He began to compile a list of what he saw. The words weren't inspired graffiti. They weren't the poetry and pathos photographed and commented on by two young Londoners to make up a book at a couple of guineas. They weren't political or surrealist, they weren't witty or comic. They were only the monotonous evidence of a civic battology. […] He became obsessed with the unending defacement of the city. He was angry nobody seemed to care, nobody did anything about it. The correspondence columns of the papers were filled with debates about the need for comprehensive schools and the technological education in a twentieth-century Britain, about the duty of adults to hand on a moral code and maintain the nation's cultural heritage, about the prevalence of bad language in television plays. But never a word about the writing on the wall 1

The two novels I have chosen to present come from different parts of the United Kingdom. They both take place in major cities but there is a one generation gap between them and they also display disparate socio-cultural backgrounds. However, despite these obvious differences, both novels share many similarities which can be summed up by the title of my paper and by the title of the SAES conference. 'Writing on the wall' -or 'walls' -is indeed at the heart of these novels. George Friel's masterpiece, Mr Alfred M.A., was published in 1972 and is set in Glasgow in the early sixties whereas Robert McLiam Wilson's Eureka Street, published in 1996, takes place in Belfast in a pre-and post-1994 ceasefire era. Graffiti, and the communication and interaction which can develop between anonymous readers -the passers-by -and the writers who hide themselves behind their slogans, play a central rôle in both novels. Friel's novel was initially to be called 'The Writing on the Wall', but that title was turned down by the publisher because a novel bearing that name was published in the early seventies 2 . That title is nonetheless given by Friel to the second part of the novel where the protagonist dicovers the social implication of a series of graffiti which has bewildered him for so long. For Belfast born Robert McLiam Wilson and for his characters, graffiti is a fundamental part of the structure and canvas of the city, labelling districts, identifying allegiances and moving politics to street level and to an open struggle of defiance, domination, and influence. The plot, in Eureka Street, also revolves around the quest for the meaning of a series of graffiti, but the graffiti becomes the pre-text for a narrative of the city. Both novels provide their authors with the possibility of commenting and reflecting about social