefire by giving multi lingual tours of the former trouble spots to foreign TV crews: "I only really brought him back in because I was dying to use that line about the Blue Peter garden, you know. I love cheap laughs That line about Star Trek and Irish is one of my, favourites in the whole book.

The novel is set almost entirely in Belfast, and is Wilson's personal tribute to the city. What goes on in this place really angers me sometimes, the punishment beatings, the way these thugs heat the crap out of kids for joy riding and if they can't get the right kid, they'll knee cap his brother instead. That rally pisses me off. I write about it in the novel. I've just made this documentary about the baseball beatings, and had to run down a corridor after Gerry Adams asking him questions about the attacks, I felt like such a moron, because he was surrounded by all these heavies."

Wilson's choice of name for the republican politician in Eureka Street, Jimmy Eve, doesn't particularly tax his reader's knowledge of the bible. The author's condemnation of hard core republicanism is absolute, and strongly colours, though never controls, the novel - parody and particularly acerbic satire are more common vehicles for his disdain than outright editorialising. He is unafraid of the potential consequences of either his depiction of paramilitary activities in the novel, or the documentary's investigation into those who order the punishment attacks.

"I'm not so worried about threats or the reaction in Belfast - I do expect a lot of hassle, though, in Britain about the politics of the novel. I find nationalism and socialism totally - incompatable and I think Sinn Fein is a fascist organisation. I think the same of the unionists. Six months ago I would have been savaged in Britain for the riot scene in the novel, and yet look at what happened at Drumcree and what that did to the North. I remember I made this documentary for Canadian TV a while back, it was basically me poncing around the place, but in it I said I didn't think there would ever be a ceasefire - that should win the Salman Rushdie award for prescience. But even when it did happen, the punishment beatings never stopped."

WHILE Wilson's anger - at the shanty town tribal laws that regulate the city resonates throughout the book, Belfast remains its most consummately drawn character. He writes of it with the indulgent zeal of a man smitten by the ugliest girl in the room. Chapter ten is a prose, poem to its grime and its bitter history, its mountains and innate understanding of its people: Belfast is a city that has lost its heart. A ship building, rope making, linen weaving town. It builds no ships, makes no rope and weaves no linen. Those trades died. A city can't live without something to do with itself.

The city is a repository of narratives of stories. Present tense, past tense, or future. The city is a novel".

"I wanted to cut that in the end, but the publishers insisted it should stay. I am very fond of Belfast, though I wasn't always.

So recognisable are the characters he lines up for attack, and his depiction of actual political developments - the Lee Clegg case - for example - that the novel's carefully wrought thematic matrices risk being forgotten to years down the line. The fact that he has written such an overtly contemporary novel does not concern him. "All the great 19th century literature, Dickens, Tolstoy, Hugo. . . was very contemporary in its time, very clearly set in specified societies and eras, and it has endured, so I'm not worried about it really." There is little fear that he will ever underestimate his own stature either.

Wilson cites Hugo as a discernible influence in the book. "I pay homage to him in a few ways. The child character, Roche, is modelled partly on a kid I know who is exactly like that, very quick witted and clever, but the character is also a homage to Gavroche in Les Miserables, right down to taking the last letters of his name to form Roche. The riot scene is also directly from Hugo. I wouldn't say it was plagiarising, homage covers it pretty well."

Homage of a less flattering sort comes out in Wilson's portrayal in the novel of a poet who is lauded internationally, awarded a major prize, and whose verse runs along the lines of ". . . I blahhed her blah with the heft of my spade/The wet blah blahhed along the lines of the country with/all the blah of the blah blah blackberries."

Wilson smiles when we come round to this. "Let's just say I wrote it before any Irish poet won a very large international prize. I find that kind of poetry strange. "I'm from the city, and when I "eventually went out to a farm, the farmers were all on mobiles, and heading down to the video shop to get the latest Sharon Stone film. There was none of this tadpole stuff at all." I suggest that there's more, to the collected poems than Just tadpoles, if we are talking about the same poet (nothing on the record indicates actual names). He shrugs. I've been teaching at Coleraine, on a creative writing course and they find it funny that he is regarded so highly. Mostly they think he's crap."

Wilson's dislikes are mostly equally strong. Milan Kundera, is "an idiot writer". The Guardian is an "absolutely evil" newspaper. At the time of the Shankill killings, The Guardian said it was all part of the price to be paid for peace. For Christ's sake: what a reprehensible thing to print, completely irresponsbile. Neither was he particularly taken by his teaching experiences - "Thank f... I'm out of there. I counted the number of students I was, supposed to have slept with, in all kinds of positions there were over 60, all these students I'd never seen or met or known . . ."

He has also, at this point, heard some, criticism levelled at the book's female characters, that they are one dimensional. When I argue that, it's not far from the truth, he listens politely and then dismisses it entirely. All characters are one dimensional, they're in a book after all.

HE DOESN'T really involve himself in literary circles at least not in Ireland, though he shares a curious cat minding routine with Glenn Patterson and Will Self. The things he enjoys considerably outweigh those he doesn't - Belfast, Rushdie's Shame his friends, writing, cigarettes, his privacy, Camus, and probably the fact that he has signed a two book deal with Secker for £105,000, as well as having just sold the German rights to Eureka Street for half that again. He is currently working on two further books one a non fiction work on human rights, the other a novel about a Czech astronomer, of which he estimates he has around a hundred pages drafted.

All the inherent dangers in publishing a novel as astounding as Ripley Bogie at the edge of 25 were carefully neutralised with Manfred's Pain, whatever its author thought of it in the end. With Eureka Street, Wilson enters another manifestation altogether, one in which he successfully manipulates a whole Shakespearean melodrama into a novel in which a city is the comic hero. Wilson has no illusions about his gifts, but what seemed precocious seven years ago has mellowed into a heady, laid back, intensity that informs his writing with a sense of vision that is rare in contemporary European fiction. Thankfully Victor Hugo's legacy is no longer just merely playing along to a tune from that musical, somewhere across the world.