RODDY Doyle has probably done 10,000 interviews and has experienced 10,000 interview.ing techniques; I can say in all modesty that mine must have been the worst. Easily. It was years ago, before he was famous, in the days when he was prepared to waste his valuable time discussing his work with the world's worst literary interviewer.
My only real recollection of the interview was that I spent much of the time talking about Kilbarrack. Not him talking about Kilbarrack. Me talking about Kilbarrack. And I remember his eyes kept gazing over my shoulder towards the window and the open air which he had so foolishly abandoned in order to talk to me.
There was a reason why I was talking about Kilbarrack. It was this. I couldn't think of a single question to ask him. Not one. Not of the literary variety anyway. Even now, I cannot compose a single question to ask a writer, other than to inquire what he or she has for breakfast. As for the rest of the patter, I haven't got a clue.
But if I were to interview Roddy Doyle now, there's one thing I would say to him: it would not be given him a lecture on Kilbarrack. He's had that. No. It would to urge him: bring back Charlo. For Charlo is dead, and life is not the same any more.
Unforgettable Characters
Take the entire span of Irish literature this century, from Ulysses onwards. How many genuinely unforgettable characters are there? How many instantly come to mind? How many are real and tangible creations, who not merely could exist but actually do exist in your own imagination? The Bloom family, and their nice friend Blazes, and Stephen, and almost anybody else you care to name from that particular novel. But after that, who else has entered the public perception as myth and character, indivisible and real?
Few enough. Myself, I have trouble of thinking of any; but Charlo is there. Charlo is an authentic character. He lives. He is an abomination, but he is fascinating because he is so authentic. He is a creation of the writer's imagination, but he inhabits the imaginations of all those who have encountered him.
It no doubt seems odd to single out a character who is already dead by the time we open the first page of Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, but he is worth talking about for one reason. Only true writers create living, palpable fictions, fictions who become non fictions in the minds of their readers.
Charlo is a triumph and therefore places Roddy Doyle into the category of being a serious writer.
This is worth saying because he is still not regarded in Ireland as being serious. In fact he is serious and seriously good. His achievements are so large but already are so taken for granted that we have completely forgotten them.
Almost single handedly he has shifted the focus of Irish fiction to the housing estates around the city, away from the stage of rural life, with its tiresomely predictable repertoire of priestcraft, Big Houses, sexual frustration and angst, and away too from the self consciously literary ambience of Dublin.
The city of Dublin is not present in his novels. It is not the locus. It is certainly a place which his characters visit, just as they visit Courtown. But they are not of Dublin because Dublin is not theirs. They are exeluded from the consciousness of the city, as the city is largely excluded from their consciousness. Their preoccupations are sex, drink, money, which are the preoccupations of most of us. But few if any writers write honestly about these natural - almost virtuous - preoccupations.
Indian Fatalism
And when Roddy Doyle deals with victimhood, it is not of the self conscious variety. It is wholly unselfconscious. His characters are almost totally without self-pity; indeed, they seem barely conscious of the other possibilities of life. There is a Indian fatalism in their acceptance of their lot. Even if we don't know such people personally - and I suspect that few Irish Times readers do - we know intuitively that he is right.
He has persuaded people to follow life in the estates of Dublin, where they would much rather not be. This is a serious achievement; and he has managed it by writing with extraordinary economy and craftsmanship. In fact, it could fairly be said that he's the most skilled; writer now writing in Ireland. Even the names he gives people - Roger, Wendy - tell you worlds about the doomed, pathetic ambitions of their families, which seem to rise to dizzy heights at the font and are then forgotten.
But seldom has any character been so pungently parenthesised as my hero Charlo - "(I watched all the Gulf War stuff with Charlo. He loved that war)". The wastelands of the estates where his dreary lives are eked out are not described, but conveyed, elliptically and with enormous subtlety. We are not reading a social worker's treatise; we are following believable people through a wholly believable landscape, and we learn about that landscape by the way its inhabitants talk and think.
Exceptional Ear
It takes an exceptional ear and a wickedly good memory to convey conversation as Roddy Doyle does. The Woman Who Walked Into Doors is doubly remarkable because the wholly convincing narrative in the first person singular is by a woman; and to my admittedly male, and therefore imperfect judgment, he captures all female conversation with uncanny accuracy - though I fear I must take his word for it that sisters in Kilbarrack discuss the speed with which their singular teenage sexual fantasies achieve the desired result.
Why is Roddy Doyle not regarded as a literary figure? Because he is so studiously nonliterary, I suppose. He writes without conceits or cleverness. His prose is lucid and immensely clever, though outwardly simple. And he invented Charlo Spencer, one of the greatest of all creations in Irish literature.