Jul. 20, 2011 - Issue #822: CASH IN!

Revue

Bullfighting

Ireland, perhaps because it's such an oral culture, with its songs and storytelling, has boasted far more "great writers" per capita than most countries over the past few centuries. Now, one of Ireland's best living bards, Roddy Doyle, offers Bullfighting, his second short-story collection, a book spilling over with voice.

It's no mean feat to write prose as if you just happened to catch someone's conversations or stream-of-consciousness, but that's how easy Doyle makes it seem here. These 13 stories enter middle-aged men's thoughts and memories: reflections on a changing marriage, or a worrisome medical diagnosis, or years of school-teaching, or the animals the family has had, or the way a wife sleeps. Some of these men walk Dublin streets but seem to be moving in circles, "roundabouts," their minds revolving around a nagging concern or haunting worry. Yet each story has the forward momentum, the feel and flow, of a dramatic inner monologue, slow-burning to the flash of a moment—of confession, of realized happiness, of a change that crept in. (The only downside to this chorus-like collection is that, if you read too many tales in a row, one man's voice starts to blur into another.)

Doyle's achievement isn't just his wry humour ("grand" is used in all its ironic variations; cancer is "dignified ... a fuckin' achievement" compared to a diagnosis of diverticula) or his short but always sharp sentences, but the easy flow of these husbands' and fathers' thoughts. In "The Slave," where the man's discovery of a rat in his house unsettles him, he moves from why he drinks coffee (picked up the habit in Florida) to conceiving their baby there (in Orlando) to the storm and the music on the radio then, to a tender, connecting thought: "It all seemed to fit. The music and the weather. Even though it was pissing outside and he was singing about the desert. But it was American. And we were there. Myself and herself, after all those years. And that kind of explains why we've one child that's eight years younger than the others. He's a souvenir, God love him. Him and the coffee."

But memory and storytelling turn on us, and the narrator, in the collection's centrepiece, "Funerals." There, a man starts to take his parents, more and more, to funerals for different people they knew. But his own fudging of the truth has become something far more disconcerting in them, he realizes.
Catholic school abuse shadows a few tales. The recent economic boom hangs like a spell, a bubbling charm that shimmers away in "Animals" and bursts in "Funerals." After darkly hilarious banter between brothers over the narrator's wayward wife Ciara, the Iceland volcanic eruption becomes a bittersweet metaphor in "Ash," where the reconciled couple's words of comfort for their daughters also hint at death: "–It's just for a while. Things will get back to normal after the ash drifts away. Or falls. –Falls? –Yeah. –Will it hurt? –No, said Ciara. It won't."

It's those seemingly painless little moments that can change the mood, alter the colour of the day, and lighten or darken the future, that these men are bullishly fighting for or against in Doyle's collection. And with prose like this, it's a beautiful fight to follow.
 

By Roddy Doyle
214 pp, $22
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