Roddy
Doyle
Powell's 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651
7:30 pm Monday, Oct. 4
Free
Even before winning the Booker Prize, Irish writer Roddy Doyle
had established a name for himself with three widely read
novels--The Commitments, The Snapper and The
Van, collectively known as the Barrytown Trilogy. He became
even more popular when the books were made into movies. His
third novel, The Van, was shortlisted for the Booker
in 1991, but Doyle eventually won the prize in 1993 for Paddy
Clarke Ha Ha Ha, a brilliantly insightful book told in
the voice of a 10-year-old boy growing up in Dublin in the
late '60s. A few years later he used this talent for creating
a genuine voice once again in The Woman Who Walked into
Doors, a powerful story of domestic violence told from
the woman's perspective. In his latest novel, A Star Called
Henry, Doyle goes back in time to turn-of-the-century
Dublin to tell the story of Henry Smart, an adventurous local
legend and Lothario who fights in the Easter Rising of 1916.
Doyle recently spoke to Willamette Week about this
historical novel from his home in Ireland.
WW: A Star Called Henry is quite
a departure from your other work in several ways, most notably
in its historical storytelling. Was this kind of writing
hard to adjust to?
Roddy Doyle: Yes, it was. Whereas in the past I could sit
down immediately and start writing, with this one I couldn't,
because I just couldn't see what I was supposed to be looking
at. Dublin has changed so dramatically. There are poor people
here today, but poverty is relative. I needed to see what
poverty was in turn-of-the-century Dublin. I had to start
reading immediately. Luckily I chose a book that is cited
in the back of the book--I listed all the books that helped
me--about tenement life in Dublin, which was an oral history,
and it was packed with stories about everyday life and the
food and the smells and the textures.
Although your new novel is different from the Barrytown
Trilogy and Paddy Clarke in many ways, in some respects
it sticks with familiar themes, like the importance of family.
Well, I suppose it's inevitable. Many rural people emigrated
over the century, but Dublin people tended to stay--and
in the same general area. I live within three miles of my
parents and two miles of my wife's family, whereas in America
people leave the house earlier, often to go to college or
something like that, and they tend to drift more than they
do here in Ireland. You can't drift too far in Ireland anyway,
as you know--you fall off the side. I don't have great things
to say about the family, but when you're writing about a
Dublin man or woman, they're rarely unaccompanied, so it
just happens to drag the family behind, even Henry's family,
which is a bit of a disaster. But it's there.
How long had you been planning to write A Star Called
Henry ?
I don't know when dreaming becomes planning, but it's been
in the back of my mind for a long time, several books back.
I've always wanted to see if I could write a book about
an old guy and follow him from the beginning and go to the
end, a bit like Dickens. Then having committed myself to
him being a Dublin man born in 1901, the questions arose:
Well, was he in the GPO [General Post Office stand-off]
in 1916? Was he involved in the War of Independence? It
seemed to me a dreadful waste of opportunity if I said no.
And then the history became an important part of it.
What did you learn in your research?
A lot. One of the later books I read--it was just being
published--is a fantastic book called The IRA and Its
Enemies. It's beautifully written. I was particularly
struck by the story of these recruits in a part of Cork
who were taken out in the middle of the night and were made
to stand in the middle of the road and roar up at the heavens,
"Fuck you, God." I'm sure people reading the book will think,
"Oh, that's just Doyle using bad language," but it's historically
accurate. It's the idea of making the young men or teenagers,
none of whom would have been familiar with the term "atheist"
or "agnostic," who would have been unthinking but absolutely
rock-solid Catholics, making them scream that up at the
heavens to show where their priorities actually were.
A Star Called Henry is subtitled "Volume 1 of
The Last Roundup," How many more volumes are there?
Well, there are hints that Henry will end up in Chicago,
and that's where he goes. A good deal of it will probably
end up in the bin, but I've started the second volume, and
I'm not sure whether it will end up as a three-volume story
or a four-volume story--if it's running out of legs, two
volumes. I want to bring him back to Ireland later on, but
there's a lot of writing to be done.
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Willamette Week | originally
published September 29,
1999
|
