Story laughs at cancer
Roddy Doyle retains an eye for Ireland’s downtrodden and an ear for authentic dialogue
The Guts By Roddy Doyle Knopf Canada 328 pages, $29.95
Some mid-life crises are more earned than others. Jimmy Rabbitte’s has pretty good cause. Roddy Doyle’s creation, introduced to the world in 1987 in The Commitments and last seen in The Van, has come a long way from a young Dublin soul-music impresario. Now 47, he’s a husband and father. He and wife Aoife have done all right with an online business dedicated to old Irish punk bands, but times are tough; they’ve had to sell part interest in the business and Jimmy has been forced to traffic in the kind of Celtic-rock bombast — “Riverdance for Nazis,” in his withering words — that he has always decried as bogus. To cap it all, he’s just been diagnosed with bowel cancer.
“I’m grand,” the eternal optimist tells anyone who asks, but the strain is starting to show.
Much of Doyle’s work since his Booker Prize-winning 1994 novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha has been undervalued, so it’s worth remembering that when The Commitments appeared, its effect on Irish readers and writers was every bit as liberating as what Irvine Welsh did for modern Scottish literature a few years later with Trainspotting, if a little less extreme. For many, what radiated from The Commitments, was the shock of recognition: working-class people being given their true voice on the page, with all notions of gentility firmly given the boot. That the author could turn on a dime from uproarious comedy to affecting pathos and back again was the icing on the cake.
It’s safe to say, then, that the many admirers of The Commitments (and of The Snapper and The Van, its successors in the Barrytown Trilogy) will be happy to re-enter that world. But be advised: The Guts is a sequel only in the very loosest sense. Such was the success of the original novel’s spinoffs — a feature film, a hit soundtrack, a touring career for a band of actors from the movie — that it’s easy to forget that, in the book, the band’s story was a relatively modest affair. Among the old gang re-encountered in The Guts — manager Jimmy, backing singer Imelda, guitarist Outspan — that heyday is a fond memory, but otherwise not all that big a deal; their obscurity is even played for laughs a couple of times. Nostalgia is not the driving force here.
The Rabbittes, with a home that’s paid for, are among the lucky ones. Old friends are at loose ends; their next-door neighbours suddenly clear out in the middle of the night, one step ahead of the home repossessors; people are generally making do with less. The time is ripe, then, for a money-making scheme, and Jimmy’s involves the upcoming Catholic Eucharistic Congress, the first in the country since 1932.
Surely a compilation of authentic Irish music from that long-gone year will be just the thing commercially, as well as a chance for Jimmy to figuratively thumb his nose at both the church and what he sees as the creeping Americanization of Irish culture.
In the tradition of a country where “craic” remains paramount, Doyle gives vernacular human speech centre stage. And he pulls it all together in a climactic set-piece involving four middle-aged men at a rock festival. It might not have seemed possible that a novel ultimately about cancer could have well-earned laughter as its defining mode, but Doyle has proven otherwise.