Roddy Doyle’s new novel, Smile, deals with a familiar — and familiarly shocking — topic in Ireland: institutional sexual abuse. “You’d hear another story about priests, nuns and what went on in Christian Brothers schools, and you’d almost sigh, ‘Not again’,” says Doyle. “It became an expected story. And I wanted to write a book that could still be a bit shocking - in the storytelling, not the subject. I wanted to tell a story that was different, do justice to it, if that makes sense.”
Shocking is the word. Reading Smile, one is swept along - as in all Doyle’s novels - by the vibrancy of the language, the vivid sense of character and place, but nothing prepares you for the final few pages where, in a twist of imaginative brilliance, everything you have read is turned completely on its head. Smile tells the story of Victor Forde, a writer who has enjoyed some recognition in Dublin as a radio-show controversialist, and as the husband of Rachel, a catering entrepreneur turned national celebrity. But Victor’s star has fallen. Rachel is gone, and he is living in a cramped, barren flat in the suburb where he grew up, venturing to a local pub in search of company.
There, he is buttonholed by a big, bullying man, Fitzpatrick, who claims to be a school friend. Fitzpatrick seems to know more about him than Victor can explain; Victor has difficulty even remembering him - but “the memory,” as Fitzpatrick says, “it’s like dropping bits of yourself as you go along, isn’t it?” This seemingly chance encounter takes us into Victor’s past, to his days at a Christian Brothers school, and his abuse at the hands of a teacher. The journey ends up with Victor - and the reader - questioning whether anything about his version of the past, and himself, can be trusted. To reveal more would give the game away, but suffice it to say that Smile is the most challenging book that Doyle has ever written.
“What was satisfying was that I was doing something very different so late on in my career,” he says. “It just felt quite fresh that I’d allowed myself to open a door - I mean, the door was always open; there was nobody saying I couldn’t open the door if I wished to. So I stuck my head in there and thought, can I get away with this? Walk in here, grab a few words and walk back out...” He laughs
I meet Doyle in the lounge of a posh hotel in Dublin. Slightly built and bespectacled, the former teacher once known to his pupils as “Punk Doyle” is now 59 and completely bald. He grew up in Kilbarrack, in north Dublin, where his father Rory taught printing at the local college of technology. The area had been carpeted with jerry-built corporation flats and settled by working-class people - “what would have been Sean O’Casey’s characters” - displaced from the inner city. The Doyles were “lower middle-class” and lived in their own bungalow. His mother and sister still live there. Doyle moved some years ago - all of three miles away. For 14 years he taught English and geography at the local Greendale Community School, where he was the only teacher to wear an earring and say “bleedin’” in class - as in “where’s yer bleedin’ homework”
In 1987, he wrote The Commitments, his first book, about a group of kids from Killbarrack - Barrytown in the book - who form a soul band. (He borrowed the name Barrytown from the title of a song by Steely Dan.) “I was messing around, wanting to write but not knowing what to write about,” he says. “Then it struck me that what I wanted to write about was just outside the door. I realised I’d been listening to those voices all my life, so why wouldn’t I use that? “You’re anxious enough when you’re writing, let alone handing it over for examination, but I could feel very strongly as I began to type, ‘I know what I’m doing.’ When a character walks in the door, I know who he’s going to meet, I know what she’s going to say to him and what he’s going to say back. I know the dimensions of the staircase. I don’t have to describe it. I know, do you know what I mean?”
The Commitments established Doyle’s milieu - Irish working-class life - and his style: tough, sentimental and frequently hilarious, rendered in quick-fire dialogue with expletives that dance off the page. He has published 10 novels since then, all but one set in Dublin. (The exception, Oh, Play That Thing, the second part of The Last Roundup - Doyle’s epic trilogy about 20th-century Ireland - took the protagonist Henry Smart to America.) “I’ve been to different places and taken notes for possible stories,” he says. “But when I’ve looked at the notes later it’s always just looked like tourism. It hasn’t felt like lived experience.” The new novel has something of the sobering mood of The Woman Who Walked into Doors, his 1996 novel about domestic abuse, and Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, which won the 1993 Booker Prize for its portrait of family break-up through the eyes of a 10-year-old boy. Smile is also Doyle’s most autobiographical novel yet. Like Victor, Doyle attended a Christian Brothers school from the age of 13, almost two decades before the scandal broke in the late Eighties, with the Catholic order accused of widespread sexual, physical and emotional abuse of children in its care.
