A couple of days before I’m due to meet Roddy Doyle in Dublin, I test positive for Covid which, although suboptimal, is at least in the spirit of his new book, The Women Behind the Door, the third in his series about Paula Spencer. The book opens with Paula putting on the kettle after enjoying “a great day” out with her pals in May 2021; a trip to the vaccination centre for the first jab of the pandemic, and a sense that, as Doyle puts it, we might be approaching “the beginning of the end”.
Doyle got his first shot at the same place, a repurposed conference centre on the Dublin City University campus in Glasnevin, on the same day. “Driving home, I began to wonder, is there a book here?” he tells me, as we chat, appropriately distanced, over Zoom. “I had been writing short stories, and I was thinking, Can I bring it further? Can I confidently say that we’re over a bit of a hump and we’re heading back to what would have been normality, or some version of normality, something new? So there and then I began to wonder, even before I got home, what would Paula be thinking?”
As we talk, it becomes increasingly clear why he turned to her, and not one of his other characters – the pub-going friends we meet in the “Two Pints” novels, for example, or any of the inhabitants of Barrytown, the setting for several of his best-known novels, including The Commitments, The Snapper and The Van. “Of all the characters I’ve written, Paula has always been lurking somewhere in the back of my mind,” he says. “I think because people mention her more than any other character, in a quiet way. The Snapper is a regular feature on Irish television, and people who weren’t born when it came out can quote it, and that’s a great source of joy for me. But actually, when it comes to people just wanting to say something quietly to me, it’s often about Paula Spencer and the two books and the television series Family. And I think of all the characters I’ve written about, despite the gender difference, she’s the one that’s probably closest to me somehow.”
She’s certainly been with him for a long time. Paula, together with her abusive husband, Charlo, and their children, first appeared not on the pages of a novel, but on the small screen in 1994, as a four-part series created by Doyle and directed by Michael Winterbottom; Ger Ryan played Paula and Sean McGinley Charlo. Its impact was immense. Doyle found himself an item on the news for days on end, and the show’s central subject – the violence that Charlo inflicts on his family – roused not only admiration but outright and furious rebuttal. “Some of the responses were so strange in retrospect,” he recalls. “People denying there was domestic violence – that’s the phrase that was used then – denying it happened in Ireland. People saying I was undermining family life, others saying that I suggested that only working-class people had this problem because it was set in a working-class household, ludicrous stuff in many ways, stuff that would never be suggested now. It’s only 30 years ago, not 130 years, but I wondered sometimes, did it get in the way of a more positive self-image? If an entire country can have a self-image, did it get in the way of the positive self-image that was actually beginning to form itself in the early and mid-90s?”
Doyle’s work has always boxed and coxed with the rapidly changing nature of Irish life. The year before Family, he had won the Booker prize for his child’s-eye view of Barrytown, and of marital breakdown, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, and two years before that, he had published The Van. “I wrote The Van in 1990 and 1991 about two unemployed men,” he tells me. “Six or seven years later, I wouldn’t have been writing The Van, because I think at that point those men were probably finding work that wasn’t there six or seven years beforehand. So it wouldn’t have been about two unemployed men. It was very much of its time, and I’m not sure if anybody at that time saw what was coming in the next 10 years or so: that the place would reinvent itself so quickly, and then the exposure of the behaviour of bishops and the people brave enough to stand up and tell the horror of what had occurred to them. The power of the church diminished so quickly that, I suppose in a way, you’d rather not look back at what it used to be like. That’s one of the reasons why I don’t think Irish people get overly nostalgic or sentimental about the past.”
Paula has multiple reasons to leave the past behind. She has survived Charlo, and confronted her alcoholism, brutal battles that she fought in 1996’s The Woman Who Walked Into Doors and, 10 years later, Paula Spencer. Her four children have grown up and left home. When we meet her now, she is cautiously celebrating her victories, reflecting on how they have prepared her for the challenges of the pandemic. In the opening pages of the novel, she remembers:
It’s hard to imagine it now, the way life was before the lockdowns. But it did feel a bit familiar to Paula when it started. She’s always had to be careful. Since she gave up the drinking and stayed that way. She’s had to be careful about where she goes, how long she stays. Careful about her friends. Careful about her mood. Very careful with the money. It took her years to make this – living carefully – a source of pride.
Having resolutely created her own safe space, Paula is a more or less contented empty nester, and The Women Behind the Door’s chief drama comes in the form of her daughter Nicola, who arrives without warning on her doorstep, in flight from the collapse of her own domestic life. The threat that she poses to Paula’s peace comes first in the shape of the wine that she brings – “It’s not even just Nicola. It’s Nicola with a gun”, says Doyle – and subsequently in the resurfacing of memories of her traumatic childhood. “I knew somehow, quite early on, it was going to be one big, long conversation, an excruciating conversation, between her and her daughter. A day of reckoning,” Doyle says. “She knows it’s payback time; she has to confront the fact that this woman in her 40s who has looked after Paula so long and so well now has to be looked after. And not only that, she has to confront any questions as to why she has to be looked after, why she’s there.”
Doyle, like Paula, is now 66, also with grown children. The recurrence of the past, he thinks, is a bit like parenthood. “As you get older, you realise sometimes that something significant happens in life and you think it’s over, but it’s not. It’s a bit like having a child, really, just the different layers of rearing and observing. You stop being one sort of a father and become a different sort of a father. And you think, well, that’s that. And then actually, you become a different kind of a father again. And so the consequences never fade. They just reinvent themselves.”
