Reading Local Interview: Roddy Doyle

Roddy Doyle, Booker-Prize-winning novelist (for 1993′s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha), screenwriter, playwright, memoirist, and general all-around writer of great things, has a new novel out.  The Dead Republic is the third in a trilogy of novels about Henry Smart, former I.R.A. soldier.  By the time we get to this final installment in Henry’s story, he’s an old man returning to the Ireland he left behind many years before, only to find it struggling in new ways with many of its old problems.

Doyle reads and signs at Powell’s on Burnside next Wednesday, May 5, at 7:30 pm.  But first, he kindly answered a few questions for us about books, movies, and his mother country.

Q: The Dead Republic follows the story of Henry Smart, protagonist of two prior novels [A Star Called Henry and Oh Play That Thing], from a nominal starting point in Hollywood to a Hollywood-ized Ireland and then back to the Ireland itself. In the process, his life story is co-opted into the 1952 film The Quiet Man.

For Henry, the process of translating his life into a crowd-pleasing, by-the-rules Hollywood movie is painful and ultimately overwhelming. You’ve written several screenplays and seen your work translated into very successful films in the past. Has it been a tough process — tough to get truth onto the screen, tough to escape Hollywood’s preconceptions of Ireland, tough to stay true to the original story?

A: My experiences of adapting my work to the screen have been good. I’m very happy with all three films. There was no pressure to make them less Dublin, more rural Irish, or Hollywood Irish.

I met a producer who wanted to re-locate the plot of The Commitments to New York – New York kids, New York Band etc. But dealing with it was easy. I just said No Thanks, and spoke to other interested producers.

The script problems, in my experience, were all practical – how to condense a novel, even a short novel, into a two-hour film, without throwing away the material that attracts people to the novel in the first place. Luckily, all the people I worked with – producers, directors, co-writers – loved the novel first. Stephen Frears, who directed two of the films, carried the novels around with him on set.

So, I’ve no complaints, no miserable script-writer stories to tell.

Q: This is the third book in a trilogy following the progress of Henry Smart, and it’s the second trilogy you’ve written. Do you know from the outset when you’re writing a trilogy — does the story present itself as needing that large a span? Or does that reveal itself along the way — do you complete each book thinking it might be the end of the story, only to find that there’s more to say? In general, how do you think about working on such a large scale — what opportunities does it afford you, and what might it cost?

A: I didn’t plan on writing a trilogy, just a long book. But, quite early into the book that became A Star Called Henry, I knew that Henry would be leaving Ireland and, eventually, coming back. So, I decided that it would be a good idea to divide the story into three parts. The first, a young man in Ireland; the second, an older man, out of Ireland; the third, a much older man, back in Ireland. The same narrator, but in different places, different eras, and different phases of his life.

Q: Your Booker Prize-winning novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha starts with “We were coming down our road,” which seems an echo of Joyce’s opening to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. (“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road…”) Your books often play with voice, temporal confusion, and dark comedy in ways that call up the Irish greats, particularly Joyce and Sterne. Do you write with your literary forebears in mind, or do those influences make their way in despite you?

A: I never have other writers at the front of my mind as I write. But I’ve been reading all my life, and watching films and listening to music, so it’s inevitable that these things inspire or provoke – I suppose.

The Joyce comparison has been made before, but I wasn’t aware of it when I wrote that opening line and, to be honest with you, I’d need more than ‘coming down’ and ‘road’ to convince me that Portrait of the Artist was even at the back of my mind when I wrote it. The book I had most in mind when I started Paddy Clarke was Richard Ford’s Wildlife.

Q: Because you often use regional diction and unexpected jumps in time, your books can be challenging to read. Doyle narrators don’t do a lot of spoon-feeding; the reader needs to keep up, and American readers in particular may need to look up some words to know what’s going on. Have you ever had any push-back about this from publishers or editors (or film folk)? Have readers made mention of it?

A: If by ‘push back’ you mean pressure to make the phrase less local, more somehow generic, the honest answer is No. The job is to make the sentence, or group of sentences, as clear as possible. If the sentence isn’t clear, it’s not necessarily because there’s a piece of regional diction in there – it’s because it’s badly written. If I think a word will be a challenge beyond my own district, I try to insert meaning or hints at meaning around the sentence, if that makes sense.