Roddy Doyle

City Safari: Some Irish “Love” From The Old Sod

Roddy Doyle

Wed, Jul 01, 2020

By Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor

Irish novelist, playwright and children’s author Roddy Doyle made a virtual visit to Philadelphia recently to promote his new novel, LOVE. Doyle talked with novelist Liz Moore as part of the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Author Events series to an unseen audience of 300. The Cloud Cast virtual event was live streamed and showed the author in his home in Dublin.

Doyle’s house just outside of Dublin sits on a hill overlooking the sea. At the bottom of the hill there’s a bus that can take him into downtown Dublin in ten minutes. When he’s not bussing it, he sometimes rides his bicycle, a 14-minute ride.  

A Dubliner by birth, Doyle is celebrating the release of ‘Love,’ about the reunion of two male friends in a pub where they relive and recount old times. In the pub they ape, as best they can, the way they shared experiences as younger men, when drinking heavily and intensely harbored no physical consequences. One of the men has a secret he will reveal during the course of the conversation. 

Publishers Weeklypraised the book. "This witty, satisfying novel about male friendship, aging, and guilt from Doyle dramatizes language’s inadequacies when it comes to affairs of the heart . . . The two men are nothing if not good company. By closing time, Doyle has focused the novel’s rambling energy into an elegiac and sobering climax. This one is a winner.”                                                                                                           

A Kirkus review of LOVE was somewhat less than favorable.

 "Whatever clarity they are finding isn't all that clear to the reader, who is beginning to find their company as exhausting and interminable as they do….  Eventually, they have to leave….By the time the novel belatedly reaches the big reveal, the reader has passed the point of caring. " 

After graduation from the University College of Dublin, Doyle taught English and Geography in high school for 14 years. In 1987 he self published his first novel, ‘The Commitments,’ about a group of working class teenage boys who start a rock ’n roll band. The fate of many self published books is often containment in moldy boxes on a basement shelf but Doyle’s vanity project went viral before there was a viral: the novel was made into a very successful film.   

The same fate awaited his second novel, ‘The Snapper,” (1990) a novel about single mothers or, as Doyle likes to say, "Had I written this book twenty years earlier when Ireland was a different country, the [out of wedlock] baby in this story would have to be hidden away in a convent.” 

His third novel, The Van(1991), about two friends who go into business together when they purchase a ‘chipper’ or a Fish and Chips van, was also made into a movie.

Three homeruns and you’re out, because Doyle said the book-to-film scenario hasn’t revisited him since The Van.

"It hasn’t happened since,” he told me by phone from his Dublin study,  "Although I wrote scripts for two movies… they were original stories. 

There were plans to make my novel "A Star Called Henry” into a movie but it never happened. My first three novels were adapted to the screen and I can see why. The stories were kind of in a straight line and I was very lucky in that regard. My fourth novel, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha,won the Booker Prize, so the early days were heady days.”

Doyle is one of those Irishmen with the gift of gab. Not only does he speak fast but his words pack a lot of information in a short number of sentences.

His book, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Hais the world as seen through the eyes of a ten-year old Dublin boy in the year 1968. Paddy Clarke’s words of wisdom, include:

   

"They didn’t understand. They didn’t understand that robbing had nothing to do with what we wanted; it was the dare, the terror, the getting away with it.”  

Doyle says that this highly productive six-year span in his life, from 1987 to 1993, "seems like a long time when you’re a young man and when you’re living them but when you look at them now it’s just a blink, really.” He tells me it surprises him that he not only wrote four novels in quick succession but a 4-part TV series, two plays, co-authored a screenplay and two original screenplays while teaching high school and being the father of two children.  

Listen to any online interview with, the always humorous, Doyle and you’re likely to hear more than a few noteworthy quotes. 

Some Roddy Doyle gems include:

         

"When you say you know Irish literature, you know some because it’s going to take you a lifetime to read.”

"While we are laughing, life is worth living.”

 "Men my age don’t read fiction, generally. They just want to read about Hitler and Stalin.”

"There was always a dog in the house when I was a kid.”

An interviewer asked him if he was happy. Doyle said, "No. Occasionally there are things that make me happy but how would you sustain happiness without the use of drink and drugs?”  

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Hahas been called the greatest depiction of childhood in English language literature. Sometimes a reader will ask Doyle about the book and mention two Ha’s Ha’s instead of the [obligatory] three. I fell into that trap during my own transatlantic chat with the author. "You forgot a ‘Ha,’” Doyle said. I told him that saying Ha three times in a row does have a certain sort of magic.  

