Special Issue: Contemporary Irish Fiction || Roddy Doyle: From Barrytown to the GPO

Roddy Doyle: From Barrytown to the GPOAuthor(s): Brian DonnellySource: Irish University Review, Vol. 30, No. 1, Special Issue: Contemporary Irish Fiction(Spring - Summer, 2000), pp. 17-31Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25517123 .

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Brian Donnelly

Roddy Doyle: From Barrytown to the GPO

Roddy Doyle is a phenomenon in the history of Irish writing. His first

novel, Vie Commitments (1987) was published privately with the help of a loan to be repaid from his schoolteacher's salary. His fourth book, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993) was the first and, to date, only Irish winner of the

Booker prize. All of his works in the novel, for the stage, for television

and the cinema have been popular successes. Alan Parker's film of The

Commitments (released in 1991) created a world-wide audience for Doyle who won awards for his part in the adaptation of the book. The films

based on Vie Snapper (1990) and The Van (1991) added considerably to

his popularity as the author of hilarious comic novels dealing with the

lives of working-class (and chronically unemployed) folk on a north

Dublin housing estate called Barrytown. His trilogy of television films,

Family (1994), and his novel, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors (1996), saw Doyle exploring the social and personal problems confronting

women and children in an environment very similar to the comic world

of Barrytown. In spite of his popularity with the reading public Doyle's fiction has

received only belated and often grudging attention from Irish critics, a

state of affairs that has been highlighted by the critical reception of A

Star Called Henry (1999), the first volume of a projected historical trilogy entitled The Last Roundup. Reservations about his works range from the

charge that this latest book is historically suspect to the claim that the

early novels patronize the working-class.1 Whenever the focus is on the

strictly literary aspects of his writings he has been criticized in particular for the narrow range of his dialogue-based narratives.2 Significantly, no

example of his early work appeared in The Field Day Anthology of Irish

Writing (1991). Doyle has shown himself sensitive to what he believes is misplaced

or malicious criticism from the Irish literary establishment and from

elements in the Irish media in particular. Consequently, he has developed a combative response expressed in the many interviews he grants to

journalists and graduate students in which he articulates a confidence

in his readers' judgment based upon sales as well as faith in his own

1. See Eamon Dunphy, 'Alas poor Roderick, we knew him well' (May 8, 1994) and

'The mediocre joker' (May 15,1994), both in Sunday Independent, p. 28.

2. See Eileen Battersby, 'Trevor and Doyle are Booker-bound', Irish Times (September 25,1991), p. 12.

17



IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

fictional creations. Remarks such as T think my style of writing may be a complete reaction to Jane Austen'3 and 'My urban working-class men

aren't like O'Casey's versions in moleskin trousers who get involved.

My characters don't give a toss about politics'4 are characteristic of a

writer who feels that he is consistently criticized within contexts, both

literary and political, that are not appropriate to his works. The recent

publication of A Star Called Henry,5 which is a departure from the subject matter of his other works, is a timely moment to review Doyle as a

novelist as he makes the imaginative journey from Barrytown of the

trilogy to the GPO of the 1916 Rising.

I

From the start Roddy Doyle's career as a novelist has run counter to the

prevailing preoccupations and conventions of Irish writing. The historic

concerns of nationality, language and religion that had engaged Irish

writers since the days of Thomas Davis and The Nation are remarkable

by their absence in a fictional locale that constitutes a striking counter

point to the rural world of older contemporaries such as Edna O'Brien

and John McGahern; it is also the antithesis of the Dublin of Joyce and

O'Casey. The world of their works finds few points of reference in the

new Dublin suburb of Barrytown, a place that is heard rather than seen:

-Wha' abou' this politics? -Yeah, politics.?Not songs abou' Fianna fuckin' Fail or

anythin' like tha'. Real politics. (They weren't with him.) -Where are yis from? (He answered the question himself.) -Dublin. (He asked another one.) -'Wha part o'Dublin? Barrytown.

Wha' class are yis? Workin' class. Are yis proud of it? Yeah, yis are.

(Then a practical question.) -Who buys the most records? The

workin' class. Are yis with me? (Not really.) -Your music should be

abou' where you're from an' the sort o' people yeh come from.

Say it once, say it loud. I'm black and I'm proud.

They looked at him.

-James Brown. Did yis know-never mind. He sang tha'.