Talking of his own schooldays, Doyle says that, on one level, it was “brilliant”. Two boys whom he met in his first year have remained his closest friends; they still meet once a week for a drink and a chat. On the other hand, “it was really quite shocking” - a place where violence was meted out by teachers casually and arbitrarily, and with a relish that, as he puts it, “went way beyond the call of duty”.
“I wouldn’t have known the word ‘sadism’ at the time, but looking back on it now, I would think that’s what it was,” he says. “And recalling being hit by one man - and he wasn’t a Brother, he was a lay teacher - I would say he was getting some sexual satisfaction from it. I remember being hit by his sweat as he hit me on the hands with a leather strap.
“We were messin’, four or five of us, as young guys do. Nothing. Six of the best, three on each hand. I put myself last in the queue, thinking he’d be tired by the time he got to me. He wasn’t. “I’ve never experienced pain delivered by somebody else like that. And shaking afterwards and holding the bars of the desk, trying to cool down...”
Doyle reckons he was lucky: “I wasn’t hit that often, but I witnessed boys being hit by fists; one guy being beaten on the ground with a huge set-square by an art teacher. An art teacher!” He shakes his head in disbelief.
The book takes its title from a moment when the young Victor is singled out by one of the Brothers with the chilling words, “Victor Forde, I can never resist your smile.” It is an ominous portent of what is to come. It is something that a Brother - “And I shan’t tell you his name” - said to Doyle himself in his first year at school. “’Roddy Doyle, I can never resist your smile...’” He pauses. “I can still remember... Jesus... I knew this was huge. I got a terrible slagging from the others boys. The word ‘queer’ is what was used - ‘He’s a queer,’ ‘You’re a queer,’ ‘Smile at him and tell him we don’t want homework.’ “Slagging among friends is a good thing. I would almost insist on it. It was good-natured in a way, but at the same time very unwelcome. And it went on for years, until he suddenly left - I was 15. Looking back, I’ve no idea why he said that to me, but Jesus Christ... when you’re 13 years old. It left me for years wondering what was wrong with my smile.” He laughs. “Maybe if it had been a nun... but’s that’s a different terror.”
Doyle himself was never abused; nor, he says, was he aware at the time of it happening to anybody else. “But it would never have been mentioned if it had been going on.” Later, when the revelations about abuse in such institutions began to surface, he would meet old boys from the school. “I’d ask them, do you think anybody was actually abused? ‘Oh, yeah!’” It is no surprise, perhaps, to learn that Doyle is an avowed atheist, although this, he says, has nothing to do with the Christian Brothers. “I just didn’t believe.” He smiles. “And you can’t listen to Lou Reed and go to Mass. It’s as simple as that.” (Music, football and literature are Doyle’s holy trinity.)
Smile is beautifully written, and beautifully observed - the rituals of male friendship, the pride a mother takes in her son getting a job - “a real job she could take to the shops”; the way an uncertain man feels when a beautiful woman shows interest. “I had my hands in the pockets of my Army surplus coat. Her hand, her arm, went between my right arm and side and into my pocket and around my hand. It was the best thing that had ever happened to me.” There is not a superfluous word. It is a source of satisfaction to Doyle to pile on the words - in this case, 120,000 for the first draft - but an even greater satisfaction to cut them back, to just 55,000. Some scenes, he suggests, you have to write in order to realise you really don’t need them. “Rhythm, to me, is as important as subject matter; substituting a three-syllable word with a two-syllable one, because the extra syllable seems to be a hurdle in the way...”
In The Guts, his previous book, he struggled with the character of a teenage girl. “She uses the word ‘like’ a lot, because teenage girls do. I was trying to replicate it, and actually it was awful - it wasn’t doing justice to her. So I took out most of the ‘likes’ and just left one or two. It’s not accurate to how she would have spoken. But it worked.” If you were trying to explain the day-to-day job of writing, he says, it would be editing. “Because the story is already there.” He smiles. “It’s just a matter of getting it out.”
–The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2015
Smile by Roddy Doyle is published by Jonathan Cape.
