Ripley Bogle

by Robert McLiam Wilson

Book Overview

Ripley Bogle, one of the most memorable Irish characters since Leopold Bloom roamed Dublin, is a self-proclaimed bum, an excoriating and expectorating Irish expatriate from Belfast, and a Cambridge... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345430948
• ISBN13: 9780345430946
• Release Date: February 2000
• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Ireland for realists.

Robert Mcliam Wilson is, in my humble opinion, the great Irish writer of our age, joining the likes of other Irish notables James Joyce and Cathal Ó Sándair. Ripley Bogle, while a step down from the splintering tale that was Eureka Street (a personal favorite of mine), is still worth a read or two. It features the life of the title character - a quick-witted, borderline-genius who goes from a precocious Cambridge student to a homeless roamer in little to no time. He is handsome, sardonic, and as we read we find that he, like Jake Jackson from Eureka Street, also has become numb to the constant violence and political turmoil that surrounds him. Some have compared Bogle to 'The Catcher in the Rye's' Holden Caulfield, but I think Bogle acts as his own man and to compare them quickly proves hollow once you read Ripley Bogle. What I like most about Wilson is that he intertwines poetry, wit and humor into even the most disturbing of events - like the betrayal and death of a best friend at the hands of the I.R.A. - and he does the trick again here in Ripley Bogle. Wilson has yet to grasp the due credit for his work because he paints Ireland with a brush that is honest and real, without the romanticism that Americans love to read about. The New York Times at one point even refused him an endorsement, saying his books were not Irish enough. Wilson responded by saying he knew what Ireland was due to the fact he's lived there all of his life. I highly recommend both Ripley Bogle and Eureka Street to anyone curious enough to deploy some reading about Ireland as seen through possibly its greatest writer of our day.

buy this book now

robert mcliam wilson dropped out of college to live on the street and write this book, and i think it's safe to say that was a brilliant move. ripley bogle makes almost none of the mistakes first-time-novelists tend to make. it stretches the intellect of the reader, the author, and of bogle himself. this (along with wilson's second novel, eureka street) is among the best books written by my generation. if you think all the great literary masters are dead and gone, you're sadly mistaken. you should read ripley bogle. your friends should read it. and everyone else you know, for that matter, should read it too.

Thank God, a writer who WRITES!

McLiam Wilson shows his youth in this first novel, but his Dickensian attention to detail is usually a thrill to behold. I'm so sick of writing being a by-the-way of telling stories. Though not without the wit present in Eureka Street, the operative adjective here is "beautiful:" every word is where it should be, every sentence is in its rightful place, and the book leaves one thinking of the author, "how does he DO that?" For readers who want to read a book written using language to benefit a plot instead of just convey it, Ripley Bogle is a godsend. The end will make your jaw drop.

As good as Eureka Street

I was simply astonished by the fact that he was this good at the start. Ripley Bogle is no worse than Eureka Street, although maybe a little more juvenile. It does not have the happy end of Eureka Street, and it is much more cynical, in the way young and precocious writers often are. However, as literature it is even more innovative than Eureka Street, and often it feels much more immediate and honest.

Great Book, Great Author, reality at it's fictitious best

1 Ripley Bogle is a novel based on one character (Ripley Bogle) and his battle with life. It is written entirely in the first person and so the view of life we get is all through Bogle's eyes. He is now a tramp living in London. Robert McLiam Wilson writes the novel in the present with Bogle sharing his past experiences with the reader as well as making you share the boredom of a tramp's life. I want to focus on Ripley Bogle because he is clearly the most obvious character and is wonderfully created. I find him fascinating because Wilson creates Bogle as if he was a real person. So while reading the book you feel like you are being privileged to share an insider's view of Bogle's life. Wilson pulls it off so well that you never feel that there is an author. You feel are reading a diary or having a dialogue between you and Bogle. Wilson is Irish. This brings a believable dimension to Bogle who is also Irish. With all the current trouble in Northern Ireland, Wilson is one of the few writers who cuts through the political correctness to create a true representation of a certain Irish lifestyle. He gets away with it because when he makes jokes or controversial suggestions about the Irish he also directs them at himself. Bogle had a very hard childhood in Belfast. He describes himself as an, "Eponymous Bastard," which sums up the unrealistic nature of his life almost like a play and at the same time the harshness. The novel starts with him describing his own birth in the third person. This sets the scene for the quirky nature of the book to follow. He writes, "Unnamed and ugly, he makes little impression on that world room. An augury of his river catching life." His use of language and word choice clearly shows that he views his entrance into the world as a misfortune. `Unnamed' suggests a lack of identity and care, his mother was a prostitute and didn't have much time for her children. `Ugly' as if the world had already decided he wasn't going to have an easy time of it and `augury' continues this looking to the future struggles an omen for what is to follow. Moving from his birth, we are now with Bogle on the streets of London. It very quickly becomes apparent that Bogle is a clever person. His word choice and the images he uses portray him as an intelligent thinker. He says of June, "Only we the destitute know the Siberian truth about an English June. We are its allies its confidants. We are on first name terms with its frozen frosty grip." I think his positioning of the word `Siberian' is clever because it conveys the coldness but also exaggerates the word `truth', as if we have all been fooled that June is a summer month. `Allies' and `confidants' convey the struggle for survival like a battle. Finally his use of alliteration `frozen frosty' adds poetry and hints at a good education. Because Wilson allows Bogle to describe himself we do not get a good 2single physical account or a summary