An' he made a fuckin' bomb.

They were stunned by what came next.

-The Irish are the niggers of Europe, lads.

They nearly gasped: it was so true.

-An' Dubliners are the niggers of Ireland. The culchies have fuckin'

every thin'. An' the northside Dubliners are the niggers o' Dublin. -

?Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud, (p. 13)

3. Quoted from an interview with Niall McArdle in his MA thesis (UCD), An Indecency

Decently Put: Roddy Doyle and Contemporary Irish Writing (1994), p. 1.

4. Quoted from an interview with Penny Perrick, 'A star called Roddy', The Times

"Metro" (September 4,1999), p. 16.

5. London: Jonathan Cape. Quotations are from this edition.

18



RODDY DOYLE: FROM BARRYTOWN TO THE GPO

This episode from early in The Commitments6 consciously cocks a snook

at the political and cultural assumptions of what readers of Irish fiction

had been nurtured on. Its raw, colloquial utterance ignores any concern

for traditional novelistic decorum. The young people who are organizing themselves into a soul band articulate an identity that is constructed

more by a popular global culture than by anything that is historically inherited within the ideals of Irishness. The only reference to the influence

of the Catholic church in the lives of the characters is the admission that

the band's female backing group came together in the folk mass choir

when at school; no one utters a single word of Irish, the country's 'first

official language', and the political turmoil in the six counties of Ulster

that had dominated Irish consciousness for a generation is relegated to

a humorous footnote in the formation of the Commitments:

Jimmy had nothing to say yet. Joey The Lips carried on.

?The Lord told me to come home. Ed Winchell, a Baptist reverend on Lenox Avenue in Harlem, told me. But the Lord told him to tell

me. He said he was watching something on TV about the feuding

Brothers in Northern Ireland and The Lord told the Reverend Ed that the Irish Brothers had no soul, that they needed some soul. And

pretty fucking quick! Ed told me to go back to Ireland and blow some soul into the Irish Brothers. The Brothers wouldn't be shooting the asses off each other if they had soul. So said Ed. I'm not a Baptist

myself but I've a lot of time for the Reverend Ed. (p. 27)

The Dublin of The Commitments is not a successor to the city of Joyce's works. The metropolis of the older novelist is a place firmly rooted in

contemporary social and political realities; the location of Doyle's early fictions exists outside of the irnmediacy of Irish public history. In this

respect Doyle differs from contemporaries such as Dermot Bolger who

were identified as a movement under the heading, 'Dirty Dublin Poetic

Realism'.7 Barrytown in the early books is an anonymous suburb where

consciousness is largely shaped by imported television programmes, American popular music and English soccer which has supplanted the

GAA much in the way that the name of a local pub has been changed from The Dark Rosaleen to The Miami Vice. From the start Roddy Doyle's achievement has been to keep the focus and terms of reference of his

stories within the day-to-day concerns and awareness of his characters,

articulated in their own words without any mediating authorial voice.

These are men, women and young people who are preoccupied with

6. All quotations from The Commitments, The Snapper and The Van are taken from the one volume, The Barrytown Trilogy (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1992). Page numbers follow each quotation in parenthesis.

7. Ferdia MacAnna, 'The Dublin Renaissance: An Essay on Modern Dublin and Dublin

Writers', Irish Review, 10 (Spring 1991), pp. 14-30.

19




such things as school, exams, work, unwanted pregnancy, male unem

ployment and its attendant problems. The social and economic con

sequences of their lives are viewed exclusively within the personal and

domestic sphere, never in the perspective of local or national politics:

-Soul is the rhythm o' the people, Jimmy said

again. -The Labour Party doesn't have soul. Fianna fuckin' Fail

doesn't have soul. The Workers' Party ain't got soul. The Irish people -no.-The Dublin people ?fuck the rest o'them.-The

people o'Dublin, our people, remember need soul. We've got soul.

