Roddy Doyle at Edinburgh Book Festival

Roddy Doyle may have lost his hair but he still looks like the mischievous teacher who’d have a laugh with you when the headmaster’s not about. After nine novels, a novella and several collections of short stories, both by himself and in collaboration with others, he’s  still full of that youthful exuberance which seeps through his work. He’s one of those writers who comfortably straddles literary and commercial success, with millions of enthused fans and a Booker Prize (for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha) as well as many more awards under his belt.

He’s known as a writer who is unfailingly funny but also not afraid of more serious themes. His Barrytown trilogy – The Committments, The Snapper and The Van – warmed the hearts of legions of readers, but his novel The Woman Who Walked Into Doors tackled one of the taboo subjects of society – domestic violence – and did so in a way that was accessible and readable as well as shocking. Paula Spencer became one of his enduring characters, and reappeared in the follow-up Paula Spencer.

Doyle is in Edinburgh to promote The Dead Republic,  the third in his latest trilogy which also includes A Star Called Henry and Oh, Play That Thing. Centred around a boy and then man named Henry Smart who fights in the Irish War of Independence, the trilogy follows Henry as he moves from Dublin to America and then back to Dublin again. Doyle starts off by explaining that when he started writing A Star Called Henry in 1995 he knew that after Henry fought for his country and moved to America he would eventually come back around 30 years later. One of the themes of the trilogy, he says, was Irish identity: who defines it, who controls it. If Henry had had an ordinary life,  he could have just decided one day to return to his roots, but having had a larger-than-life existence, Doyle needed a really good excuse to move his hero back. Doyle says he had the idea of involving Henry with the real-life director John Ford. ‘I’ve always admired John Ford,’ Doyle says. ‘I’ve read a lot about him. He strikes me as the kind of guy Henry would knock foreheads against.’ Hence Henry almost making it onto the set of a John Ford-directed film starring Maureen O’Hara.

‘The Quiet Man was, for a lot of Americans, Ireland.’ Doyle says. ‘Its a wonderful film but it doesn’t resemble anywhere I’m close to. I had been reading about Ford, John Wayne and O’Hara, and I knew Ford wanted to make The Quiet Man from the 1930s. I came across an IRA figure called Ernie O’Malley. In my opinion he wrote the best IRA memoir, Another Man’s Wounds. At the end of The Quiet Man, O’Malley is credited as the ‘IRA Consultant’! I can imagine the exchanges: ‘Where would I put the gun?’ ‘There.’  But the IRA’s presence in The Quiet Man is subliminal. Anyhow, O’Malley’s experiences helped me imagine the damage done to Henry in jail and allowed me to bring him back to Ireland. Henry’s part ends up on the cutting room floor because money was limited. Ford was a hard-headed figure thrashing out the story of The Quiet Man; one story is the one Ford has to tell but the other is Henry’s which ends up being a story that doesn’t get told. People in films are used to seeing changes made in the editing process. I recently re-read The Tin Drum ( by Gunter Grass) – magnificent. Then I watched the film again and realised that the film is a poor adaptation; it plucks out the best bits of the book which results in context sometimes being absent.’

‘But Henry’s life is brought back to him in the process,’ Doyle continues. ‘Chunks of memory come back to him. And he has only himself to blame, so it’s not a bad thing. He goes off with his wooden leg to Ireland and becomes a gardener, so he becomes the quiet man in his way. When he returns to Dublin, it’s the early 1950s. He has a house he can call home for the first time. He’s settled in a place which would then have been a village but is now a suburb. It was a pleasure for me to bring him back to a mile from where I live so I didn’t have to read books to research other places anymore!’

Doyle reads an extract from The Dead Republic. It’s classic Doyle, unadorned writing, simple sentences masking the deeper human condition. And as you’d expect,  it’s funny – very funny. One of Henry the now- gardener’s new customers declares to him ‘What would I do without you, Henry?’ ‘Yer own fucking garden, missus,’ comes the muttered reply. The section Doyle reads shows Henry comparing Dublin to America, for example, prams used to push babies, not coal. And humour and pathos are neatly combined in a section where Henry’s wooden leg becomes sucked under by the mud in a  flower-bed and he falls and rolls around. He is spotted by the woman whose garden he is tending, who, much to Henry’s humiliation, lifts him out to safety and into her house.

