Roddy the realist

C.S. LEWIS once wrote that in his days as a school examiner, he came across a batch of answers to a question about Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale in which the main characters are a cock and a hen. The boys' teacher was an expert poultry - breeder, and their answers were discourses on the precise breed of the birds, showing that Chanticleer the cock could not - have been one of the modern varieties but must have been an Old English Fowl. This was all very interesting, wrote Lewis, "but I couldn't help feeling they had missed something." Reading Michael Smith's recent review of Roddy Doyle's new novel The Woman Who Walked Into Doors in The Irish Times, in which he interrogated the book for its faithfulness to contemporary working class life, I equally couldn't help feeling that he had missed something.

Roddy Doyle is one of the few serious writers whose work reduces criticism to irrelevance. And it is just as well. For if Michael Smith's review of The Woman Who Walked Into Doors is anything to go by, conventional critical categories are hopelessly inadequate. His first four novels, all of them highly stylised, were attacked for being too grittily realistic. Now that he has, for the first time, written a piece of social realism, it is attacked for not being realistic enough.

Realism in fiction should be about more than pedantic and humourless literal mindedness. It isn't about asking, when Paula, the narrator of the novel, jokes that her husband's family probably even robbed their blood from Pelican House, whether it might actually be possible to do this. It isn't about wondering, when Paula masturbates a boy in a schoolroom, whether this is a typical occurrence in Irish schools. It is about something much more profound - the ability to make a reader experience the human realities of other people. Roddy Doyle has that ability and in The Woman Who Walked Into Doors he deploys it with extraordinary courage to explore, not mere surface realities, but the truths that are hidden behind them.

MICHAEL Smith's rather daft questions about the realism of the novel, identity precisely what is wrong with the notion of realism itself as it has been generally understood by Irish critics. One of the great achievements of Doyle's book, indeed, is that it escapes the stylistic and psychological conventions of what has tended to pass for realism in Irish literature. The Woman Who Walked Into Doors is realism as a relationship to life, not as an exercise in literary genre.

There is, for instance, little physical description of things or places. Paula takes her own world for granted, assumes that she doesn't have to describe or explain it. The only places she describes are the ones that are, for her, unusual - the houses she goes to work in as a cleaner, the road in Malahide where her husband Charlo kills and is killed.

And this is a complete reversal of the norm. Realism as a genre assumes that the reader is middle class. It takes the reader to places - the domain of the lower orders - that are assumed to be unfamiliar. The intensity of description comes precisely, from that assumption of unfamiliarity you, gentle reader, are being led into unknown territory, and I, the narrator will chart it for you in such detail that you will believe that it exists.

One of the great things Doyle does in giving the narrative over entirely to Paula's voice is to explode all of these assumptions. The first person narrative is in some respects limiting, since everything has to be credibly contained within a single consciousness. But it is "also crucial. Paula has no reason to explain anything in the daily world of working class suburbs: if you don't understand Bisto or Charlie Bird, Happy Meals or The Golden Shot - tough. It is middle class Ireland that is described as if it is an unknown land. The book's journey is not the journey of the middle class reader into the wild territory of the proles. It is Paula's journey into the wild territory of her own life.

And that journey is not mapped according to some naive notion that human experience, especially the experience of the powerless and voiceless, can be described as a simple, stable relationship to "reality". Paula's reality is not what you can see with your own eyes. On the contrary, Paula's story is all about her own and other people's failure to see what is front of them, to read the signs of her bruises. Every painful piece of reality in the book has to be fought for against denial, amnesia, incredulity, the fuzz of alcohol, the desire to pretend that things were not as bad as they seemed. Realism becomes, not a literary convention but a human triumph. The ability to say what novelists say - this happened, then this happened - is, for Paula, the mark of escape from victimhood.

This kind of realism matters. It matters that truths about violence and sex and poverty can be stated in this way. It matters that after a series of Irish novels about men inflicting violence on women, told from the point of view of the men, the other side of the story is told. It matters that an abused woman can be written about, not as a victim, but as a person. And it matters that, after this novel, realism can never again be the property of writers for whom the lives of most people form an exotic destination for intrepid literary travellers.