?Fuckin' righ' we have. (p. 38)

This whimsical banter touches a general truth: the community of The

Commitments, The Snapper (1990) and The Van (1991) is a self-contained

world within an actual historical city. Here chronic unemployment constitutes a personal or a family crisis, never a serious political issue; a

pregnancy resulting from the rape of a young woman by the father of one of her friends is the cause of a certain amount of family dissension, not the occasion of a legal, spiritual or community crisis. None of these

dilemmas in The Snapper results in tragic or even deeply unhappy consequences because the story, like its predecessor, operates within

the conventions of comedy which presupposes a happy ending. Con

sequently, these early novels portray aspects of contemporary, working class, urban life without the obligation to explore more fully the bleaker

consequences of much of that reality. Within the obvious limitations of the comic form of the so-called

Barrytown Trilogy,8 Doyle succeeds in portraying many of the significant social and cultural mores and conventions of late twentieth-century Ireland, a society in which most of the traditional authorities and historic

models have begun to cede to the influences of mass culture and life

bounded by the uniformity of the large housing estate. Significantly, there

is no suggestion that a rural idyll has been lost; on the contrary the

Rabbitts at the centre of the trilogy represents much that is best in family life, and the Hikers pub constitutes the ideal focus for the wider com

munity's interaction and recreation. The rough-and-tumble of Jimmy Rabbitte's relationship with his wife and children has a vulgar naturalness and crude affection, the absence of which traditionally constituted the psychic drama of much Irish writing, one that found its

latest and most complex expression in John McGahern's critically acclaimed Amongst Women (1990). Indeed the spontaneity of the

relationship between parents and children as portrayed in Doyle's fictions

reflects the lack of respect for traditional authorities. In these works concern is for one's own family and friends and not for the abstract

8. The term 'trilogy' is a convenient one to cover the three early novels which share

characters and setting in common. They were not conceived as a trilogy at the outset.

20



RODDY DOYLE: FROM BARRYTOWN TO TFIE GPO

teachings of church or state. In The Snapper, for example, the news of

Sharon's pregnancy, a condition that in the Irish novel up until the

nineteen seventies would have constituted the central moral and

psychological drama, is given largely comic treatment:

A man needs a pint after all tha', he [Jimmy Sr] said.

?Is that all? said Veronica, shocked.

Wha' d'yeh mean, Veronica?

?It's a terrible -

Veronica started.

But she couldn't really go on. She thought that Sharon's news

deserved a lot more attention, and some sort of punishment. As far

as Veronica was concerned this was the worst thing that had ever

happened the family. But she couldn't really explain why, not really. And she knew that, anyway nothing could be done about it. Maybe

it wouldn't be so bad once she got used to it.

Then she thought of something. ?The neighbours, she said.

?Wha' abou' them? said Jimmy Sr.

Veronica thought for a bit.

?What'11 they say? she then said.

?You don't care wha' tha' lot says, do yeh? said Jimmy Sr.

-Yes. I do.

?Ah now, Veronica.

He sat down.

Sharon spoke

?They'll have a laugh when they find ou' an' they'll try an' guess

who I'm having it for. An' that's all.-An' anyway, I don't care.

?An that's the important thing, Jimmy Sr told Veronica.

Veronica didn't look convinced, (pp. 150-51)

There is no deep tension in this family dilemma because in Barrytown

'Nobody minded. Guess the daddy was a hobby' Veronica's protests lack the visceral conviction of the mother in Irish novels of earlier

generations. In The Snapper the drama that would traditionally have

arisen from an out-of-wedlock pregnancy is replaced by the conflict

between a daughter about to create a new life and a father who

increasingly feels marginalized both at home and among his mates in

the Hiker.

Much of Roddy Doyle's best dramatic and comic writing is in the scenes involving the daughter who is becoming gradually aware of her

growth into motherhood and her father's mistaken belief that he has now the opportunity to share in the experience of pregnancy and birth

that he failed to realize when he and Veronica were making their own

family. In Sharon's growing awareness of her physical and psychological

changes may be observed the seeds of The Woman Who Walked into Doors

(1996);9 in the behaviour of her father, Jimmy Sr, is the preoccupation

9. London: Jonathan Cape. All quotations are from this edition and page numbers are

given parenthetically in the text.

