Bodies of Evidence: Cities and Stories in Robert McLiam Wilson's Eureka Street and Irvine Welsh's Filth (original) (raw)

The city's surface is thick with its living citizens. Its earth is richly sown with its many dead. The city is a repository of narratives, of stories. Present tense, past tense or future. The city is a novel. Cities are simple things. They are the conglomerations of people. Cities are complex things. They are the geographical and emotional distillations of whole nations. What makes a place a city has little to do with size. It has to do with the speed at which its citizens walk, the cut of their clothes, the sound of their shouts. But most of all, cities are the meeting places of stories. The men and women there are narratives, endlessly complex and intriguing.