The chairman of the session, Jamie Jauncey, then asks Doyle about a poignant part of the book where the seventy-something Henry ends up involved with one of the people whose gardens he tends, a ninety- year-old woman. ‘There’s plenty of opportunity for farce,’ says Jauncey, ‘but it’s also very touching. How did you imagine a seventy-year-old’s feelings considering you’re not a man of seventy?’

‘But I will be, I hope,’ Doyle returns. ‘Not immediately, but eventually. When I started the trilogy in 1995, I had hair and was in my thirties. My third child wasn’t born yet; wasn’t even a dirty thought. The great thing about being a writer is that all life becomes research. None of us wants to get older but it’s still interesting to consider it – even the dark stuff like grief, anxiety about children growing up and so on. In fact, I’m closer now to  seventy than I am to Jimmy Rabbitte’s age.’ Doyle smiles. ‘I’m going to cry now!’

Doyle carries on.’ Jimmy then starts a new job, as a caretaker. When I was a teacher, I knew that if I wanted something done I didn’t go to the Principal but to the caretaker – he holds the real power. It’s something the other teachers didn’t seem to know, although some of the pupils did. When I was about seven, the caretaker at my school was an ancient man with a limp. He dragged his foot around. I gave him a history he may not have had – I gave him a bullet lodged in his leg.’  So it was presumably easy for Doyle to imagine Henry limping around as a caretaker.

And what of Doyle’s own schooldays? ‘I went to a Christian Brothers school – it was a state school but was run by the Christian Brothers. My time there coincided with Bloody Sunday. The Christian Brothers were very angry men and were very sympathetic to the cause of the IRA. We were actually given the newspaper of the IRA and Sinn Fein to read ( in one regular class.) It was a very black and white time. Everything Irish was ‘good’, everything British was ‘bad’.  Luckily I was old enough to make my own decisions, but when I was writing the book I could imagine that several of the staff in the staffroom in the school in which Henry worked were IRA sympathisers. Anyhow, Henry discovers old habits die hard, and his past unexpectedly comes back.’

On the subject of Republican politics, Doyle says ‘Republican politics is different in every country you’re in. The religious nature of it is disturbing – opinion takes on a religious conviction, so that even a plan to bomb is made in the ‘knowledge’ that it’s the right thing to do.’

Jamie Jauncey then says that the trilogy is really the history of 20th Century Ireland, and asks Doyle whether when he started writing it he had the characters and story already formed in his head. Doyle replies that he always starts with a character, but that stories he’d grown up with also fed into the trilogy. ‘I grew up knowing stories that could never be verified,’ he says. ‘One is that I had two uncles, brothers, who fought on opposite sides in the Civil War. One was in the army, he came back home and by the time he left again, the army was the British army. His brother was in the diehard Republican army. The one who fought on the Republican side died. My grandfather buried his gun. We never knew if the uncle had used it or not. Another fact is that my mother’s father was in Liverpool during the War of Independence. There are all these holes in my knowledge – what was he doing there? It’s an invitation to any writer to fill these holes.’

He also talks about his interest in Dublin, saying that the layers of the city fascinate him. ‘I try and bat away my resentment when places/streets disappear. Luckily I can remember places from the past. All this fed into the book, as well as the notion of Irishness and who decides what it is to be Irish. When I was younger, there was an insistence that you had to be a certain kind of person. Now, there’s no pressure because the economy has collapsed, so politicians who can’t talk without drooling are now pushing culture, so we’re back to being able to be artists, poets and the like. Now, being Irish can be several things at once, as being Scottish can be.’

Jamie Jauncey then asks Doyle about the ending of the book without giving anything away. ‘You take Henry through the peace process and leave him in the present day. Shadows remain of his old ways, his bully-boy past. What’s your prognosis for the peace process?’

‘A year ago I’d have said the violence appears to be over,’ says Doyle. ‘But all it takes is a couple of mad bastards capable of planting a bomb. Many of these don’t go off but inevitably over the coming years one or two will. We just have to try and remember to keep calm. Martin McGuinness is talking about the need to support. It would have been almost sci fi twenty years ago to imagine that he’d be a politician in power.’