21




with masculinity and the problematic role of the father of grown children

and an increasingly independent wife, a theme that has engaged many

contemporary writers. Significantly the opening episode of The Van

reveals Jimmy Sr vacating the kitchen table to allow his son Darren the

space to do his homework while he goes out to the front of the house to

observe idly the doings of the neighbours. In The Commitments Jimmy Sr is a cipher; in The Van we are given a

more complex portrait of a man who feels his self-worth to be under

threat. Like its predecessors, this novel is a comedy, but a comedy that

skirts dangerously close to tragedy as in the scene where Jimmy Sr's

employed son slips his father a five pound note, thus reversing the father

son roles. The deteriorating relationship between Jimmy Sr and his friend

and business partner Bimbo shows Doyle's writing at its most assured

and powerful. But it is in these episodes that the comic mode of the

early novels is threatened and it is significant that the story ends with a

scene that returns Jimmy Sr to the condition of a child. Following the row between the partners in the van, the novel ends with a cryptic scene

that suggests that Jimmy Sr is incapable of growing up fully:

Veronica woke up while he was getting his clothes off. She smelt the

sea in the room. It was getting bright outside. He sat on the bed

beside her.

?Give us a hug, Veronica, will yeh.-1 need a hug. (p. 633)

The Van highlights Doyle's singular gifts: his ability to create a lively, contemporary idiom and his awareness of the culture of late twentieth

century life in a nondescript suburb. He treats his characters without

condescension and revels in their earthy humour as in the scene in the

Hikers where Bertie articulates the men's distaste for female encroach

ment into their space:

He swept his open hand up and across from left to right, and showed them the room.

-This is our scene, compadre, he said.

-Fuckin'sure, said Jimmy Sr.

Bertie was really enjoying himself. He pointed the things out to them.

-Our pints. Our table here with the beermat under it stoppin' it

from wobblin'. Our dart board an' our hoops,

over there, look it.

He stamped his foot.

-Our floor with no carpets on it. Our chairs here with the springs

all stickin' up into our holes. We fit here, Bimbo, said Bertie.-An'

those fuckers over there [a group of women] should go upstairs to

the Lounge where they fuckin' belong, (p. 379)

Such scenes achieve a rhythmic, colloquial heightening; they give a

vitality and charm to what, on the outside, appears merely squalid. The

same is true of episodes of female bonding and friendship as in the lively comic baiting of the lounge boy by Sharon and her friends:

22




The row was over. They nearly got sick laughing. The lounge

boy was

coming back.

?Here's your bit o'fluff, Mary, said Sharon.

-Ah stop.

-Howyeh, Gorgeous, said Jackie. -Did yeh make your holy com

munion yet? The lounge boy tried to get everything off the tray all at once so

he could get the fuck out of that corner.

He said nothing. -Wha' size do yeh take? Yvonne asked him.

The lounge boy legged it. He left too much change on the table and a

puddle where he'd spilt the Coke. Mary threw a beer-mat on

top of it.

-Jesus, Sharon, said Jackie. -I thought you were goin' to have a

miscarriage there you were laughin'

so much.

-I couldn't help it -Wha' size d'yeh take?

They started again. -I meant his shirt, said Yvonne.

They giggled and wiped their eyes and noses and poured the Coke and tonic on top of the vodka and gin. (p. 196)

Not only is the dialogue striking, but his delight in the pleasures and

preoccupations of Sharon and her friends displays a unique feature of

Doyle's work: his capacity to record the trivia that goes to make up a

culture at any particular moment and to convey something of the spirit of the times with comic inventiveness. We see this, for example, in the

description of football fever that gripped the nation during the 1990

World Cup in Italy:

The country had gone soccer mad. OuT ones were explaining offside

to each other; the young one at the check-out in the cash-and-carry told Jimmy Sr. that Romania hadn't a

hope cos Lacatus was

suspended because he was on two yellow cards. It was great. There

were flags hanging out of nearly every window in Barrytown. It

was great for business as well. There were no proper dinners being made at all. Half the mammies in Barrytown were watching the

afternoon matches, and after the extra-time and the penalty shoot

outs there was no time left to make the dinner before the next match.

The whole place was living on chips, (p. 508)

The ephemeral nature of such occasions is splendidly conveyed in the

casual remark that concludes the episode: 'And then we got beaten by the Italians and that was the end of that.' Few contemporary Irish writers serve better one of the most fundamental impulses of the novelist since the time of Defoe: to record and preserve the spirit of the times.

