An ear for the speech of Ireland’s common man

 
5 September 2013

The Guts by Roddy Doyle (Cape, £12.99)

Nicely timed for the stage version of The Commitments comes a sequel for the character who invented them: Jimmy Rabbitte. He’s 47 now, married with four children (Jimmy may be barely Catholic but fecundity is a harder habit to break) with a job seeking out bands from his own glory days and giving them a new lease of life on social media and the performance circuit.

We meet him just as he’s diagnosed with bowel cancer, which seems somehow to reflect the state of the Irish body politic in recession: Jimmy’s next-door neighbour, party caterer for the Dublin smart set, has done a runner in the night from a house the banks are repossessing. Things have moved on from the Eighties; Jimmy’s teenage daughter is called Mahalia Egan-Rabbitte, if you please. Jimmy may be cancerous but he’s indomitable. And he sees in the forthcoming Eucharistic Congress in Dublin (a devotional festival which naturally he isn’t attending) a business opportunity to produce an album of music from 1932, the last time it took place in Ireland, inventing for the purpose a track that is lewd, mildly blasphemous and patently non-1932. Whatever; it takes off.

The great thing about Roddy Doyle is his ear for the demotic. He is himself involved in a community writing project and his capacity to reproduce real, contemporary talk, at least Dublin talk, is unsurpassed. The dialogue between Jimmy and his father, Jimmy Snr, is a distillation of a thousand such conversations: economical, humorous, understated and punctuated with more fucks — noun, adjective and verb — than anyone else could get away with. Brilliant.

The downside comes of Jimmy so patently sharing the author’s outlook; certainly, he’s much of an age (Roddy Doyle is 55). Jimmy’s take on contemporary society — usefully summed up in the Rabbittes’ annual Christmas gathering, in which one sister’s separated husband isn’t family but another’s lesbian girlfriend (who plays a lovely game of pitch and toss) is — is wonderfully reflective of the worldview of the Dublin equivalent of the Islington dinner party. The book can at times read like a man looking in a mirror and admiring what he sees. The culminating episode — a pop festival in a field attended by Jimmy and his ageing friends, including another feisty cancer sufferer, Outspan — is outrageously sentimental, a celebration of male, middle-aged bonding over rock music. No matter: The Guts is a good read.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £10.99, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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