He is no stranger to reinvention. Before he became a full-time writer, he was a teacher at a community school, and although he loved it, and says he still misses “the numbers, the chat and the laughter”, he doesn’t regret changing his life. “I wouldn’t have been able to write The Woman Who Walked Into Doors if I’d been a teacher. It was the first novel I wrote after giving up teaching, and it was a full-time job. It wasn’t something like Paddy Clarke, when I grabbed at the minutes and the half-hours and the hours I had between teaching and changing nappies and putting babies to bed. But with The Woman Who Walked Into Doors? I couldn’t have written it in that way. I couldn’t keep dashing back and writing a sentence here or there. I had to concentrate on writing very little all day until it began to flow. That book was written by a full-time writer, as opposed to somebody who wrote in the gaps in between other parts of life.”
He is primarily a novelist, but seems to find time for all sorts of other side-hustles. “I do the other stuff because the day is very long,” he grins, “and I like testing myself if it seems like something that would be a bit of an adventure.” Most famously, he adapted The Commitments – the story of a group of friends inspired by soul music to form a band, led by the enterprising Jimmy Rabbitte – for both Alan Parker’s film, when he worked with Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, and for its long-running musical theatre version. Screenplays and stage adaptations of his other novels followed, as well as original drama, and he’s clear that playwrights were his first great influence: “God in my life is Seán O’Casey: it was plays, really, the words on the page even more so than the words on the stage. Reading those plays had a huge, huge impact on me.”
He’s also allowed his love of sport to bleed into his writing life, working with boxer Kellie Harrington and footballer Roy Keane on their memoirs. We have been chatting about Irish politics, and who might possibly succeed the much-loved Michael D Higgins as president. I jokingly suggest Keane would be an interesting choice, which makes him laugh: “Roy would put manners on us!” he says, an idiomatic phrase that suggests Keane would run a tight ship. “There are very few occupations that I wouldn’t consider Roy to be a suitable candidate for: maybe not open-heart surgery.”
I tell him that when I first moved to Ireland six years ago from a stunned post-referendum UK, I felt that I had arrived in a country that, while not without its political and social problems, was free of the kind of rightwing extremism that was beginning to take hold in Britain. Now, there are instances of it in Ireland: arson attacks at immigration centres, last year’s riots in Dublin, political candidates whose agendas attack the travelling community. Is he worried?
“That nationalism has been there all my life in some shape or form,” he replies. “That strange notion that there’s some sort of a purity to be found on the island, but I suppose it was inevitable that these things were going to happen. Because it’s an island, but we’re not isolated at all. So in many ways, what happens elsewhere is going to happen to us, if it hasn’t happened already... [Since] the late 90s, when it became apparent that Ireland had become a magnet for people – as opposed to repulsing the population, it was attracting more people – there’s always been those who are uncomfortable with this or all too happy to attack it somehow. And it’s now, I think, that there seems to be an organisational competence that they’re a force really to be reckoned with.”
He is acute about the way that Ireland, in common with many countries but with the additional historical freight of having been colonised for centuries, regards itself. One day, he says, the country will be revelling in its Olympic success, the next reacting to a comparatively minor setback: “I remember it used to be said quite a lot by commentators, we’re the laughing stock of Europe, we’re the laughing stock of the world. As if Europe gave a toss!”
He remains, however, optimistic. “There’s a tendency to think that we have so much to offer the world, but the world has nothing to offer us. It’s there. But on the other hand, back to the Olympics, I think one of the reasons why Rhasidat [Adeleke, the Irish sprinter] has become at her age some sort of national treasure, is because it gives people the opportunity to cheer for that note of Irishness and to elbow the strict Celtic twilight bullshit in the face.”
One area in which Ireland is very noticeably excelling is in literature, with writers including Sebastian Barry, Colm Tóibín and Anne Enright sharing the space with a younger generation including the Booker-longlisted Colin Barrett, the phenomenon of Sally Rooney, and last year’s Booker winner Paul Lynch. I wonder if the constant talk of a flowering, particularly among writers depicting urban and working-class lives, is an irritant to someone who’s been around for such a long time?
“Dermot Bolger was publishing novels before I was and they were set in Finglas, very similar to the place, Barrytown, that I would have created. There was Paul Smith’s The Countrywoman, which I remember reading as a teenager, set in a tenement in Dublin. There was Strumpet City [by James Plunkett]. I could keep on going. There’s a lot of writing set in Dublin. I don’t really feel in any way like standing up and saying, hang on, you forgot about this. It amuses me, in a way, and it’s very understandable to me; every generation, most glaringly obviously in music, reacts to the previous one. And that’s fair enough. So I don’t feel in any way left out, but it is amusing.”
When we speak, Doyle is on holiday in Wexford – “I haven’t done a stroke of work in a month, and I’ve kind of half forgotten what that entails” – but soon he’ll be back at the desk. His next novel is set 40 years in the past, and revolves around teaching, a subject he’s not addressed directly before. I ask if we’ll ever hear any more from Paula? “I wouldn’t say no, but I wouldn’t say yes either,” he replies. “If a few years down the line, there’s still a novel in me after this one, or the one after, and I’m wondering if something in Ireland has shifted again, if there’s been some sort of tectonic activity and the place is redefined yet again… she’d be a good guide.”
• The Women Behind the Door by Roddy Doyle is published by Jonathan Cape (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