II

Doyle is a writer who is clearly unwilling to keep repeating a successful

formula. His novels after the trilogy are marked in different ways by

93




experimentation in subject matter and novelistic form. There is a good deal of comic writing in Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha10 but the conventions of

comedy that governed the early books are replaced by a bleak realism in a society that is firmly rooted in contemporary social history. The

Barrytown of Paddy's childhood is in the process of construction as it

eats into the green fields of north Dublin, providing the playground for

the local children:

The new road was straight now, all the way. The edges of

Donnelly's fields were chopped off and you could see all the farm because the hedges

were gone; it was like Catherine's doll's house

with the door opened. You could see all the being-built houses on the other side of the fields. The farm was being surrounded. The cows were gone, to the new farm. Big lorries took them. The smell

was a laugh, (p. Ill)

Our territory was getting smaller. The fields were patches among

the different houses and bits left over where the roads didn't meet

properly. They'd become dumps for all the waste stuff, bits of wood

and brick and solidified bags of cement and milk bottles. They were

good for exploring but bad for running in. (p. 146)

These changes are observed disinterestedly by the ten-year-old boy who is attempting to cope with the emotional consequences of the

disintegration of his parents' marriage. The first person narrative is a

development of the technique employed in the trilogy insofar as

experience is articulated within the verbal and perceptual range of the

character. The narrative follows the perceptive eye of a child who

observes the particularity of all about him:

His auntie was nice. She walked from side to side. She said God the

cold or God the heat, depending on what the weather was like. When she walked across the kitchen she went Tea tea tea tea tea. When she

heard the Angelus at six o'clock she'd go into the television and all

the way she'd be saying The News the News the News the News.

She had big veins like roots curling up the side and back of her legs. She made biscuits, huge big slabs; they were gorgeous, even when

they were stale, (p. 39)

The limitations of a small boy's understanding allows Doyle to create

episodes of memorable comedy by re-enacting some of the standard

building blocks in the structure of a Catholic, Nationalist education such as Paddy's account of Miss Watkins's lesson on the 1916 Proclamation

of Independence and his retelling of the story of the leper priest, Fr

10. London: Seeker and Warburg. All quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given parenthetically in the text.

24




Damien. These accounts are bravura performances of narration as the

child's idiom and memory processes inform every detail. Here, too, Doyle

typically uses his fiction to record and memorialize aspects of the Ireland

of his own youth, a country whose cultural insularity is being infiltrated

by the television set in the corner of the living-room. Paddy's childhood, like his creator's, coincides with and is partly shaped by such events as

The Man From U.N.C.L.E., the US war in Vietnam and the Arab-Israeli

conflict, Gay Byrne's The Late Late Show, Manchester United's defeat of

Benfica of Lisbon in the 1968 European Cup Final; this was a period when every household owned one of those record players with the

multiple dispenser:'... You could pile six records in it over the turntable.

We only had three; The Black and White Minstrels, South Pacific and

Hank Williams The King of Country.' All of his books revel in this kind

of particularity of detail and specificity of contemporary reference that

map Ireland's entry into the global village. Doyle's attentiveness to the

bric-a-brac of modem life as a significant factor in the shaping of character

registers those late twentieth-century forces that were beginning to

supersede the historical and religious lessons endured by Paddy Clarke

in the classroom.

Doyle's primary concern in this novel and in his next, The Woman

Who Walked Into Doors, is to articulate the hurt, anger, fear and confusion

of someone who is powerless and vulnerable. This preoccupation with

characters who are weak or marginalized is the most recurrent one in

his writings. In Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha his achievement was to create a

language adequate to Paddy's experience of the disintegration of his

parents' marriage and the problems at school that followed from it:

I didn't understand. She was lovely. He was nice. They had four

children. I was one of them, the oldest. The man of the house when

my da wasn't there. She held onto us for longer, gripped us and looked over us at the floor or the ceiling. She didn't notice me

trying to push away; I was too old for that. In front of Sinbad. I still loved

her smell. But she wasn't cuddling us; she was hanging

on to us.

He waited before he answered, always he did, pretended he

hadn't heard anything. She was always the one that tried to make

them talk. He'd answer just when I thought she'd have to ask again, to change her voice, make it sound angry. It was agony waiting for

him. (p. 222)

The narrative voice in this instance and throughout the novel is a nice

balance between the adult's recollection and the imrnediacy of childhood

perceptions; only occasionally does the over sophisticated simile or an

inappropriate phrase intrude upon this compromise. The same is true

of Paula's tale in The Woman Who Walked Into Doors where the voice has an apparent naturalness and spontaneity that is compelling as, for

instance, when she recalls the introduction of her husband-to-be to her

father:

25




Charlo and my father. High Noon. The two of them standing there,

facing each other, staring, my father at the window. Charlo at the

door. My mother trying to get out of her chair, trying to smile. Denise

and Wendy on the floor looking at The Golden Shot. The rest were out or

upstairs.