Jauncey then tells the audience about another project involving Doyle called Elsewhere. Fifty leading authors were asked to write a short piece of less than 3000 words on the subject of Elsewhere. The commission was intended to encourage authors to think about identity and social cohesion through the lens of the unknown. Doyle was one of the contributors.

Doyle explains that when he received the commission last April, he was happy to write the story as he was about to go to the US. ‘At home, I don’t think about being Irish,’ he says, ‘but in the States, I become Irish because of all the topical issues that people want to talk about – clerical abuse, politics, and so on. ‘

He then explains that his idea came from the many ‘headshops’ in Dublin where legal drugs were, until recently, sold. ‘One near me was recently closed down,’ he says. ‘The police specified that the shop should have been a florist. Anyhow, children of a certain age used to visit these headshops.’ He then reads part of his story, a surreal and uproarious tale in which some young Dublin boys who had been smoking stuff labelled with the warning ‘Not for Human Consumption’  somehow find themselves transplanted into the historical Battle of Buenavista, in which they’re fighting for the Catholics in Mexico. As with his earlier reading, the text is punctuated with belly laughs from the audience.

‘Not so much magical realism as magic mushroom realism,’ quips Jauncey when Doyle has finished. Doyle talks about the romanticization of history in which the Irish are deemed to have ‘changed sides to fight for the little man.’  ’Jesus Christ!’ he laughs. ‘It’s all simplified so that the lovable Irish only wanted to fight for Mexico. That’s what was taught at school and that’s still perpetuated. I can tell you, I was at a football match recently and the things being shouted at the Mexican team were not fraternal, shall we say!’

He also mentions the casual racism of some Irish people, as shown in one part of the story in which one Irish boy asks the other what language one of the strangers is speaking. ‘Paki,’ comes the reply. ‘We must be in Iraq then,’ retorts the first.

Doyle then relates the story of how he did his research into drugs. Some of the information was gleaned by asking people who came out with the ‘I know a guy who knows a guy who knows someone…’ shiftiness. The rest came from the result of a health campaign in Ireland last winter, where every household was issued with hand-gel to prevent transmission of flu viruses. ‘The kids were drinking it,’ Doyle explains. ‘They were buying Coke on the way to school and making cocktails of Coke and hand-gel! I’m sure it made religion and maths more bearable.’

Jauncey notes that Doyle’s dialogue is as sharp as ever, and opens the floor to questions. The first relates to a re-write of Playboy of the Western World which Doyle worked on with a Nigerian writer, and Doyle says a few lines about this, mentioning that the main character in their re-write was Nigerian and that they transferred the story to the 21st Century whereas the original is about a young man arriving in Western Ireland in the early 20th Century. Unlike writing a novel, the plot was already there, Doyle explained, which took away the novel-writer’s anxiety about thinking of an ending.

Doyle is then asked about collaborating versus walking alone. Is it harder? ‘Yes,’ says Doyle, ‘but only because in any writer’s head there is often an argument with the self about what direction to take the story in. When you’re working with someone else, you have not only your own argument with your self but the other writer’s  with themself and also the debate with each other.’

One audience member asks Doyle how he avoids being seen as an ambassador for Ireland when he travels. Doyle replies that the best thing to do is to answer questions honestly and not to say what people want you to say. Expectations are hard to escape, he adds, on a related tangent. He recounts how his mother’s mother died when his mother was three so that his mother didn’t know much about her side of the family. In the 1950s she discovered a letter in which the name Beekman, a Dutch name, kept cropping up. She was given a Manhattan phone book to see if she could find any relatives with the name there, resulting in the discovery of some first cousins on Long Island. Doyle remembers these new relatives visiting them in Ireland when he was nineteen or twenty. He says that it was fascinating because they had certain expectations of the Irish – for example, they almost resented the fact that the Doyles had a colour TV that was bigger than theirs. So expectations often exist, he says, and the way to circumvent problems is to always reply to questions honestly and not give stock answers or tourist board answers. ‘Of course, as you get older the answers vary from day to day,’ he jokes. ‘It’s nice to vary your honest answers, even if only for one’s mental health.’