Fiction Smile

Roddy Doyle (Jonathan Cape, £14.99)

IRELAND HAS never lacked for literary progeny, but not since James Joyce has ‘dear, dirty Dublin’ inspired a more fluent or honest anatomist than roddy Doyle. It’s 30 years since The Commitments—his raucous celebration of the city’s Northside, which later blasted from page to film and stage—was published. Mr Doyle remains, however, inimitable among contemporary storytellers and peerless at yoking humour to humanity. Title aside, it’s hard not to beam at the prospect of his new novel.

Smile opens in Donnelly’s pub with 54-year-old Dubliner Victor Forde nursing a pint and needing to talk. There’s promise of some vintage Doyle—talk is, above all, what the author renders best—but what follows is a revelation, in every sense.

A stranger joins Victor with his drink. Ed Fitzpatrick claims to know him from schooldays. He probes Victor for shared recollections of their teenage years being educated by Christian Brothers in one of the many institutions run, countrywide, by the Catholic order. Victor, alone after the end of his marriage to television celebrity rachel and reduced to the wisp of a reputation for ‘saying the unsayable’ as a pundit, dislikes Fitzpatrick.

He also dislikes the not-soburied memories that Fitzpatrick disturbs. Never forget ‘in Ireland you can get along for a long time before the truth starts to matter’.

Gritty and witty, this is a virtuouso performance, but, beneath the blarney, Mr Doyle is intent on excavating a deep bog of history and the darkest haunts of the human heart. For once, tellingly, an insight by Oscar Wilde seems more apt than easily borrowed: ‘Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.’ Smile is a devastating reminder that any smile can prove paper-thin. Caroline Jackson