Coming to Terms With New Ireland

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Coming to Terms With New Ireland

February 14, 2008

EACH of the eight new tales in Roddy Doyle’s first ever collection of short stories – The Deportees and Other Stories, recently published by Viking Press — have one thing in common.

Someone born in Ireland meets someone who has come to live there. It’s the friendships, courtships, tensions and seductions that bloom between them that animate this remarkable new collection.

Author of The Commitments, The Snapper and most recently Paula Spencer, the Dublin-based Booker Prize winning Doyle is right up to the minute in terms of provocative social questions. In 1995, Doyle writes, he went to bed in one country and woke up in another. The Celtic Tiger economy changed everything, utterly. By 2008 one in every 10 people now living in Ireland was born somewhere else.

It was during the late 1990s that Doyle started hearing stories about the first big wave of arrivals. Suddenly local taxi drivers were telling him tales about the African woman who got a buggy from Social Welfare and left it behind at a bus station because she couldn’t be bothered carrying it on and she knew she could easily get another.

Or the Polish woman who rented a flat and had it turned into a brothel before the landlord could even cash her deposit check. Or the neighbor who looked over his garden wall to see four Muslim men bleeding an Irish sheep to death.

Hearing these tall tales, and hearing the distinct menace between their lines, Doyle decided he wanted to add some stories of his own. In April 2000 he read an article in The Irish Times about two Nigerian journalists, Abel Ugba and Chinedu Onyejelem, who had started a multicultural newspaper called Metro Eireann.

Doyle decided that he’d like to meet them. And no sooner than he met them he offered to write for them. His monthly 800-word column eventually became The Deportees.

Longtime Doyle fans will be delighted to hear that Jimmy Rabbitte, the man who formed The Commitments, is back in an unlikely sequel to that beloved tale. But this time he’s fronting a new band, a multicultural one that forgoes soul music for the folk songs of Woody Guthrie.

In case you start wondering if Doyle’s mellowed, let it be known that The Deportees is unpredictable, hilarious and one of most insightful depictions of modern Dublin in years.

In the story “Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner,” the least successful of the collection, Doyle writes about Dubliner Larry Linnane’s reaction when his daughter Stephanie brings home “the black fella.” It’s a gentle meditation on a theme, but at times it can feel a little strained, as the point he’s making overwhelms the tale.

Other stories succeed so well they remain with you for days. In “The Pram,” Doyle conjures a genuinely terrifying tale about a Polish nanny who decides to settle scores with her two elder charges by – in a new Irish phrase she has learned – “scaring them s***less.”

She tells them the story of a child catcher, an old lady who lives in a forest and steals babies and badly behaved little girls for their skin. What follows will raise the hair on the back of you neck and possibly move you to tears. It marks Doyle’s skill as a writer that he can both frighten and move you with tales this well told.

Another highlight is “New Boy,” a beautifully crafted story about a 9-year-old refugee who finds himself adrift in a new world of Irish children, where the only choice before him appears to be sink or swim.

“Black Hoodie,” a love story about a teenage Irish boy and the Nigerian girl he’s devoted to, is a small masterpiece of social satire, cultural assumptions, and the unconscious racism that quickly bubbles to the surface when the two hold hands.

“When we go through the shops, we’re followed all the way. We stop – the security guards stop. We go up the escalator – they’re three steps behind us, and there’s another one waiting at the top … You’re never lonely if you’re with a black girl, or even if your hoodie is black,” Doyle writes.

As Doyle shows us in his brilliant new collection, Irish society has become multicultural, but it’s not exactly cosmopolitan yet.

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