Sunday Afternoon.

I'd brought him home for tea. I'd been told to. - I want to see him, said my father. -

He's very nice, said Mammy. -

I want to see him anyway, he said. -It's about time I met

him.

They looked at one another, Daddy and Charlo. I hadn't told

Charlo to be nice; I was hoping he'd put on a bit of a show. He turned

up in his usual gear, the parallels and bomber jacket. Wearing denims

on a Sunday was a big thing back then; it was almost like saying that you didn't believe in God. And his bomber jacket, zipped up even

though it was lovely out, real spring weather. I thought he

looked great but I could see him now through my father's eyes. I

saw him looking at Charlo's socks. Mammy was still trying to lift

herself out of the chair. She wasn't fat or awkward or anything; she

probably just felt weak. I know I did. - This is Charles, I said.

I nearly burst out laughing. -

Charles, said my father. -

Howyeh, said Charlo. -Mister O'Leary. He was

trying. I really loved him now. He was doing it for me,

wrecking his Sunday, doing his best. -

Howyeh, Missis O'Leary. God, he was gorgeous. -

Hello again, Charles, said Mammy. I don't know why she said that; again. Maybe she sensed that

Daddy was going to like Charlo

- she often guessed things wrong

-

and she wanted to remind him that she'd seen him first. Maybe she

hoped it would help us relax. He was the first fella I'd ever brought home. I was

eighteen.

Twenty-one years ago. -

Sit yourselves down, said Daddy. - We're watching Bob Monkhouse, said Mammy.

Charlo said nothing. - D'you like Bob Monkhouse, Charles? Said Daddy. - He's alright, said Charlo.

- We like him. -

He's good guests, said Charlo.

I nearly fell off my chair. He was really trying, (pp. 116-17)

Paula's recollection dramatizes the vibrancy and nervous excitement of a young woman in love and reveals the vulnerability that Charlo would

prey upon so relentlessly. In the TV series Family Doyle portrayed the

sociological context of the syndrome of the battered woman; in the novel

he attempted the more complex task of creating the actual construction

of the personality of such a victim. The problem here as in all such

26




narratives is how to remain faithful to the linguistic range of the character

without resorting to a succession of short sentences, always a difficult

stylistic challenge for Doyle. His achievement in this case is that, by and

large, he creates an appropriate eloquence for Paula. This is apparent in, for example,

the scene where she recalls Charlo's aggression towards

her.

He hit me. He sent me across the kitchen and I hit the sink and fell.

I felt nothing, only shock. A spinning in my head. I knew nothing for a while, where I was, who was with me, what I was doing on the

floor. I saw nothing; I was

empty. Then I saw his legs, making a

triangle with the floor. He seemed way up over me. Way up; huge.

I had to bend back to see him. Then he came down to me. I saw his knees bending; I saw his hand pulling up one of his trouser legs. I saw his face. His eyes were

going over my face, every inch, every

mark. He was worried. He was shocked and worried. He loved me

again. He held my chin. He skipped over my eyes. He couldn't look

straight at me. He felt guilty, dreadful. He loved me

again. What

happened? I provoked him. I was to blame. I should have made his dinner. It was my own fault; there was a pair of us in it. What

happened? I don't know. He held my chin and looked at every square inch of my face. He loved me again, (p. 175)

It is episodes such as this that caused reviewers world-wide to praise the male author for his extraordinary insight into the psychology of a

woman. The achievement, however, has as much to do with Doyle's

developing narrative skills as it has with emotional and psychological

understanding of the battered woman syndrome; indeed the two are

inseparable. As in all of his work the author has created and sustained a

voice subtly expressive of the day-to-day existence of his character.