How did he come up with such a title? Doyle says he was on a pay phone with his publisher to tell him that he had completed the novel. "He said ‘that’s great news, what’s the title?’ I said I don’t have one; he said ‘I think we need one quick, I want to get it into the spring catalog.’ This was a different book. I saw this sort of crude nursery rhyme, something the boys in the school would chant at Paddy Clarke…the Ha, Ha, Ha. Paddy’s schoolmates just keep chanting it. I suggested the title to my publisher and he liked it.”   

Doyle has written one non-fiction book, a memoir of his parents. "Rory and Ita,”(2002). "They’re dead now,” Doyle says. "I co-wrote a book with an Irish soccer player called "The Second Half—memories of Roy Keane,”which came out in 2014. I don’t write newspaper columns as such, and I’ve never written a column or an article about religion.”

I had intended to ask Doyle about religion but held back. After the interview I checked his Wikipedia bio and discovered that he’s an atheist.  

        

Vanity Fair’sfeature on Doyle in 2017 noted that, "Much of 

the change sweeping Ireland is, of course, tied to the waning influence of Catholicism. When Doyle was 17, he realized he was an atheist, a slow-burning epiphany that didn’t just vex his parents, but hampered his day-to-day decisions for decades: ‘I constantly had to explain, no, I can’t do that. I’m an atheist.’ Today, atheism is unremarkable (‘Nobody gives a toss what my religion is any more’), a reality punctuated by last year’s same-sex marriage referendum, which saw thousands upon thousands of Ireland’s diaspora fly home to vote for gay rights.” 

The change in Ireland was noted in 2012 when Psychology Todaynoted that religious attendance rates and belief in God in Ireland had dropped significantly, making Ireland "indistinguishable from the other affluent secular countries of Europe.”

In 2013, Irish Centralreported that, "The latest figures confirm a 2011 a poll by Gallup International, which showed that Ireland now ranks among the top ten atheist nations worldwide, in a huge shift from the last poll in 2005. In the six years between polls, according to the results, one in five Irish people set aside religion. "

The Irish 2017 Census reported that 78 percent of the country identifies as Catholic, down from 84 percent in 2012. 

Roddy Doyle’s work doesn’t generally stir up any controversy but that was not the case when his 4-part series about a working class Dublin family, The Spencers, aired on RTE and BBC1 in 1994. At that time, he received both praise and condemnation. Condemnation came in the form of death threats. His accusers thought he was attacking working class families and Catholicism.

Doyle says he read the compliments and threats as Facebook messages late in bed late one night and then went off to sleep. He adds he wouldn’t be so cavalier about getting death threats today but would go straight to the authorities.  

Doyle, who grew up in Kabarik, lives on a hill on the north side of Dublin, a 3 minute walk from the sea. "I’m not worried about climate change,” he told me. "I think there’s a good 50 years before the sea starts lapping up the front step.”

We wind up talking about the covid lockdown, which was especially intense in Ireland. 

"The messages at the beginning of the covid crisis were very clear. For instance, the direct contact numbers went down drastically because people just obeyed. It’s more complicated now, now that everything is voluntary. By degrees things are loosening up. Hopefully this has been a once in a lifetime experience. ‘

He says the lockdown didn’t change his life that drastically because, as a writer, he’s used to spending hours alone in his study. His once-a-day walks to the sea helped him get through most days. He says he is glad that his children are adults. "I didn’t have to worry about a teenage boy climbing out the bedroom window to go and find his friends. Essentially what you’re asking young people to do is behave like middle aged people for three months.”

         

He adds that he is grateful that both his parents are no longer alive so he didn’t have to worry about them during the crisis.

         

Still, the 3-month lockdown experience has wrought unexpected changes to what Doyle imagined he would be working on. "I’m now writing short stories. I had several plays lined up for this and they are all postponed or cancelled. I don’t know when theaters will be able to be able to open again. Theater for me for many years has been a great source of joy. "   

         

"We’ve experienced quite a lot in the last three months,” he tells me before signing off. "There might be a rush of really not very good novels [about covid and the lockdown experience].” 

          

I tell him I’m beginning to see these trends in Philadelphia, with theater companies offering memberships in a PANdemic Reading club. 

         

Doyle says he’s looking forward to seeing live theater again, although if he has to he will be content with virtual theater because "it’s better than nothing.” 

         

Oscar Wilde’s quote, "Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess,” doesn’t necessarily work in the case of theater. 

         

"You know, if I see a really, really brilliant theater monologue, I don’t necessarily want to see another one a week later.”