Starman

Howard Marks says to say hello! Roddy Doyle greets me in the lobby of Dublin s Buswell s Hotel with a warm handshake and the news that he s just returned from the Edinburgh Festival, where he spent a hugely entertaining evening in the company of my favourite drug buddy and everybody s favourite (former) drug dealer. And did one of Ireland s most controversial literary sons inhale during the course of this historic congress?
No he certainly did though, he smiles, shaking his tightly shaven head and fidgeting with the stud in his ear. I never got into drugs, never tried anything. They just seemed to completely pass me by. I m more into a couple of pints. But I was really surprised when I met him. He s a lovely guy really charming and entertaining. I loved the title of his show as well Time Well Wasted. I thought that was great.
Whatever about Howard s time, Doyle certainly can t pretend to have been on the doss for the last few years. The Booker Prize-winning author has just published his sixth novel and, to use a musical analogy, it s as radical a departure for him as Achtung Baby was for U2. A Star Called Henry marks a quantum leap in Roddy Doyle s prose style. Where once it was sparse and script-like, it s now teeming with more literary life than your average Amazonian pond. This is a vastly ambitious and epic work, an assured and subversive look behind the legends of Irish republicanism. This is not the work of the Roddy Doyle we once knew.
Volume One of what may or may not become a trilogy called The Last Roundup, the book tells the story of Henry Smart, a Dublin street kid, the son of a murderous one-legged bouncer, who rises from a childhood of dirt and squalor to go on to fight in the GPO in 1916, and then to become one of Michael Collins boys. Not only is it Doyle s first historical novel, it also marks his first significant step away from the careful realism of his previous books. Though this is probably his grittiest work particularly in its descriptions of turn of the century Dublin tenement life it s also his most fantastically told. Poetry practically pours off its pages.
Three days before this interview, the Irish Times a paper that s been long amongst his most ardent critics proclaimed it a masterpiece .
Little wonder he s still smiling . . .

OLAF TYARANSEN: Congratulations on the book! You seem to be getting a better ride with the press this time around as well.
RODDY DOYLE: Yeah, I m worried! (laughs). A good review from the Irish Times!
They ve always pretty much savaged you in the past, haven t they?
They have, except I think Joe O Connor once did a good review of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. Other than that, they ve sort of uniformly savaged me. But I think there s a new sheriff in town. So, yeah, it was great. I read it in bed. My wife got up and went down to the shops and let me stay in bed to read the first review. So I had that pleasure. It was very favourable. It was great.
Apparently there were one or two in magazines that came out that weren t all that favourable. But the bulk of them seem to be great. I tend to wait. I look at the first few and then I wait until there s a big pile of them before I bother looking again. Because I m not all that obsessed about them.
Well, you know what they say you shouldn t read your own press just weigh it!!
Or keep a score! You know, I m winning 3-2 (laughs).
Do you hang out with many other writers?
No. Hang out is a phrase I don t understand. I was talking recently about how I admire the work of Dermot Healy and somebody asked, do you hang out with him? And I said, well, he lives in Sligo and I live in Dublin, so where exactly are we supposed to hang out Kinnegad? No, I occasionally meet other writers at readings or festivals but that s about it.
So, with the millennium fast approaching, is this book the first part of Roddy Doyle s attempt to sum up twentieth century Ireland, the way De Lillo did with America in Underworld?
Well, I m not fussed about that because, I mean, how many months to the millennium? It will be three or four years, maybe more, before I finish the next volume. So that wouldn t be a personal obsession. But it may be the age I m at as well. I m 41 so I think in a way my life has straddled the old and the new Ireland. I sort of feel quite comfortable in both.
Still, it s a fairly radical departure for you particularly in terms of writing style.
I ve always been scared of repetition. And I m not interested in accruing money. We own our own house. I don t have to worry about a mortgage. So I felt it would be just a terrible shame to waste the creative freedom and the financial freedom I have, by just churning out more of the same because it was successful.
Were you worried that you might alienate foreign audiences because of the Irish historical aspect to the story?
I wasn t sure how much history to put in. I didn t want it to be a historical book. I didn t want people to read it as history. So if they do that s their problem, not mine. But there did have to be a certain amount of historical explanation. What I tried to do was to integrate it in a way that it never intruded. It s not something that occupied me too much when I was writing it.
Looking at all of your novels and this one in particular it struck me that they re all about poverty, in some way or other. Is that something that s of great concern to you?
