Blast From The Past

Around 5.30pm on November 17, 1974, the then 15-year-old Roddy Doyle was at home in his parents’ house in Kilbarrack when he heard an ominously loud bang coming from the city centre. The first deadly strike of what became known as the ‘Dublin bombings’, it was a UVF car bomb exploding on Talbot Street.

“I remember it vividly,” Doyle says. “I was at home and I remember my sister was meeting her boyfriend in town. There was this almighty bang, even from that distance. There was obviously no mobile phones back then so there was the worry of that. Anyway she phoned later that night. She had been somewhere else, blissfully unaware that anything had happened. I think she was in the basement of a pub somewhere, and when she came up the whole place was mad. So that’s a memory.”
That notorious terrorist attack features in Doyle’s latest novel, The Dead Republic (the final instalment of an epic trilogy he calls The Last Roundup, preceded by 1999’s A Star Called Henry and 2004’s Oh, Play That Thing!). Indeed, his narrator Henry Smart – who fought in the Easter Rising in the first book, and managed jazz musician Louis Armstrong in the second – is caught in the blast.
The Dead Republic opens in 1951, as Smart (now missing a leg) returns to Ireland for the first time since his escape in 1922. Having been appointed ‘IRA consultant’ on John Ford’s film The Quiet Man, he arrives into Shannon in the company of John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara and the famous Hollywood director himself.
While the story features many real life characters, Doyle is at pains to emphasise that it’s still very much a work of fiction. “I did a lot of research, but a lot of it kind of carried over from Oh Play That Thing!’ The last part of that book featured John Ford so I was really just reacquainting myself with notes I’d taken for that book or just reading further. So there was a lot of formal research, but Ford’s career and Ford himself are very well documented.
“Actually, there was an editorial oversight. In the other books, I have a list of the books I read for research and which were of use to me. I do have one for this one too, but somebody forgot to put it in. It’ll be in all the future editions. I read slavishly to make sure it was as accurate as it could be, but then I pick and choose my accuracies. Once you have a fictional character in a real setting, it’s fiction.”
When Smart is later recruited into the IRA by a young, brown-bearded provisional, Doyle stresses in the text that it’s not Gerry Adams. “You can’t legislate as to how people will read a book – and you’ve no right to, really – but I don’t want people thinking that this is history. But I saw no reason why you wouldn’t mark it and just say, ‘This is not who you think it might be’.”
It’s been a full 15 years since Doyle began writing The Last Roundup. Was the entire trilogy mapped out in his head from the start?
“No, I couldn’t have,” he says. “I always knew Henry was coming back to Ireland. When I was coming up to the end of the first book, I knew he was going to meet Louis Armstrong and I knew he was going to meet John Ford. Because Louis Armstrong was an attempt to get as far away from Ireland as possible, and then John Ford was an accidental way that he could actually be sucked back into some sort of definition of Irishness. But I didn’t know that it would be so late in the book that he’d encounter Ford.
“After that I knew that he was somehow or other going to become involved with the modern IRA and the Provos, and that it was going to be based around the hunger strikes. But as to how I was going to get him to the finishing line and where exactly I was going to stop, I didn’t know until I was writing the third one and I was reading my history and reminding myself. And, of course, nobody knew about the secret Northern Ireland peace talks when I started writing in 1995.”
As Henry Smart’s story progressed through the 1970s, Doyle found that research became almost unnecessary. “The fact that I’m writing about the past doesn’t necessarily mean it’s historical. I mean this book, it’s set in my lifetime, most of it. Certainly I found myself having to do less and less reading towards the end. Once he was in the 1950s, I was there. It’s hard to accept that something that happened in your lifetime is now history, but the Dublin bombings were almost 36 years ago.”
The Dead Republic also sees Smart reunited with his long lost wife in quite unlikely circumstances – which require much willing suspension of disbelief. Is the author deliberately playing with his readers?
“Yeah, I’m playing with myself – if I may use that phrase,” he smiles. “I didn’t want it to be too neat. I do accept coincidences, they happen all the time. There was a certain rounding up, the story needed a rounding up – the whole thing, after all, is called The Last Roundup – so I did want certain characters to come back in. I really wanted to bring his wife back.”
There’s a big newspaper debate raging at the moment about the fact that most of Ireland’s literary novelists seem to be writing books set in the past (Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea, Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn, Colum McCann’s Let The Great World Spin, etc) rather than tackling contemporary issues. Having just finished a trilogy that encompasses the whole history of the twentieth century, what’s Doyle’s take on it?
“I find myself in agreement and disagreement, really,” he says, shrugging. “Like with a lot of things. I think life would be a lot more bearable if people would accept that there are actually several answers to different questions. But between writing Oh, Play That Thing! and this book, I wrote Paula Spencer which was set very deliberately in 2004/2005, and was her response to the Celtic Tiger. So I do write about the present as well.
“And I think to say that writers don’t write about the present is a nonsense really. Although you can come up with some brilliant books that prove the argument to be correct. But then there are others that disprove it. Or you can come up with someone like Kevin Barry’s work, which is in a different zone altogether. So I wouldn’t lose sleep about the argument. Like, when I wrote The Commitments it was in the present day.”
Incidentally, is Doyle aware that his debut novel is quoted approvingly by former NME journalist Nick Kent in his new memoir, Apathy for the Devil?
“Is it? That’s great!” he says, looking chuffed. “I must pick up a copy on the way home. I loved that journalism compilation he did years ago [The Dark Stuff]. Because I read all those stories when they were first published in the NME. Actually, The Commitments is mentioned in Greil Marcus’s new book about Van Morrison as well. I’m obviously finally becoming cool.”