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“Woof, woof, the dogs are barking. The tramps are arriving into town.” Such is the epigraph of Ripley Bogle, the temperamental autobiography of a superb and cynical fibber. Recently expelled from Cambridge, “RipleyIrishEnglisBogle”, seems to have reached a step in his life, and comes back on the events which have led him up to roam in the cold and damp London streets. After a chaotic childhood in Ireland which has changed him into an arrogant drunkard, and leaving the corpses of a father, a friend an a child behind him, he goes away from his native island, but “Even in the back of beyond, we always dig up a small corner of ever- lasting Ireland”

With a lot of Flash-backs and digressions, Robert McLiam Wilson spins the chronicle bathed, in black humour of a Celestial bum. Nothing is more Irish than lying. The only thing is when the Irish lie, they call that to create a myth. And the Irish myth is something the writer knows about, as he has spent his youth in the same way as the character, between a torn and violent Ireland and an austere and vain Cambridge.