When I first read Rob Doyle’s novel Here Are the Young Men back in the summer of 2014 I felt as if I had come across someone singular. The way he wrote about those Dublin boys’ lives – dangling in that curiously charged space between childhood and adulthood – was shocking, powerful and deeply profound. The novel roared in my ears.
I knew very little about this talented young writer but one thing was clear. He was the real deal. Someone who had the ability to drill down into the human experience and bring up not only the polite and profound, but also the bile. I knew I had to bring him to the Bloomsbury list.
Reading This Is The Ritual for the first time felt like having a sharp, cold shower. An exercise in self-exploration, self-immolation, self-flagellation, the stories that make up the book come from a writer stripped bare, exposing himself – his every filthy, dark thought, in all his explicit, hilarious, mad gloriousness. The collection is uncompromising in its bleak confrontations of failed hopes and aborted dreams. Delighting in testing the reader, Rob Doyle forces us to flex our minds and check our gag reflex.
Two stories in particular stood out to me. The first, Paris Story, concerns the friendship and then relationship between the writer X and the writer K, and it lays bare every writer’s deepest, darkest fears. Writing is at times an act of aggression – and a grappling with morality on the page but also in life, as writers can be betrayers of secrets, magpies taking and appropriating others’ stories, twisting them to their own purposes. You have to have a sense of conviction, as a writer, that what you’re taking from others is worth it – and so there can be a certain kind of hubris that comes with the act. And with hubris, can come jealousy – jealousy of the success of others. In six short pages all this is explored, as serious X watches the rise of K, while his own career founders. Then comes betrayal, and later, a reckoning, of sorts.
The second, Anus – Black Sun, is a story as hideously gripping as the explicit, but basely simplistic, pornographic film that it revolves around. Hypnotising, it is an array of commentaries on our modern society, its dependence on the internet for pleasure, the numbing qualities that leach from this dependency, and the search for something truly moving – something truly, viscerally shocking – in a society awash with scenes of horror and explicit sex daily.
Rob Doyle is deeply connected to his craft and unafraid to push himself and his readers. The mixture of experimentation and psychological realism in the collection is perfectly judged and makes for a richly rewarding reading experience. His lack of inhibitions is unnerving sometimes, and I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable reading some of them out loud to my mother, but more often than not they tease, cajole and send you into fits of laughter, all the while throwing little grenades into your brain. And if that isn’t great fiction writing, what is?
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 this week and to be published on irishtimes.com next Friday
