Roddy Doyle to hold Writers Fest chat
In Roddy Doyle’s latest novel Love, two old friends spend a summer’s night drinking and soul searching.
They begin the journey over dinner in a restaurant but soon hit the pavement and pubs of Dublin.
With each pint there are further nods to nostalgia and discussions of current concerns. The pair has a four-decade history of which they don’t always agree upon. But with each bar stool sat upon they get closer to the truth and each other.
Sadly, two old mates on a Dublin pub-crawl is truly a work of fiction for now as COVID-19 has completely shuttered what are called wet — booze only — pubs in Ireland. This is a fact that Doyle delivers with a sigh during a recent phone conversation from his home in Dublin.
“The notion of finishing work and putting a book under my arm and going down to my local for a very slow pint and to read a few pages, well, I can’t do that,” said Doyle. “Or text a friend and say ‘you want a pint?’ Well, you can’t do that.”
What you can do is book your friend and time at one of the pub/ restaurant establishments and then eat, drink and leave after 90 minutes. This arrangement, says Doyle, is not a popular one.
“I think a lot of men particularly, or maybe just Irish people, don’t like that mixed food and pub thing. It’s not the same thing at all,” said Doyle. “It’s a restaurant masquerading as a pub.”
Doyle, who won the 1993 Man Booker Prize for his novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, says he’s heard the same complaint from others. An old mate he ran into recently told the writer that he missed the pubs and “the bullshit, the crack, the slagging as we call it. The banter,” said Doyle. “I understand exactly what he means.”
It’s that crack and banter of the Irish variety that has been the meat and potatoes of a long and very prolific career filled with award-winning and bestselling novels (Love is No. 12), collections of short stories, much-loved children’s books and screenplays for hit movies.
Written two years ago, his latest novel, he says, came fast and furious as he found himself upping his usual daily writing output by three or four times. He says working on Love helped him cope with his mother’s death in 2018 and the news that a very close friend was also soon to pass away.
“I harnessed the grief I think in the many ways — the anxiety and all these things,” said Doyle. “The conversation in the book isn’t the conversation I’ve ever had myself. The circumstances are entirely fictional, but I think this notion of men in each other’s company was at the front of my head while I was writing this book because I knew I was going to lose that, not entirely because I had other friends, but I have vivid memories of being with that man in a pub not unlike the pub where the two young lads sit talking bullshit in the same way these two men talked 35, 36, 37 years ago. That was what was at the top when I got deeper and deeper into the book — I want to capture these two men talking.”
The two men talking are the narrator Davy, who has come back from London to see to his dying father, and Joe, who has a secret to share with his old pal. The conversation is sad, funny, thought provoking, occasionally annoying (that could be the beer talking) and always entertaining.
Doyle will be talking about Love and his other work when he appears via the internet for the Vancouver Writers Fest event The Summer Book Club featuring Roddy Doyle on Saturday at 2 p.m.
“The phrase ‘better than nothing’ springs to mind,” Doyle said about this new online world order. “My idea of a book coming out is wandering for a couple of weeks, going from city to city.”
Doyle says part of the enjoyment of a promotional tour for him is diving into a book himself.
“A big Penguin Classic is how I mark the occasion,” he says.
Now, reading is done at home and Doyle reports he’s had his nose in a handful of books including Such a Fun Age, a novel by Kiley Reid, Landfill: Notes on Gull Watching and Trash Picking in the Anthropocene by Tim Dee, and Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year.
“There’s a manual that will get me through the crisis,” said Doyle, adding a chuckle.
Like most writers when the world went indoors, Doyle was initially nonplussed at the idea of time alone.
“Yeah, at one level it was business as usual. Nothing changed insofar as I work alone in my office here at the top of the house and the day after the lockdown started I did exactly what I had been doing for years — went up to work,” said Doyle.
But soon the pandemic moved the goalposts and suddenly the game was not a familiar one.
“I was working on a novel set in the present day and I realized I had to set it aside because
I didn’t know what the present day was anymore with any great confidence, you know? I’m about ready to go back to it now,” said Doyle, adding plans to work in the theatre this year have been shelved as well.
While the novel was shelved, Doyle switched to another of his specialties.
“I started writing a few short stories instead because it seemed to me a better way to capture the various moments and the feelings and the sense of almost strange elation at the beginning of it. The sense of togetherness, then the more complicated feelings that come later. So that’s what I was doing,” said Doyle. “It took me a while to find out what it was I could do, then I got back into my stride again.”
When he wasn’t working, Doyle did what a lot of us did and he cooked with his family. In this case, his wife and two of the couple’s three adult kids.
“There was sort of concentration on food. We were taking turns making extraordinary dishes,” said Doyle.
With a laugh, he recounted the time when he realized that the culinary exploits of the household had escalated to a ridiculous level.
He says his son took advantage of the new-found freedom that allowed Dubliners to venture a couple of kilometres from home and headed to the local liquor store to purchase some vermouth, which was required for a recipe he was making.
“He’s not ordinarily a man who would carry a bottle of vermouth,” said Doyle. “It was a bit James Bond-ish, him taking his life into his own hands to deliver this lovely meal. I think that’s when we all began to calm down.”
One of the other things people relied on to get through these unique and uncharted times were TV shows and movies. Doyle admits to doing his fair share of binge viewing, too.
He also bought a bike. “Yes, I guess I did all the clichés,” he said.
What else are you going to do when your favourite pub is closed?