In this single important respect Doyle may be regarded as a late

twentieth-century instance of the impulse that motivated William

Carleton a century and a half earlier; Carleton's aim was to give voice to

a people and a way of life that was disappearing under the twin pressures of modernity and famine. In Doyle we have a writer whose books attempt to articulate a part of late twentieth-century Irish experience that had

largely remained outside the horizons of Irish literature, ways of life

hidden from the concerns of people who typically buy and read literary fiction in Ireland. Like Carleton, Doyle's enterprise involved an imagin ative reproduction of the world of his characters, articulated in their own words. The extent to which any writer of any period accurately recreates the actual, living speech of a group or people is a problematic one. Even the restricted range of diction and syntax that characterizes

the utterances of Jimmy Sr or Paula Spencer cannot conceal the con

siderable artistry that Doyle brings to their creation. In his best work he

has achieved that near ideal intersection between the formal demands

of the written word and the colourful if limited verbal ranges of his

27




creations. Doyle's achievement has been, surely, that he has created

characters who have convincingly expressed their own lives within their own distinctive idioms.

HI

A Star Called Henry marked a radical departure from the world and the

themes that had interested Roddy Doyle in his works up to its

publication. The tale of the slum-child born in 1901 who is destined to

become a rebel hero in James Connolly's Citizen's Army at fourteen years of age and a ruthless and fearless member of Michael Collins's 'Apostles7 three years later is far removed from the domestic concerns of the people of Barrytown. The familiar, anonymous suburbs of late twentieth-century

Dublin are replaced by the awful slums and underground waterways of

the earlier city. The descriptions of sights and the evocation of smells are

often powerful, clearly the result of detailed research as the reading list at the end of the text acknowledges. In these Doyle gives rein to a visual sense that was given little scope in most of the earlier novels. Many of

the set-pieces, particularly those that occur during the Easter Rising of

1916, are typical of his ability to create atmosphere and drama. They also allow him to indulge a fascination with violence and its psychology that was latent even in the early works:

It was natural to them [the country recruits]. They were poachers

and the sons of poachers, creeping around and behind generations of Fitzgalways and their rabbits, cutting the tendons of their cattle,

avoiding their agents and bullies, grabbing the arses of their scullery maids. They were people who had to move furtively through their own place for hundreds of years, who had survived by hiding themselves. And still did, out of habit and necessity, and for

entertainment, like Ivan, devoting so much thought to being

an eejit,

pretending to be one, giving his life to it. They were all masters of

disguise and invisibility. I had nothing to teach them. I was the man from outside who would bring importance to their skills simply by stating them. I'd show them that their traits and talents were the

stuff that made warriors, (p. 221)

The voice in this instance is direct and authoritative as is generally the case when Doyle allows his narrator to simply describe events as

historical occurrences:

The main hall was being transformed. Men in the uniforms of

the Volunteers and Citizen Army, and most in bits and pieces or no

uniform at all, were carrying bags of sand on their shoulders, and

tables, chairs, ledgers, mailbags, sacks of coal and piling them into

defensive walls at the main and side doors and all the windows.

The women of Cumann na mBan carried urns and cauldrons, trestle

tables and baskets to the stairs and down to the basement. Other

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men humped provisions and guns, sledgehammers and laundry

hampers in from the courtyard. Others had been sent down to the

Merropole Hotel and across to the Imperial for bedding, supplies and anything else that might

come in handy. Orders were barked, barked again and obeyed. There were younger ones

running back

and forth between the officers, delivering and bringing back

messages. They moved frantically, riddled with excitement, while

the older ones, the men and nearly men, were slowed by the

knowledge that they were witnessing their own most important moments, (pp. 87-8)

However, the problem with the novel as an historical recreation is

that it operates uneasily between the modes of naturalism and a kind of

magic realism in the person of Henry's father and his wooden leg which

serves him as both limb and deadly weapon. After his father's death

this leg accompanies the young narrator as talisman and wooden

Excalibur throughout the 1916 Rising and the Anglo-Irish war of

1919-21. However, it increasingly jars against the pervading naturalism

of a novel that constitutes a critique of the revolutionary period that

seems to owe a good deal to O'Casey's view of those events as well as to

much subsequent 'revisionist' historical commentary. This interpretation of Irish history, that sees the outcome of the

revolutionary period as a Catholic, bourgeois takeover is consistent with

the political outlook that informed the early writings. The iconoclastic

dismissal of official Ireland in those works is of a part with the perspective that views 1916 as a failed revolution, one whose teachings are the source

of bewildered amusement for the young Paddy Clarke.11 The fundamental shortcoming of A Star Called Henry, however, lies in

the conception of the narrator himself, Henry Smart. In one obvious

respect he is a successor of those earlier characters such as the youths in

The Commitments as well as Jimmy Sr and Paula Spencer who were

disadvantaged by the accidents of birth and environment. But his story, unlike theirs, mostly feels contrived, a contrivance that comes across as

a failure in the narrative voice:

I was eight and surviving. I'd lived three years in the streets and

under boxes, in hallways and on wasteland. I'd slept in the weeds

and under snow. I had Victor [his four-year-old brother], my father's

leg and nothing else. I was bright but illiterate, strapping but always sick. I was handsome and filthy and bursting out of my rags. And I

was surviving.