I suppose so, because all the best stories are hard-luck stories. But I think all my characters survive. There s Jimmy Rabbitte who refuses to be confined by his circumstances. His father sadly does. With The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, she s taking command of her life and refusing to be defined, as well. And with Henry Smart, I suppose poverty is relative at the time. But, yeah, he grows up in the direst poverty.
That scene where he and his brother make soup out of baby rats and coat their hands in it in order to capture the parent rats practically had me retching!
Yeah, that was pretty awful!! I got that from Tenement Life In Dublin, this book that Gill & Macmillan brought out. It s a fantastic book an oral history. I suppose most of the people who talk in it are dead. But it was a fantastic book and it gave me the pictures and the ideas for the first part of the book his childhood.
It was really grim.
Yeah, but it was fascinating as well, wasn t it? It was really visual. I was on the verge of throwing up when I wrote that scene because rats are one of the few things that genuinely make me squirm. But that s where I let my imagination run riot. One of the nice things about writing this book was that I could go over the top, so to speak. The Woman Who Walked Into Doors every word had to be accurate, and every word had to count. And the most worrying part with TWWWID was not the violence, it was the sex, making sure it was a woman s sex, not a man s, not me writing it, but her.
No in A Star Called Henry, though!
This time round I could go over the top so, for example, when Henry s finished with a woman she s on the ceiling, you know, or she s on the mantle-piece! And I really enjoyed that over the top description. And the same to a degree with his descriptions of the world he grew up in. In the past I ve pared it away and in this case I was packing it, really packing it. And I enjoyed it.
Henry is fairly scathing of some of the legends of Irish republicanism for example, he describes Dev as smelling of shite and wearing red socks when he was arrested in 1916. What s your opinion of both the original Free-Staters and of modern day republicans?
Well, in terms of the ones in 1916, I think that they were men on the make. So I ve no time for them. But I ve a lot of time for the current leadership of Sinn Fein. I do admire them, as I do Mo Mowlam. People who ve introduced new words into the vocabulary, who ve jumped a lot to break moulds and redefine what s going on. It s very courageous.
I could imagine myself somewhere down the line optimistically, if everything s sorted out voting for Sinn Fein. If it becomes a question of their policy on education and health, I could imagine myself quite happily voting for them if they had the candidates. They ve got some very dodgy candidates. I generally admire leather jackets, but it depends on the shoulders carrying the leather jackets (laughs).
What do you think of Irish politicians generally?
There s never really been a separation of local and national politics so there s very few statesmen in there. It s not their fault. Possibly they ve a lot to offer their constituency but they ve absolutely nothing to offer the country. There are exceptions obviously. But I don t pay as much attention to it all as I used to. It s all a bit predictable, isn t it?
Questions &Answers is so tedious. You get the odd maverick, the odd character. I watched about ten minutes of it on Sunday, and Declan Lynch was refusing to be serious. You had Willie O Dea on one side of him and Mebh Ruane who s a barrel of laughs! on the other side, and the point was made that he refused to take anything seriously, which was about almost the only logical way to approach some of the questions, you know. I thought he was great. But I don t pay too much attention to it anymore.
How do you see yourself as a writer subversive, socialist or just plain storyteller?
I see myself as a voting human being. I m reluctant to use the word socialist because if you asked me 20 years ago what it was, I d have said it and I think you would have understood what it meant, but now I don t know if it has any meaning at all. I m not looking back bitterly and saying it was better back then, because it wasn t. I suppose to the spectrum of things I m to the left, but not particularly actively. But I think I can tell good stories.
But is there a deeper motivation behind those stories?
Yes, there is. On one level what I want to do is just write a good story and then, I suppose, the other things come into play. I want to write about certain types of people. I d like to think that a novel, a story, has to be entertaining. I d like to think in some ways that it s more than that, that people see the world somewhat differently having finished it. Even something like The Commitments where they might have seen a gang of kids as a threat, having read The Commitments they might not see them in the same light. Or they might see more in the word fuck than in the past. Not an absence of vocabulary but something akin to creativity. But when I start to write a book I don t have a set list of themes, to be honest.
When was the last time you received hate mail?
That s a good while ago. Actually it s a good while since I got any sort of mail (laughs). Usually it coincides with the publication of a book or the release of a film. So the last time would have been The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. Most of it was with Family. When the first one came out I was still teaching and it came to the school, and I opened it up and there was a photograph of me with DEAD scoured across my head. It was very badly written (laughs).
A past pupil, perhaps?
