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Interview: Roddy Doyle

Roddy Doyle’s work has always had distinctive touches to it: that gritty focus on Dublin working-class life, that lively patter of dialogue, those dark glints of humour. It would be hard to mistake a snippet of his writing for anyone else’s.

But flicking through his recent books, you’ll find another pattern emerging. Doyle isn’t getting any younger – and neither are his characters. Looming over all of them is a dawning sense of unstoppable age. It tugs away quietly, sometimes breaking through, as it does in Bullfighting

I recognise what’s going on in my head, what’s been going on for a while, actually, on and off. It’s middle age. I know that. It’s getting older, slower, tired, bored, useless. It’s death becoming real. The old neighbours from my childhood dying. And even people my own age. Cancer mostly. 

Bullfighting is a short-story collection full of middle-aged men, contemplating what it means to be fifty-something. The reference to cancer is telling: The Guts, Doyle’s latest novel, shows Jimmy Rabbitte coping with a tumour in his (eponymous) bowels.

Is this the same brash Jimmy that formed The Commitments in 1987? Is this the same Roddy Doyle that wrote so convincingly through the eyes of ten year old Paddy Clarke, winning the 1993 Booker Prize?

Paddy Clarke definitely is a product of my life at that time – full-time teacher, father of a new baby, with another one on the way, writing other things as well.” The classroom and the young family home are certainly the two arenas in which Paddy plays out his battles – but it’s not the only effect that life in 1993 had on the book.

“They’re tiny little episodes, that were written in the tiny little bits of time that I had”, he remembers. “I was writing a script for The Snapper, I was planning a television series that became Family”. That fragmentary, snippet-like style was something he also used in later, more leisurely projects; but it came from a hectic pace of life. “It seems in retrospect – how the fuck did I do all that? I think a lot of people, looking back, wonder.”

Doyle’s early writing experiences were anything but hectic. He started off with a satiric column in “a paper that came out occasionally called Student, believe it or not”, and only tried his hand at fiction after three years as an English teacher.

Even that wasn’t particularly stressful. “Secondary school holidays in Ireland are very generous – June, July and August”. Doyle came to London, to “get into the discipline of writing a bit every day”, away from the temptations of home. “I went down to Wood Green library and wrote, sometimes for just a few hours, sometimes I’d force myself to stay there all day. I’d go five or six times a week.”

“I had that tenacity or bloody-mindedness just to keep at it – which is something that never gets a look-in when you get to talks about writing, or the more academic stuff about writing.”

Any nostalgia? “No, I don’t miss being a teacher – it’s not a part of my life that I miss at all.” In fact, Doyle seems to have a fairly comfortable relationship with his past. “The memories generally are brilliant – fatherhood, the adventure that was, writing all these books, to be involved in films … but that’s lived. And I’m not looking back – there’s nothing about it that I would regret.”

Perhaps critics have been too hasty to attribute the angst that haunts so many of his characters to Doyle himself. “In terms of both my life, and the material that I have to write about, I’m quite content being at the age I am now”. “Material” is interesting; it seems that Doyle can observe the effects of age, and the associated qualms, without being too personally burdened by them. “Being a middle-aged man, watching a middle-aged world: there’s loads of material for writing”.

The interview ends with the sense that Doyle is aware of the passing years, without being troubled by them; keen to explore anxieties of change, but happy in the knowledge that something always remains.

Music and football are two constants that persist through the writing, from Paddy Clarke’s George Best kickabout games and Hank Williams records to Champions League Wednesday nights and the latest Springsteen album.

“I think it’s a good thing – that link back – it’s an enthusiasm”. He mentions dusting off Blood on the Tracks a couple of nights before (“no album I buy now at the age of fifty-five will ever mean as much”), and is a devout Chelsea fan. “I jump up and I shout at the telly – I went beserk went Torres scored yesterday”.

“I’m a fully fledged-adult – but there is that thread, because it’s not that different to my reaction as a twelve-year old”. It’s a comforting consistency, “like a guitar string: you can pluck it at any point in your life and the same note resonates”.

The Guts is published by Jonathon Cape and is available here.  

 

 

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