Hot Press meets Roddy Doyle

Although Roddy Doyle has enjoyed a stellar career as a novelist, in his early unpublished years he almost welcomed rejection letters. At least they were preferable to being totally ignored.

“Rejection, after a while, almost became a positive response,” the 55-year-old Booker-winner smiles. “It was the lack of response that got to me. When I sent off a novel, which I know now wouldn’t be fit to publish, it was the ‘not coming back at all’ or ‘coming back unopened’ that was worse. And I wrote to agents asking them if they wanted to read a few sample chapters, following all the advice you get, and it was always, ‘No, but we’d love to read you when you‘re published.’”
When the then Kilbarrack schoolteacher wrote his next novel – about a fledgling Dublin working class soul band – he decided not to send it to anyone. Instead he formed his own imprint called King Farouk and published it independently.
“When I was writing The Commitments, I was quite excited about it,” he recalls. “Something clicked quite early on when I was writing it. And I just thought I’d do it myself. I had friends who had founded the Passion Machine theatre company and I could see what they were doing. The word wasn’t there at the time, the indie thing. Indie, I think, was probably Harrison Ford (laughs). Nobody sneered at it. I came across the term ‘vanity publishing’ some years later, which I thought was horrible.”
The Commitments was published in 1987 and the rest is history. The book became a word of mouth bestseller (which quickly landed Doyle a lucrative international publishing deal) and was turned into a successful movie by Alan Parker in 1991. Now a musical stage adaptation, directed by Jamie Lloyd, is opening in London’s West End in October.
We’re meeting in photographer Mark Nixon’s Clontarf studio, just down the road from the home Doyle shares with his wife and children. He apologises for not coming into town to meet me. He has to pack for a flight to London in the morning. For the next few weeks, he’ll be on hand for rehearsals and previews at the Palace Theatre.
He tells me that he resisted offers to adapt the book for the stage for many years.
“Almost immediately after The Commitments film came out there were enquiries about the musical rights. I said no, because I felt enough is enough. I had no experience professionally, emotionally or anything of musicals.”
Saying ‘no’ isn’t something Doyle has ever had a problem with. Last year, Louis Walsh dubbed him “the rudest man in showbiz” in a story on the front page of the Sunday Independent, after Doyle rebuffed the boyband manager’s offer to team him up with Simon Cowell on a movie project.
“It was a bit mystifying,” he laughs. “It happened years before the story appeared. You got the sense from the paper that I had I just put down the phone that day. That’s why it’s a bit mystifying. I was aware that there was a thing called The X-Factor, but I had never seen it. That came later when my kids were older, my daughter particularly. But at the time I hadn’t seen it.
“So I got a call and it’s Louis Walsh. He said, ‘Do you know Simon Cowell?’ And I said ‘No, I don’t’ and he said ‘He’s the guy I do X-Factor with’. I was aware he was a bit of a hate figure. I’d never actually seen him in action. And he said, ‘Well, he’d like to talk to you about this film idea, can I give him your phone number?’ And I immediately said ‘no’. It would be a waste of time because there’s nothing in that world that I want. So he said ‘Oh’ and I think we said goodbye to each other and that was it.
“And then six or seven years later somebody phones me and says, ‘What did you say to Louis Walsh?’ So it’s a non-event really. And underlined the wisdom of saying no in the first place. I think it might have been a quiet week for Louis. He called me ‘the rudest man in showbiz’! And my wife said, ‘Sure, you’re not in showbiz!’”
Of course, he’s very much in showbiz nowadays. Having eventually relented, he wrote the script for the stage musical himself. “The big challenge, I suppose, was: you’ve decided you’re writing a musical, grand. But it’s a band that can’t actually play their instruments. So there’s the challenge and how do you do it? How do you start a musical in a semi-conventional way – people are entitled to think they’re going to something that even if you don’t call it a musical, everybody’s saying it’s a musical. You can play with the conventions but the conventions are there so you want a big burst at the beginning when the curtain opens. So how do you do it without giving the story away?”
Figuring all that out delayed the writing of his most recent novel by a couple of years. More than The Snapper or The Van, the newly published The Guts – which makes the Barrytown Trilogy now the Barrytown Quartet – is a more direct sequel to his debut in that it continues the story of Jimmy Rabbitte Jnr, the ambitious young band manager who first put The Commitments together [see review].
“It took me a couple of years longer than planned,” he says. “I started a good chunk of it, about 20,000 words and then I decided I would take on the job of writing The Commitments script – and that was a big job and I had to write it quickly. I would normally divide my day between projects. I had to stop that for the guts of six months while I was writing the script. Then, when I went back to the novel, I had kind of lost the thread a bit. So I polished it as if it was a finished thing and then kept going. It was a couple of years in total.”
Although Doyle has flexed his literary muscles in various ways – and books – over the last 25 years, The Guts is very much written in the same sparse style as his debut.
“I would be annoyed or whatever if The Guts was my fourth book because I’d be thinking ‘I’m sticking myself in a rut here’,” he admits, “Because I had written Paddy Clarke and the Henry books and done other stuff as well, I felt happy going back. It’s been 25 years or so, so I’ll go back and see how the characters are doing. It’s kind of a reaction to the re-emergence of the world recession as well. The other books were written at a time when we now know there was a recession. We all thought it was normal life in Ireland. Then things changed.
“I just thought, I wrote the Rabbitte family back then, how are they getting on now? How are they coping? If I was writing it years ago I probably would have slipped into a lazy familiarity. When you add a quarter of a century to someone’s life, a lot could have happened.”