No, I would have ironed out any spelling errors before they left school. So it wasn t one of mine (smiles). But if you like it was the most pointed when The Family was broadcast, the most intense. There s hate mail, which is fine. And there s critical letters, which are fine. But when the death threat arrived, that rattled me slightly. I was listening to someone on the radio who said by the seventh they re just boring (laughs).
Going back to the poverty theme, are you conscious that there are still kids on the streets of Dublin who re living lives similar to the life of Henry in the book?
Yeah, of course. But this is part of the tyranny of the Celtic Tiger. All our problems are over we ve got a wonderful educated young populace, despite the fact that the statistics tell us that 25% of the population can t read. You know [wryly], poverty s over. So I think we have to fight the laziness of it. But I also think we ve lived with that national inferiority for so long and that did us no favours either. I ve been a victim of it for quite a while and now I think the danger is it could go the other direction. But generally I think it s all about economics.
In what sense?
Work is work. I think it s terrific. The word yuppy lost its meaning pretty quickly and I think Celtic Tiger has lost its meaning pretty quickly as well. I think there are parts of Dublin that have become exactly like any other city. Part of the joy of going to London for the first time in 1978 was that there was a decent gig on every Friday night and now that s the case in Dublin as well. You know, we re finally catching up.
I know you were very actively involved in campaigning for a Yes vote during the Divorce Referendum. Will you campaign if there s another Abortion Referendum?
I doubt it. Well, it depends on the context. If it s about whether abortion should be available in this country, I personally think it should. But I m also aware that the vast majority of people in this country disagree with me and that no amount of words from me would change their minds. So, I don t feel like to sound brutal wasting my time. Divorce was there to be won but it was spinning away. So that s why I got worked up about it. I felt that it was a defining moment in Irish current history. But whether abortion is or not, I don t know.
It s a very complicated thing you know, where does life begin and all this sort of stuff. I have no feelings about it. But I do think that the fascists in Youth Defence along with the politically correct monsters on the other side these people should be confronted and booed at.
I think they thrive on being booed at.
Maybe they do, but you can t sit back and let them try to insist that they represent us in some way.
How do you feel about the Catholic Church these days? Vindicated?
I have no opinion on the Catholic Church. None whatsoever. It s quite refreshing that it doesn t seem to matter. I couldn t care less. In a way it does seem a terrible pity that you ve got ordinary, competent, may I use the word, decent, priests who have to carry that ugliness on their shoulders for the rest of their lives. And that saddens me. I ve nothing really to do with them actively, but it saddens me.
When Family was broadcast I got a letter from a priest in the Midlands who invited me to leave the country. He said: In your own words, Mr Doyle fuck off!! We don t want you here . And if Family was broadcast today I don t think he d write that letter. I don t think he d be as secure writing that. So now that the Church has gone out of my life, I wish it well (laughs).
Do you believe in an afterlife?
There isn t one. So I would hope that death keeps away for a little while yet.
What further ambitions do you have as a writer? I mean, you ve won the Booker Prize . . .
That was never an ambition in the first place. It just came around. I have no ambitions to win prizes. There s no point in having ambitions like that because you don t seem to have much to do with it anyway. I d like to finish this Henry Smart story. That s going to take a decade, perhaps. That s ambition enough. And there are a couple of immediate ideas I have that will become films. But in other areas of my life there are other ambitions or wishes. Obviously, one would like to see one s kids grow up healthy and independent. I hope as a parent I ll be able to loosen the leash as they get older.
How do your kids deal with your success?
They haven t had to yet, they re still too young. They ve seen my picture in the paper now and again and I ve given them copies of my books. And there s a small book that New Island are bringing out later in the year, a series of books for adults who are learning to read, and I ll give them copies of that. I ve written a kids story but it needs a bit more work and they did their own illustrations for it. They re aware that this is what I do for a living but they re not overly enamoured.
How would you like to be remembered? What would your epitaph be?
I ve nothing to say on that issue at all. Being as honest as I can be here I hope that I die before my kids do and I hope that they and whoever s left behind remember me with affection. That s about it. I d like to think that the books would be on the shelves after I die, but not to the extent that that s an obsession.
I read Vaclav Havel s book, Letters To Olga, where he wrote these letters from jail to his wife, who is now dead. It was heavy-going. But he seemed to define immortality as being that you come into contact with somebody and they come away somewhat changed. It could be for the good, like you pass a compliment or it could be for the bad, as in the case of a teacher who brutalises somebody or where sarcasm destroys somebody. And that to me is immortality.
But as to epitaphs and that, I could never work up the honest energy to do it, because it wouldn t really interest me. n
A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle (Jonathan Cape, #16.99) is out now.