Roddy Doyle unleashed
Author of The Commitments brings fi ghting words to middle age.
Not too long ago Roddy Doyle climbed up to the attic in his Dublin home, turned on the lights and went to the trunks where his records were stored. Then he carried them downstairs to “the front room” of his house, a room that had become a receptacle for bicycles and junk. He wanted to listen to records again, slide them from their sleeves, run the duster over them, drop a needle and hear the crackle and fuzz of the tracks.
“I’m a man of no religion, but I believe in ritual.”
The ritual, he explains, was as much about fighting “the redundancy of middle age,” as it was a step toward finding a way through the needle eye of what he calls “middle age grief.”
The first record the 55- year- old listened to was Bob Marley’s Exodus. “I told my family the bicycles have got to go, we’re turning this into a music room.”
Doyle’s reputation as a writer has been inextricably linked to music since he self- published the famed 1987 novel The Commitments. The story of Jimmy Rabbitte, an idealistic manager who assembles a rag- tag band of working- class would- be musicians on a mission to bring black soul to Dublin was, at its heart, a work of social realism. The story went on to become a beloved and internationally acclaimed film.
Doyle, in town to promote The Guts, a novel that revisits Jimmy Rabbitte in middle life, took time out to speak to The Vancouver Sun about his wellloved character, middle age, and the pleasure of dusting off the vinyl and taking new risks to find relevancy.
In The Guts, Rabbitte, at 47 has four kids and a wife, and he is still chasing his own soul through music, only now he’s fighting for his life, against bowel cancer, down- sized expectations and redundancy.
When Doyle wrote The Commitments, Ireland was mired in a deep recession; in the ’ 90s, he started hearing his friends in the pubs talking about recession again. He started to wonder how Jimmy Rabbitte would manage. Doyle isn’t writing about the recession. “That would be a bad novel,” he says. “I wanted to situate it in this particular recession and I wanted it to be part of the anxiety of the book.”
The self- flagellation he observed after the economic downturn he found off- putting and unproductive. “The talk of ‘ Oh, we lost our soul’ is drivel. Absolute drivel,” he says. “Even the artistic community has been quite smug about it all ( blaming the banks), saying ‘ Oh, we didn’t give them mortgages we couldn’t afford,’ holier than
The Guts is rife with humour and refreshingly free of melodrama. And like The Commitments, the story unfolds in pages of the rhythmic, slangy Dublin dialogue that is the real music of Doyle’s work.
thou, as if they are a bit more pure than the rest.”
The human impact is what concerns Doyle, not apportioning blame.
“I heard and I knew of people who were losing their homes like that, disappearing overnight because they couldn’t afford the mortgage anymore. Jimmy’s next- door neighbours go through that and it has a huge impact on Jimmy and his wife.”
The emptiness of the house is a constant reminder of loss. Jimmy’s bowel cancer, Doyle says, is “a way to condense a lot of the questions people have when they get older: the redundancy that occurs when their children grow older, when they are being passed over at work for younger people with different and better qualifications, when they begin to feel their past, and attitudes change toward everything, sex, going out, music.”
At 55, Doyle says, cancer had become a regular topic of conversation in the pub. “It used to be football, music, work, our children. Now it’s cancer. We immediately start joking about it.”
The Guts is rife with humour and refreshingly free of melodrama. And like The Commitments, the story unfolds in pages of the rhythmic, slangy Dublin dialogue that is the real music of Doyle’s work.
The book opens with a conversation between Jimmy Sr. and Jimmy at a pub that is comic, profane and tender, veering from the intricacies of the new world, Facebook and texting, to what remains of the old.
He waited, made sure Jimmy was paying proper attention. -- Go on, said Jimmy. -- I still wake up with a hard one, said his father. -- Do yeh? said Jimmy. -- Every mornin’, said Jimmy Sr. Includin’ Sundays. -- That’s great. Well done. -- F--- off.
Later, Jimmy breaks the news of the cancer to his dad. -- How’s Ma? -- Grand. Are you havin’ another?
-- No, said Jimmy. I’m driving. -- Fair enough. -- I have cancer. -- Good man. -- I’m being serious, Da. -- I know.
“We all, at various points in our life, when our children have grown up and gone, or we are given our severance package, or we retire, are asking ourselves, ‘ What am I going to do for the rest of my life?’ Jimmy is confronted with that.”
Jimmy Rabbitte is the same anti- hero that struck a chord in The Commitments, and two of Doyle’s other novels, The Van and The Snapper: feckless, hopeful, enterprising, however he is no longer a youth searching for meaning, he is a mature man facing his own mortality.
“The Commitments was a form of Irishness, and maleness that hadn’t been depicted. He wasn’t miserable, he wasn’t at war with his family, he wasn’t carrying chips on his shoulder, he didn’t give a f--about being Irish. Jimmy’s very much an urban being. He could be plunked in any city in the world.”
In a magical scene in the book, Jimmy Rabbitte unsheathes the vinyl records to show his kids the holy relics of his youth. It was after writing that scene, not before, that Doyle made his way to his own attic to unpack his vinyl.
“I had really forgotten how much I enjoyed taking the record out of the sleeve, putting it on the deck, lowering the needle, sitting between the speakers and actively listening. Those rituals mean more to me than they used to.”
Doyle said he’s lucky to have good health, but like Jimmy Rabbitte, he isn’t immune to the pains of the passage of time. He’s close with his kids, aged 21 and 23, but his role as caretaker, father and nurturer has changed since they grew up and moved out.
“I miss them. It’s grief. You have to decide, am I going to let this bury me. Am I going to continually think, ‘ Well, that’s another light that’s gone out.’ Or am I gonna kind of settle into this and enjoy myself? It’s a decision you can make. I don’t want to sound like some sort of f-- kin’ life coach, but you can open your head to new experiences.”
For Doyle, the “great adventure” of his new life was to write the stage musical of The Commitments, which is now playing to sold- out houses in London.
He has also started a writing program for Dublin youth, called Fighting Words, inspired by his friend Dave Eggers’ San Francisco school, 826 Valencia.
The experience of pushing through “the fear and anxiety” of striking out and doing new things has been part of what he calls a conscious decision to move forward. “It’s a while back since I made the decision, and it’s working. I asked myself, ‘ do I want to declare war on the world now? Am I just going to become the cranky old man, or am I going to enjoy being the cranky old man?’ I’m going to enjoy it.”