BULLFIGHTING BY RODDY DOYLE
Many people are fans of Roddy Doyle even if they don't know it. Successful movies were made of a trilogy of his novels: The Commitments, The Snapper and The Van.
A Booker Prize winner, Doyle is hailed as the voice of modern Ireland - a weighty claim, since that small island has produced more than its share of literary award winners, including four recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature - not bad for an island of six million people.
In his current short story collection, Bullfighting, Doyle belongs to the group he writes about: middleaged men living in Dublin. This is current Dublin, suffering the collapse of the Celtic Tiger (the decade of economic growth that ended with the current global recession).
Financial concerns are only the background, however, and not central to the stories. Far more pressing are the challenges of the men we meet. They are dealing with issues common to people of their age everywhere: children leaving, parents dying or becoming incapacitated, relationships losing their passion and friends all facing similar problems. There is loss, and sadness, but miraculously this collection is enjoyable to read, and ultimately hopeful in its outlook.
Bullfighting consists of 13 stories, each in the voice of a male Dubliner. A charge could be leveled against Doyle: it might really be the same man, telling different anecdotes. The truth probably is that men of a certain age and economic situation, living today in Dublin, really do sound similar. There are no rich people here, or paupers; none of the narrators is evil, or even nasty. They are just middle-aged men in middle-class lives.
There are threads running throughout the book. One is that, generally, the men love their wives: Martin tells us in the story "The Photograph" that he and his wife had "never really stopped fancying each other." Martin's friend Davie, who was separated, had come up with what he called "Davie's Law: All women over the age of 40 are mad." But Martin decides that his own wife's madness actually suits her.
Another thread is the sense of throwing things out, or casting them off. Not important or symbolic things necessarily: they could be a dead rat found in the house, or a statuette that had been on a hall table. But the getting rid of useless stuff seems to balance losing important things: a friend to cancer, a job, the ability to have a coherent conversation with parents.
Animals and kids play a role as well, and here we see Doyle's deftness at work: good parenting is not portrayed as sentimental, but often creative. In "Animals", George provides his children with a parade of pets, most of which did not last long: "The animals always had decent, elaborate burials. Christian, Hindu, Humanist - whatever bits of knowledge the kids brought home from school went into the funerals. George changed mobile phones, not because he really wanted to, but because he knew the boxes would come in handy - it was always wise to have a coffin ready for the next dead bird or fish."
When Martin attends his friend's funeral, he notices that "Jesus in the Stations of the Cross looked a bit like Keith Richards." Bill, in another story, makes a hobby of taking his parents to funerals, and stopping for fish and chips afterwards. In the title story, four friends spend a week in a tawdry Spanish town, drinking too much, getting too much sun, wearing shorts they would never wear at home - but when Gerry finishes by saying, "This was living...this was happiness," we simply believe him. That's how good Doyle is.
