THE COMMITMENT
Channel your memories, work hard, but be kind to yourself, Booker-winning Irish novelist Roddy Doyle tells Tina Jackson
Roddy Doyle
Who writes the lives, hopes, dreams, sorrows and failures of ordinary people with greater insight, empathy and humanity than Roddy Doyle? The Booker Prize-winning Dublin writer broke new ground with his much-loved first novel, 1987’s The Commitments and he’s still doing it. His new novel Smile, out this month, is his eleventh. In it, his middle-aged character Victor looks back over formative events in his life. It’s as profound, funny, sad and shocking as anything Roddy has ever written.
‘These things bubble away, but maybe four years ago I was listening to the radio and there was a homeless man, and he sounded, if not elderly, as if he had decades under his belt,’ describes Roddy. ‘He said he looked at people walking past him and they seemed as if they knew where they were going – it was like a secret they knew and he didn’t. It struck me as a brilliant description of a sensation we must all feel at some time. I decided that the next book I was writing, one of the characters was going to say that. That gave me my ending and I didn’t have a clue how I’d get there.’
When we meet Victor, he’s in Donnelly’s pub, trying to get his life together and make friends after a divorce. A man in the pub introduces himself as an old schoolmate. Victor dislikes him instantly, and the memories he stirs up – of his treatment by one of the Christian Brothers who taught him – even more.
‘School memories were bubbling away, though I must make it clear that I was never sexually abused by a Christian Brother, and I’ve never witnessed it,’ says Roddy. ‘But the atmosphere of that time has bubbled way, and I wanted to go back to that time – though not in an autobiographical way.’
In 2009, The Irish Child Abuse Commission published a lengthy report detailing emotional, physical and sexual abuse that included the testimonies of nearly 2,000 witnesses who attended more than 200 Catholic-run schools between the 1930s and the 1990s. The then Prime Minister Brian Cowan publicly apologised to the victims for the Government’s failure to intervene.
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October 2017
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