11. For reviews that focus on the novel's interpretations of history see Seamus Deane,

'Roddy Doyle's Troubles', The Guardian: Saturday Review ( September, 1999), p. 8; Ruth Dudley Edwards, 'Though Rich and Famous He Still Cares', Literary Review

(September 1999), pp. 47-8; Brendan Walsh, '1916 and All That', The Tablet (18

September, 1999), p. 1264.

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But it wasn't enough. I was itching for more.

-Come on, Victor, I said. -

We need to better ourselves.

I washed myself and Victor from a bucket at the back of Granny Nash's house and then we went down to the national school behind

the big railings. It was late morning; the yard was empty. We went

into a huge hall. I stopped at the first door. We could hear children

reciting something on the other side. I knocked and waited. I held

Victor's hand. -

Yes, said a voice that belonged to a woman. - I didn't look yet. By not looking, I could hope that the face

would be smiling and lovely. I could even expect it. I could

keep talking. - We've come for our education, I said. -

Have you, indeed? said the voice. - Yeah. (pp. 70-71)

The voice here and throughout is disconcertingly close to the idiom

and syntax of Paddy Clarke, although the portrayals of Henry and Victor are not remotely concerned with the psychological realism that informed

the creation of the earlier character. Indeed, Henry, who tells us on several

historic occasions that he was the most handsome man present and whose

sexual prowess from the age of fourteen renders him irresistible to

women, usually appears as an impoverished version of George McDonald Fraser's Harry Flashman but without the Victorian cad's

winning cowardice:

I was fourteen. None of the others knew, or would have believed it.

I was six foot, two inches tall and had the shoulders of a boy built to

carry the weight of the world. I was probably the best-looking man in the G.P.O. but there was nothing beautiful about me.

My eyes were astonishing, blue daggers that warned the world to keep its

distance. I was one of the few real soldiers there; I had nothing to fear and nothing to go home to. (p. 89)

The best historical fiction offers either an investigation of the historical

process or, alternatively, interrogates the ways in which the narratives

of the past are created. Such is the case in novels as various as Gunther

Grass's The Tin Drum (1959), Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) and the late J.G. Farrell's trilogy of the decline of the British Empire.12 A

Star Called Henry achieves neither of these ends. It employs historical

settings as little more than exotic props for a sexy adventurer who is

also an efficient and dispassionate killer.

In a BBC Omnibus television profile (1999) Roddy Doyle confessed

that his abandonment of the themes and places of his fictions up to the

12. Troubles (1970), The Siege ofKrishnapur (1973), The Singapore Grip (1978).

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writing of Henry Smart's tale was the result of a fear of repeating what he could do easily and well and of pandering to readers who craved a

return to the comedy of the trilogy. If they want more comedy they can

feck off and 'I'm not gonna be a has-been at the age of forty-one' were

two of the more telling remarks. Such attitudes are understandable, and

admirable up to a point, though a little condescending to the readers

who made him a rich and famous man. In the same programme we learnt

that the second part of Henry Smart's story will take him to Chicago of

the nineteen twenties where, it is planned, he will become the manager of the young Louis Armstrong and consequently achieve a sense of

American identity. This will, no doubt, take Roddy Doyle even further

away from the world and the idiom that made him one of the most

popular writers of his generation. It will also place his work in a context

that will invite comparison with the American scenes recreated so

compellingly by, for example, E.L. Doctorow in Ragtime (1975) and Billy

Bathgate (1989) and by Don DeLillo in Underworld (1998), novels that

revised our understanding of modern American history and how that

story has been told. Such books do not only make fictions out of history,

they investigate the fictions out of which history is made. The challenge is one that will test Roddy Doyle's imaginative range and narrative skills.

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Documents

Special Issue: Contemporary Irish Fiction || Roddy Doyle: From Barrytown to the GPO