Rob Doyle’s legs dangle over the edge of Hell: his characters are all firmly in the pit

The Dalai Lama famously confronts life’s joys and terrors with the same gentle giggle. Whether one wishes to discuss love, CIA funding, quietism, nepotism, mindfulness or flowers, each answer is preceded by the same inane titter.

Rob Doyle, however, does not have the beatific calm of those who are predestinated to success. He sits with his legs dangling over the edge of a circle of Hell: His characters are all firmly in the pit. “WE LIVE IN D BODY OF SATAN” as P Cranley screams in his all-caps madness, before leaving Earth bound for paradise with his ambiguous fairy godmother. Despite the angelic appearance of Cranley’s spiritual interlocutor, I fear he didn’t end up anywhere good.

Cranley is the most extreme expression of a theme that binds together many of the stories in this brilliant collection: the power of bad ideas. There is an atmosphere of violence and aimless desolation throughout – leavened at times with grim and deadly humour – but, interestingly, no one seems to do anyone outright harm. Characters die, disappear and self-destruct, but the bloodthirsty reader will find no murders here, no external attack. The worst crime committed in the whole book is the writing of a negative review. Instead, all the violence rises from within, all the suffering is constructed by the characters themselves. This is exemplified by The Turk Inside, in which the protagonist is oppressed and molested by a person he never meets, or even sees, for whose very existence he has only the thinnest of evidence.

Doyle is unabashedly a writer interested in ideas, but those ideas are not in any sense separable from or external to his characters. Instead we see these characters through the medium of their own deluded thinking about themselves. This Is The Ritual is populated with people who construct elaborate lies about who they are through the medium of total personal honesty and self-examination. Again and again they peel back another layer of self-delusion, only to become the victim of a deeper fiction. This technique reaches its apotheosis in the final story of the collection, Jean-Pierre Passolet – a Reminiscence, in which a decrepit writer attempts to put an intellectual gloss on his emotionally and sexually impoverished existence, distracting us all the while from the narcissistic self-loathing of the rather bland-seeming narrator.

What gives Doyle’s work its disquieting power is this mental claustrophobia. His narrators are always seeking ideas, ways of looking at the world, that can replace the ones that have failed them so badly. They always find themselves at another dead end. Physical pleasures or pains provide sterile distraction. Only powerful psychical experiences – madness, hallucinogenic drugs or extreme alcohol consumption – offer even momentary escape. In an iconic passage of The Devils of Loudun, Aldous Huxley examines these different types of escape – “self-transcendence” – distinguishing them into upward and downward modes. Doyle’s characters, seeking to escape their “sweating selves”, are almost always moving downwards. In the absence of mystical or spiritual convictions, that’s the only direction of travel. One exception to this is, perhaps ironically, the religious significance invested in the works of Nietzsche, who is a totemic figure hovering over the book. Even here, though, his most avid disciple, in the story, On Nietzsche, finds his obsession with the great philosopher leads him only to comical oblivion.

We mock the superstitions of every earlier age and yet in Doyle’s universe it feels as if bad ideas have never been so powerful or so prevalent. In fact, This Is The Ritual makes it clear that none of us have the means to know what a good idea might look like. This creates a strong tension in the work between convention and individuality. In what seems like the most personal story of the collection, No Man’s Land, a young man in crisis is presented with a choice between the anodyne of a regular life (home, college, friends) and the bleak hostility of the world without, embodied in the ruined vagabond-philosopher he encounters in an industrial wasteland. What becomes clear is that in either scenario all justification is hollow. Choose to step heroically into the tundra, or stay by the fireside. Either way you’ll find yourself mumbling a trite mantra of self-congratulation to conceal your terror. Doyle refuses to resolve this tension easily. In No Man’s Land the outcome is redemptive. In The Turk Inside, by contrast, we are treated to the sad enumeration of the narrator’s new aspirations aimed at a life of utter banality.

There is a tendency to characterise this kind of story-telling as ironic or knowing, and to see in it a kind of intellectual exercise. I think a careful reading shows that the exact opposite is true. This is a book full of passion, sincere in its anger and full of real horrors. At the same time, like all great writers, Doyle is incapable of complacency or of certainty. He’s struggled and he continues to struggle and he knows he has achieved no kind of wisdom. Rob Doyle is the reverse of a giggling Lama.

This is the Ritual by Rob Doyle is published by Bloomsbury and Dublin's Lilliput Press. This month, we shall be exploring the collection in detail, with interviews and articles by the author, his editors, fellow writers and critics, culminating in a podcast interview recorded at the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin last week and to be published on irishtimes.com this Friday