03 Aug 2013 04:47:54
"Nostalgia's always big in a recession," says a character in Roddy Doyle's new novel – and, in The Guts, Doyle has served up a good-sized helping of it. Billed as "the return of Jimmy Rabbitte", it takes up again, 20 years on, with the teenage svengali who decided that Dublin needed a white soul band, and named them the Commitments. It provides everything that, back in the mid-1990s, a Roddy Doyle novel seemed to represent: a big, raucous but loving Northside Dublin family; perfectly pitched dialogue; well-observed male camaraderie; a lot of music; and, perhaps most of all, entertaining profanity. ("Have you been reading those Roddy Doyle books again, Dougal?" asks Father Ted when his simple sidekick unexpectedly calls him a "big bollix". "I have yeah Ted, you big gobshite," replies Dougal.) The Guts even starts in the pub that was the setting for much of the Barrytown Trilogy (The Commitments, The Snapper and The Van), where Jimmy and his dad, Jimmy Sr, are shooting the breeze: -How come Bertie has such a young son? Jimmy asked.
-Ah Jaysis, said Jimmy Sr. - He rode his missis. It's no great mystery.
In recent years, Doyle has reinvented himself – with mixed results – as a magic realist: his Last Roundup trilogy was an irreverent fable that reworked Republican history, following Henry Smart's Zelig-like passage through Ireland's 20th century. At heart, though, Doyle is a classic social realist, working in a tradition that stretches from Zola to Ken Loach. Almost all his stories deal with the downtrodden, the underdogs, the ignored. His plots are minimal and unsensational, but they usually turn on an acknowledged "social problem", such as teenage pregnancy (The Snapper), unemployment (The Van), family breakdown (Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha) or domestic abuse (The Woman Who Walked Into Doors). They are thick with local detail: Barrytown is a fictional version of Kilbarrack, a down-at-heel suburb of north Dublin where Doyle grew up and worked as a school teacher for 14 years. He has always been particularly good at balancing sweet and sour, comedy and grime, lightly worn pathos and an unsentimental recognition of the hard facts (though as his career has progressed, the overall mood has become gradually more sombre). Characteristically for Doyle, The Guts is a feelgood novel about bowel cancer and Ireland's financial meltdown. It's certainly nostalgic, but it's also a sustained attack on Irish nostalgia.
The boom years have been good to Jimmy Rabbitte: he has made a living out of resurrecting old Irish punk bands and flogging their songs on the internet. He has a lovely wife, Aoife; four bright, rowdy teenage children; and a house in "a middle-class area" not far from where he grew up. But when the novel starts, in 2011, the economy has gone down the pan and Jimmy is in the pub with his dad, finding it "foreign, in a way. He didn't know who was who, or what was going on." He also has to tell his father that he has cancer.
Generically, like much of Doyle's work, The Guts is easy to pigeonhole: it's a mid-life crisis novel. The problems it tackles are ageing, hair‑loss, the revising-down of expectations, extra-marital lust, disease and mortality – along with repossessions and lost jobs. Though it doesn't have such a simple and satisfying plot, in mood and style it closely resembles The Van (Jimmy Sr's mid-life crisis novel, in which he and his friend Bimbo are laid off, get a chip van and briefly make a mint selling fast food during Ireland's 1990 World Cup campaign). Long-term Doyle readers will enjoy the echoes of the previous books, particular the way that Jimmy keeps catching himself behaving like his father – hitching up his jeans, rubbing his hands together and performing other bits of "oul lad" behaviour.
There are various plot strands. Most importantly, there is Jimmy's battle with cancer, which involves chemotherapy, memory loss and various crises, while he goes around asking the nurses for ice and lemon with his intravenous drip, and telling everyone that he's "grand". As in the other Barrytown novels, Doyle's excellent dialogue does a great deal of the work. The third person narrator often only holds the ring for the voices. Emotional reactions, descriptions of people and settings, are all to be inferred from the conversations:
-Really, he said, - I'm grand.
-Grand, she said, - I hate that bloody word.
Jimmy also decides, in the circumstances, to get back in contact with his long-lost brother Leslie, who in the Barrytown Trilogy was always either absent or getting into trouble.
In addition, there's a minor-key Commitments reunion theme. Jimmy bumps into Imelda, the band's much-fancied backing singer, in the pub, and later comes across his old friend Outspan, the guitarist, in the hospital's cancer wing, where he is being treated for terminal lung cancer. Meanwhile, Jimmy's music business is struggling – although, to his lasting shame, recession-era nostalgia has driven up sales of celtic rock records: "electrified diddly-eye music" about the Provos and the ancient kings of Ireland shedding Saxon blood, performed by ageing middle-class men with ponytails. "Riverdance for Nazis", as Jimmy describes it. Partly as an attempt to put up two fingers to all this, Jimmy decides to commemorate the return of the Eucharistic Congress to Ireland for the first time since 1932 with a collection of proper, unsentimental old-time Irish music (working title: "Faith of Our Fathers Me Hole"). "We could trace the roots of punk to some whistlin' bogger in 1932," he tells his colleagues excitedly. This sub-plot allows Doyle to indulge in some of his favourite activities simultaneously: writing about music, and making fun of both the Catholic church and armchair Republicans. "That shite's never far away," as Jimmy sagely remarks.
The Guts is some distance off the pace of his best novels, such as The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, an impressive act of imaginative sympathy, or, perhaps best of all, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha – a near-perfect recreation of a young boy's mental world. There are plenty of complaints that could be lodged against the new book. It has the same rough, slightly provisional feel as The Commitments and The Snapper, but without their energy or narrative drive. It seems a bit of a coincidence that two of Jimmy's band members are thrown into his path, in short order. And the caper that powers the final third – Jimmy decides to invent the final song on his 1932 album when he can't find exactly what he wants – seems both overplotted and underdeveloped. Dramatising everyday happiness is notoriously difficult, and though Doyle does it very well, the word "brilliant", as a way of describing Jimmy's feelings for his family, loses its force through repetition. Sometimes the loose, oral style shades into laziness, or at least clumsiness:
The boys were sitting on the bed, making sure their toes didn't touch him. It was awkward, fuckin' excruciating. But – strangely, and brilliant; he couldn't wait to tell Aoife – the fact that he was sick was an advantage.
Nevertheless, The Guts has life, and heart, and jokes. In these circumstances much can be forgiven. Like almost all Doyle's work, it's very likable, and its low-key, character-driven approach to describing life in Ireland, "a small country on the brink of collapse", is very effective. If not an obvious prize list-botherer, The Guts deserves to be a popular success. Who knows, it might even penetrate a demographic group notoriously resistant to reading novels: middle‑aged men.
