Potatoes and Guinness. Thinking of Ireland brings these to mind. Now here’s something else: Roddy Doyle. The schoolteacher-turned-author is perhaps the little isle’s greatest export to date. His first three books, The Commitments, The Snapper and The Van-collectively known as the Barrytown Trilogy-gave us the darkly comic ups and downs of the Rabbites, an Irish working class family.
He followed that up with the Booker Prize-winning Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha-written in the voice of ten-year-old Paddy, watching the collapse of his parents’ marriage-and cemented his reputation as the chronicler of Modern Irish Life. Then Doyle shocked his legions of readers by sitting them down for a little face-time with a 39-year-old battered woman who was ready to tell her story.
Doyle admits that the two years spent writing The Woman Who Walked Into Doors were difficult, and that the process of creating the narrator was nothing if not laborious.
“Paula Spencer [the narrator] is roughly the same age as me, and that helped. She grows up in the same part of Dublin as me. She meets her husband in a dance hall that I would have gone to at that time. The music she hears or remembers is the kind of sentimental drivel that was being played when I was there… She speaks a lot about her children, her anxieties, her pride-no research needed there, that was kind of me.
“Gradually [Paula’s], experience of physical pain, which was almost a daily event, or the terror of it… I was trying to use my own very limited experience of pain and how I coped or didn’t cope with it. Just looking for the image that fits, that will give to the reader the notion of trying to lift yourself up, out of your body, distancing yourself from the pain.”
In the end, abused women the world over marveled at Doyle’s ability to get inside their hellish experiences. And if that weren’t enough, Doyle’s newest book, Oh, Play That Thing, goes even further afield. It marks the first time that Doyle has set a story off the Emerald Isle, and in it he gives the nod to over 80 books of research on the history of New York, Chicago, jazz music, and the people that inhabited America in the 1920s. Despite the mountain of historical data, Dublin’s golden scribe speaks flippantly about his method of tackling subject matter that is a bit farther from home.
“I would imagine, probably, that there’s more books there than most people would read in their lives,” says Doyle with a laugh. “The way I work, I read as I write. I would never be organized enough to create a process where I could think, ‘Okay, I’ve read enough,’ and then write.”
Doyle’s reading list has a way of working itself into his stories. A 1997 review of a biography about Louis Armstrong sowed the seed for Armstrong and Henry Smart to run into each other over the course of Oh, Play That Thing.
“There was a snippet in the review that really gave me a possibility… This bouncer called Black Benny said to him: ‘Louie, when you get [to Chicago], you’re gonna make it. Make sure that you got a white man who can put his hand on your shoulder and say: This here is my nigger.’ It’s quite a shocking thing to read. And when you sit and you think about it, it’s actually a very wise thing. It says an awful lot about society as it was, and perhaps still is. I wondered whether Henry could be that white man.”
And so he was, in the book at least.
“It’s fictional, obviously,” says Doyle with another laugh. “You know, people ask ‘Did that really happen?’ And I say, ‘No.’ I mean, virtually none of it did.”
