‘Looking back, some of my teachers were sadists’

Roddy Doyle tells Mick Brown how painful memories shaped his new novel

Roddy Doyle’s new novel, Smile, deals with a familiar – and familiarly shocking – 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.”

Shocking is the word. 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 tells the story of Victor Forde, a writer who has enjoyed some recognition in Dublin as a radio-show controversialist, and as the husband of Rachel, a catering entrepreneur turned national celebrity. But Victor’s star has fallen. Rachel is gone, and he is living in a cramped, barren flat in the suburb where he grew up, venturing to a local pub in search of company.

There, he is buttonholed by a big, bullying man, Fitzpatrick, who claims to be a school friend. Fitzpatrick seems to know more about him than Victor can explain; Victor has difficulty even remembering him – but “the memory,” as Fitzpatrick says, “it’s like dropping bits of yourself as you go along, isn’t it?”

This seemingly chance encounter takes us into Victor’s past, to his days at a Christian Brothers school, and his abuse at the hands of a teacher. The journey ends up with Victor – and the reader – questioning whether anything about his version of the past, and himself, can be trusted.

To reveal more would give the game away, but suffice it to say that 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. “It just felt quite fresh that I’d allowed myself to open a door – I mean, the door was always open; there was nobody saying I couldn’t open the door if I wished to. So I stuck my head in there and thought, can I get away with this? Walk in here, grab a few words and walk back out…” He laughs.

I meet Doyle in the lounge of a posh hotel in Dublin. Slightly built and bespectacled, the former teacher once known to his pupils as “Punk Doyle” is now 59 and completely bald. He grew up in Kilbarrack, in north Dublin, where his father Rory taught printing at the local college of technology. The area had been carpeted with jerry-built corporation flats and settled by working-class people – “what would have been Sean O’Casey’s characters” – displaced from the inner city. The Doyles were “lower middle-class” and lived in their own bungalow. His mother and sister still live there. Doyle moved some years ago – all of three miles away.

For 14 years he taught English and geography at the local Greendale Community School, where he was the only teacher to wear an earring and say “bleedin’” in class – as in “where’s yer bleedin’ homework”. In 1987, he wrote The Commitments, his first book, about a group of kids from Killbarrack – Barrytown in the book – who form a soul band. (He borrowed the name Barrytown from the title of a song by Steely Dan.)

“I was messing around, wanting to write but not knowing what to write about,” he says. “Then it struck me that what I wanted to write about was just outside the door. I realised 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 working-class 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, all but one set in Dublin. ( The exception, Oh, Play That Thing, the second part of The Last Roundup – Doyle’s epic trilogy about 20th-century Ireland – took the protagonist Henry Smart to America.) “I’ve been to different places and taken notes for possible stories,” he says. “But when I’ve looked at the notes later it’s always just looked like tourism. It hasn’t felt like lived experience.”

The new novel has something of the sobering mood of The Woman Who Walked into Doors, his 1996 novel about domestic abuse, and Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, which won the 1993 Booker Prize for its portrait of family break-up through the eyes of a 10-year-old boy.

Smile is also Doyle’s most autobiographical novel yet. Like Victor, Doyle attended a Christian Brothers school from the age of 13, almost two decades before the scandal broke in the late Eighties, with the Catholic order accused of widespread sexual, physical and emotional abuse of children in its care. Talking of his own schooldays, Doyle says that, 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 and a chat. 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

‘I was wanting to write but not knowing what to write about’