New Ways to Kill Your Mother

Roddy Doyle’s parents, then, being born in the short time after the struggle for independence ended and before the revolutionaries began to grow roses, are Irish versions of midnight’s children. Doyle has attempted to write a book about a most elusive subject, using their two voices; he has attempted to evoke ordinary life in peacetime amounting in its modest way to happiness. He has kept the revolution and its spirit in the background, placing instead his parents’ courtship, marriage, the raising of their children, their domestic life in the foreground. He has also attempted to capture their particular tone, interrupting merely to explain a small matter or move the story on, but never to argue with them. He is interested in the detail of things; the book is full of proper names, brand names, precise memories, simple anecdotes.

He is concerned to dramatize a number of subjects uncommon in Irish writing, including his own previous work — niceness, decency, love, harmony, gentleness, kindness, prosperity, gentility. Thus cooking and going to work in the morning, acquiring a first refrigerator or a first washing machine, the buying of a dress or a suit, the going to a dance or visiting friends, in all their mundane detail, are central events in the book, are allowed the space normally reserved for bitterness and violence in Irish books. This move into sweetness may arise partly from the genuine affection that Doyle feels for his parents, but it also comes from the sort of politics that has been central to his work from the beginning.

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In November 1979, two months after the Pope’s visit to Ireland, Roddy Doyle, aged twenty, first came to public attention. He wrote an article for the magazine In Dublin stating that the Virgin Mary, who had appeared at Knock in the west of Ireland one hundred years earlier, had thereafter travelled to Dublin where she had, he was sure, given birth to Patrick Pearse, whose centenary we were also celebrating. The delay of two months between the two events, Doyle explained, was due only to the bad state of the roads at the time. Doyle’s remarks, funny and bitterly irreverent in a time of great piety, made him something of a hero for those of us who worked for the magazine. His status was much enhanced when he was denounced soon afterwards by the Irish-language magazine Inniu, which pointed out that there were countries in the world who knew how to deal with such blasphemies. Clearly they meant Iran, since the Ayatollah and his punishments were in the news every day. Doyle had taken a cheeky swipe at Knock, the very shrine the Pope had visited, and at one of the martyred icons of Irish nationalism at the same time.

A year or two later, when the IRA hunger strikes were causing an upsurge of sympathy for the movement and its martyrs, someone told me that Roddy Doyle was writing a comic novel called Your Granny’s a Hunger Striker. Although brought up in the bosom of the Fianna Fail party and the Catholic Church, I looked forward to the novel. Like many of our generation, I had had my fill of Irish piety and wished only for jokes on these matters. This was, perhaps, one of the rights for which the earlier generation had fought, and one of the inevitable consequences of their struggle, even if it did not seem like that at the time.

Your Granny’s a Hunger Striker was never published, but in 1987 Doyle’s novel The Commitments appeared, followed by The Snapper (1990), The Van (1991), Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993) and The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996). The novels, and the movies that were made from some of them, were original in their tone, fast-moving, sharp, irreverent. They also became, in the images they created of Dublin, immensely influential.

The city of Dublin has always stood apart from the Irish nation. When Roddy Doyle’s great-uncle, Robert Brennan, heard in prison about the extent of the 1916 Rising in Dublin, his informant told him: ‘Dublin was grand. No longer shall we hear [the] jibe about the city of “bellowing slaves and genteel dastards”.’ By the time Rory, Roddy Doyle’s father, began his apprenticeship as a printer twenty-five years later, working with men from Dublin city, however, the city seemed to have returned to its old self. ‘It was an eye-opener for me, like being in a different country. The philosophy was profoundly anti-Republican, anti-Gaelic, almost anti-Irish. As far as they were concerned, they were Dublin men, not Irish. They bought and read English newspapers… They spoke of nothing but soccer, all the Dublin and English teams.’

This, then, was the world in which Rory’s son set his novels, a world in which there was no mention of the struggle for independence or its legacy, and no mention of the conflict in Northern Ireland, at its most intense in the years the novels were published, and no mention of the Catholic Church. It was a world stripped of the props that readers most associated with Ireland, and filled instead with rock ‘n’ roll, much wit and shouting, and sex and swearing and soccer. It could have been Liverpool or Birmingham or Manchester, except for something absolutely central to it, which was the spirit of the city, which everyone who knew Dublin recognized. Making this image of the city popular, almost official, as Doyle did in these years, was a seriously political project in a country whose self- image was rural and Catholic and conservative and nationalist. In doing this, Doyle came in a distinguished line of Irish novelists who sought to reinvent Ireland, from Joyce, who placed a Jewish hero in his irreverent capital city in Ulysses in 1922, to John Banville, who made Irish history into a great burlesque and a set of comic sequences in Birchwood fifty years later. The novelists sought to reassemble the nation.

In 1999, in his novel A Star Called Henry, Roddy Doyle came to deal for the first time with the nationalism of his grandparents and the heritage and history that provide the background to Rory & Ita; he made an effort to apply his comic skills to the lives of his grandparents. Henry, his hero, who plays a crucial part in most events in Irish history, is also a Dubliner who comes in contact with the members of the nationalist movement:

They hated anyone or anything from Dublin. Dublin was too close to England; it was where the orders and cruelty came from… Ireland was everywhere west of Dublin, the real people were west, west, west, as far west as possible, on the islands, the rocks off the islands, speaking Irish and eating wool… they were more Irish than I was; they were nearer to being the pure thing.

Rory & Ita quietly and subtly dramatizes the lure of this Dublin life and its softening effect on the nationalists who settled in the city after independence. Rory did not join the Fianna Fail party because of his nationalist sympathies; he said he

became involved in Fianna Fail because I was born into Fianna Fail. I never joined; I was born into it. I never joined and I never left. My father was one of the Republicans who followed de Valera when he founded the party in 1926… Anyone who belongs to Fianna Fail, just look at them; they don’t need a card — they are who they are.

Fianna Fail has managed since 1926 to be many things to many people. It soaked up nationalist energies, diverted the old brigade from fighting wars into fighting elections. In theory, it sought to restore Gaelic as the national language, to reunify Ireland, and to represent the lower middle class and the small farmers, but slowly it put most of its energy into staying in power. It began to represent big business and corruption. It managed to offer allegiance to both Brussels and Boston. My father, who was a staunch member, having also been ‘born into it’, always said that if you voted for the opposition, your right hand would wither away. He too believed that you could tell a Fianna Fail person by looking at them. He, like Rory, put enormous energy into election campaigns and derived great pleasure from winning them. ‘Election campaigns are highly emotional — soaring adrenaline and non-stop hard work,’ Rory says. In 1977 Rory set about organizing the campaign to replace Conor Cruise O’Brien, who was a Labour member of the Irish parliament, with a Fianna Fail candidate. ‘I’m sure he was a charming man to meet, but I never did meet him, and we took his seat,’ he says.

Rory manages to be charming also, and mild-mannered and funny. Like many other ordinary members of Fianna Fail, he embodies a certain low-key decency, excited by local rivalry as much as large ideologies, lacking zealotry. These are the very qualities that made the party very difficult to unseat. Even those of us who, despite being ‘born into the party’, loathe its politics, find it hard to dislike its actual members. This makes killing your Fianna Fail father a rather onerous task; Roddy Doyle has been wise, perhaps, to try to do it to his with