Roddy Doyle
The award-winning Dublin author on his latest publication, Charlie Savage
Why Charlie? This is the first question I put to Roddy Doyle when I meet him over a ham sandwich to chat about his latest book – a compilation of his Charlie Savage columns which appear weekly in the Irish Independent Weekend magazine.
Roddy’s gift for authentic dialogue has led him to write in many voices, from ten-year-old working-class boys in Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, to a woman regularly beaten by her husband in The Woman Who Walked into Doors. So why then is the world of a white, workingclass Dubliner in his 60s, happily married with children and an unknown (even to him) number of grandchildren worth telling? Roddy acknowledges that as Charlie’s contemporary, it is easier to write weekly pieces that blend his own musings and memories with the character closest to him in terms of circumstance. “It is closer to my experience. It immediately seemed like a good one to go for. I thought I’d go for someone just a little bit older than me, with a clatter of grandchildren, and things are changing – none of us wants to get older.”
As well as allowing an outlet for Roddy’s meditations on the experience of ageing, the column has allowed him to explore his own memories of his parents and childhood. Those memories came into particular focus when he nursed his mother at his childhood home before she passed away. “With this particular volume, my mother wasn’t well and she eventually died. She was very old and I was spending a lot of time with her. Inevitably, you begin to think about your childhood.”
He explains that the column isn’t autobiographical but that his memories are passed through the lens of Charlie Savage. “As parents and then contemporaries die, it can be quite distressing but at the same time it opens up doors to rooms that were shut, and if you’re lucky the contents of those rooms are pleasant. Being able to harness these feelings and the indignity of growing old can be quite funny. Charlie is lucky though because he’s healthy. It would be different if he had cancer. So it’s easy for him to grow old gracefully.”
There have been detractors who have called out Charlie Savage for being patronisingly sexist at times – for instance, referring to his wife as ‘the wife’, but Roddy doesn’t take this criticism on board. “I’m sure there are people who will read it and pick his inadequacies. If we’re to filter through language and decide what is acceptable and what isn’t acceptable – clearly there are words, phrases, attitudes that aren’t acceptable in public – but if we start being too prescriptive, the language will disappear altogether.”
Like many men of his age, Charlie cherry-picks the things he wants to take on board and the things he wants to adopt a faux bewilderment at. “He adores the daughter and he would readily acknowledge her intelligence. So he will listen to what she has to say and some of it is daft – the Lycra and the diets – but that’s the fun of it.” He likens Charlie to another great character of his: Dessie Rabbitte. “He’s deliberately bewildered. A bit like Colm Meaney in The Snapper. Deliberately, part of the outlook is bewilderment and outrage – it’s part of the fun.”
It’s opportune that he should mention The Snapper as this work is debated again and again in terms of consent and sexual assault, and whether Sharon Rabbitte was raped by George Burgess, her friend’s father who took advantage of her when she was drunk. Doyle explains he believes not. “I have a very clear idea, very clear, that no she wasn’t, but it is still a discussion. Including the fact that it was written in 1987 and now it’s 32 years later.” If he wrote it today would he write it differently? “No I don’t think I would. There are aspects of it that would have to change if it was set today. I don’t think I’d write it differently. She might reach different conclusions herself, but it might be a very different book then. Her attitude towards abortion would be different, but at the end of the day it is a novel and the end result is a baby, so even if she favours abortion, I’d still have her holding on to the child, because then it wouldn’t be The Snapper.”
Roddy says that he wrote that section of The Snapper in the knowledge that attitudes change and that a lot of people wouldn’t like it but he says that wouldn’t stop him writing a story which he thinks fits a particular character. While there are universal themes, it is after all, just one character’s story. “The Woman Who Walked into Doors was the story of a woman who was beaten by her husband. I’m not saying all working-class women are beaten by their husbands, so that accusation which came with Family (a 1994 RTÉ drama based on the story), I find easy to dismiss.”
Some of the most autobiographical moments in the Charlie Savage collection come when his thoughts turn to friendship, especially the kind that exists between men. The book itself is dedicated to Roddy’s friend Ronnie Caraher who sadly passed away last May and Charlie, like Roddy, has a group of cherished school friends who remain an important part of his life. “As you get older there’s great comfort to be had when you’re sharing that with somebody else. I have a group of friends – it’s a smaller group now because two have died. We’ve grown together from childhood and there’s great emotional clout in that shared history. You can take shortcuts on those conversations, or not even speak; you know each other so well. It’s devastating when one dies; part of yourself is ripped out really. This is part of the mortality of us all.”
Roddy believes that it is healthy for men to spend time together, shoulder to shoulder, whether that’s having a pint or just out for a walk. “I think men very often become quite isolated and sometimes retirement isn’t such a particularly good idea. Having led active lives, suddenly they’re inactive. Women are much better at creating formal or informal reasons to gather – like the book club phenomenon, which has nothing to do with books altogether. There are those who look out the window of their car, see a man in his 60s going into a pub and tut as they go home to their glass of wine. But more than likely he is going into to keep company with other men his own age and it is a very healthy thing to do.”
Charlie Savage by Roddy Doyle (Jonathan Cape) is out now in hardback, €14.99