THE SHAME OF A NATION
Smile tackles institutional sexual abuse and makes it resonate anew
Smile Roddy Doyle Knopf Canada
Roddy Doyle’s new novel, Smile, deals with a familiar topic in Ireland: institutional sexual abuse.
“You’d hear another story about priests, nuns and what went on in Christian Brothers schools, and you’d almost sigh, ‘Not again,’” says Doyle. “It became an expected story. And I wanted to write a book that could still be a bit shocking — in the storytelling, not the subject. I wanted to tell a story that was different, do justice to it, if that makes sense.”
Reading Smile, one is swept along — as in all Doyle’s novels — by the vibrancy of the language, the vivid sense of character and place, but nothing prepares you for the final few pages where, in a twist of imaginative brilliance, everything you have read is turned completely on its head.
Smile is the most challenging book that Doyle has ever written.
“What was satisfying was that I was doing something very different so late on in my career,” he says.
Slightly built and bespectacled, the former teacher once known to his pupils as “Punk Doyle” is now 59 and bald. He grew up in Kilbarrack, in north Dublin, and in 1987 he wrote The Commitments, his first book, about a group of kids from Kilbarrack — Barrytown in the book — who form a soul band.
“I was messing around, wanting to write but not knowing what to write about. Then it struck me that what I wanted to write about was just outside the door. I realized I’d been listening to those voices all my life, so why wouldn’t I use that?
“You’re anxious enough when you’re writing, let alone handing it over for examination, but I could feel very strongly as I began to type, ‘I know what I’m doing.’ When a character walks in the door, I know who he’s going to meet, I know what she’s going to say to him and what he’s going to say back. I know the dimensions of the staircase. I don’t have to describe it. I know. Do you know what I mean?”
The Commitments established Doyle’s milieu — Irish workingclass life — and his style: tough, sentimental and frequently hilarious, rendered in quick-fire dialogue with expletives that dance off the page. He has published 10 novels since then.
Doyle attended a Christian Brothers school from the age of 13, almost two decades before the scandal broke in the late ’80s, with the Catholic order accused of widespread sexual, physical and emotional abuse of children. Talking of his school days, Doyle says on one level, it was “brilliant.” Two boys whom he met in his first year have remained his closest friends; they still meet once a week for a drink. On the other hand, “it was really quite shocking,” a place where violence was meted out by teachers casually and arbitrarily, and with a relish that, as he puts it, “went way beyond the call of duty.”
“I wouldn’t have known the word ‘sadism’ at the time, but looking back on it now, I would think that’s what it was,” he says. “And recalling being hit by one man — and he wasn’t a Brother, he was a lay teacher — I would say he was getting some sexual satisfaction from it. I remember being hit by his sweat as he hit me on the hands with a leather strap.
“I’ve never experienced pain delivered by somebody else like that. And shaking afterwards and holding the bars of the desk, trying to cool down ...”
Doyle was never abused; nor, he says, was he aware at the time of it happening to anybody else. “But it would never have been mentioned if it had been going on.”
Later, when the revelations about abuse in such institutions began to surface, he would meet old boys from the school. “I’d ask them, do you think anybody was actually abused? ‘Oh, yeah!’”
It is no surprise, perhaps, to learn that Doyle is an avowed atheist. “I just didn’t believe. And you can’t listen to Lou Reed and go to Mass. It’s as simple as that.”
Smile is beautifully written, and beautifully observed. It is a source of satisfaction to Doyle to pile on the words — in this case, 120,000 for the first draft — but an even greater satisfaction to cut them back, to just 55,000.
“Rhythm, to me, is as important as subject matter; substituting a three-syllable word with a twosyllable one, because the extra syllable seems to be a hurdle in the way ….”
If you were trying to explain the day-to-day job of writing, he says, it would be editing. “Because the story is already there.”
He smiles. “It’s just a matter of getting it out.”
I wouldn’t have known the word ‘sadism’ at the time, but looking back on it now, I would think that’s what it was.