Interview: Hot Press talks to Rob Doyle

Unsurprisingly, in a collection of short experimental fiction that features a story titled ‘Anus – Black Sun’, there’s quite a lot of excrement in Rob Doyle’s second book, This is the Ritual. That’s not a comment on the quality of his often bleak and brutally raw writings, just an observation on the content. The opening piece features a failed Irish writer bemoaning “the hideous shit of literature.” But several other stories also deal with matters faecal.

“Oh really, did that jump out at you?” the 33-year-old Dubliner asks, looking slightly dismayed. “That’s totally not a conscious thing. I do remember my editor once saying, ‘Could you maybe think about using the word ‘excrement’ a little less?’ I hadn’t even realised there was so many in it, but I suppose there is. Norman Mailer said never ignore shit, you know, which is interesting.”

A tall, thin, intense character, Doyle is sipping wine with Hot Press in the Library Bar of Dublin’s Central Hotel. The last time we met was about 18 months ago, in the same location, to discuss his debut novel, Here are the Young Men. Set in Celtic Tiger Dublin of 2003, that rather unrelenting coming of age novel was a critical and commercial success. So much so that Doyle was essentially free to do what he wanted with his sophomore publication.

“There was a lot of glee in this book for me,” he admits, “in the sense of, ‘I’ve got the first book behind me and I’m going to put a lot of the ideas and the aesthetic principles and so on, that I’ve been thinking of for years into practice and really go nuts and try out things’. Not in the way that it’s deliberately trying to alienate the reader – I’m really not into that – but just to be free and go a bit wild.”

For the most part, Doyle’s unfettered literary wildness works. His stories are often about alienation, but don’t actually alienate. Soaked with sex, drugs, booze, philosophy, insanity and broken artistic dreams, and set in various international locations, the best of these dark, thrilling and provocative pieces will stay with you long after you’ve put the book down.

“Obviously it is a collection of short fictions, but I’ve really come to start thinking of it almost as a novel, in the sense that the pieces are linked together in so many ways, some subtle, and some not so subtle,” he explains. “While it is a collection, I also see it as a cohesive book, that’s almost like a guide, a tour of consciousness. A lot of it is very autobiographical and explicitly so.”

Echoing the likes of Burroughs, Ballard and Bolano, This is the Ritual is a disturbing read. It’s also daring, with a naked shamelessness to some of the prose. Left alone in his lover’s apartment, the insanely jealous narrator of ‘The Turk Inside’ “did what you’d expect: sniff her underwear, scrutinise the toilet bowl, pull myself off in her bed.”
He smiles when I mention this. “Yeah I’m glad you picked that up now, because that particular bit that you’re talking about is where I read it and I go... (mock shudders). It’s the same with the first book. Every kind of fucking premature ejaculation and teenage sexual frustration – that’s all in there and it’s pretty much you’re reading over your own stuff and you’re cringing going, ‘Oh Christ’! But I would never ever change it, even if I wanted to, because that’s the gold, you know? And the closer you can get to that, that’s just what I’m interested in writing, really.”

He lives it like he writes it. Currently licking his wounds from yet another failed relationship, which had him based in Paris for a time, Doyle is now living alone in a cold house in Rosslare (where the daily ferry is a constant temptation). He spent much of his twenties travelling the globe, soaking up experiences and learning his trade.

All of the stories – some of which have been previously published - are relatively recent. “It’s been written over the last few years. The earliest story in it would be ‘Mexico Drift’: that was written about the punks in the desert. Not much in that is fiction, oddly enough, but that was the first thing that was published back in 2012.”

Doyle himself occasionally appears as a real character in his stories, but This is the Ritual also features intriguingly playful profiles of several imaginary Irish writers, all of whom are obscure and doomed. ‘Martin Knows Me’ is about an aspiring Derry novelist who worships Martin Amis, and opens with the lines, “Failure can be a kind of career. Bitterness too.”

“That was something I had wanted to do for ages,” he explains. “It was something I was talking to [poet] Dave Lordan about. We were going to write a book together, a compendium of fake Irish authors. We were gonna do it as a kind of collaborative project but, as often happens, we didn’t quite see eye to eye about what it wanted to be about. I had a few of them that I had written, and published here and there, so I decided to use them.”

Doyle himself has already surpassed the achievements of his fictional authors. His next creative forays will be in film. There’s a script of Here are the Young Men, co-written with Irish actor Eoin Macken, currently in development.

He has also just starred in a UK indie movie called Hit The North. “That came out of the blue,” he reflects. “Last spring out of the blue I got contacted by the novelist [and Hot Press writer] Peter Murphy and his wife, Paula Cox. They told me that there was this friend of theirs, Daniel Sayer, making this film. They were determined that, for the lead role, they wanted a non-actor, someone who wasn’t a professional actor, but somebody who was a creative type or whatever. So they thought of me.”

Having immediately hit it off with Sayer, he got the part. “The film is a road movie set in 1994,” he explains. “Most films are filmed in a month-and-a-half or two months, but this was filmed in like seven or eight months because I went to France to be with my then-girlfriend, and so it was a lot of flying over to the UK for a week and back.”

Hit The North is being edited at the moment. “It’s a very independent film, which has a great crew on it, but it’s more or less this guy sinking his life savings into a very arty project. It’s very much the grandiose romantic gesture, which I love! It is very unabashedly arthouse, very slow, digressive. It’s a road movie – but the plot is minimal and the image is primary. Lots of conversation in the car, lots of silence, lots of just really beautiful haunting footage. It’s a certain aesthetic, post-industrial, North England, Joy Divisiony. Long coats and coldness. Closing mines.”

Doyle’s not expecting Hollywood stardom from the project. “What they told me was 300 feature films get made in the UK – and how many of those do you hear about? So, at the minimum, it’ll probably get a low-key arthouse release. But it exists. Beyond that I have no idea. It’s gorgeous, I’ve got all the screen-grabs. It’s mad – the sex scenes, the nudity. There’s a shitting scene in it, which I hope ends up on the cutting room floor.”
He wrinkles his nose in mock disgust and laughs. “I didn’t actually shit, I just had to pretend to shit. There wasn’t much dignity there.”

This is the Ritual is published by Bloomsbury