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Summary
Summary
Eight funny and poignant stories of immigrant experience in contemporary Ireland
The eight tales in Roddy Doyle’s first-ever collection of stories have one thing in common: someone born in Ireland meets someone who has come to live there. In “Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner,” a father who prides himself on his open-mindedness when his daughters talk about sex is forced to confront his feelings when one of them brings home a black man. “New Boy” describes the first day of school for a nine-year-old boy from Africa; while in “The Pram,” a terrifying ghost story, a Polish nanny grows impatient with her charge’s older sisters and decides—in a new phrase she has learned—to “scare them shitless.” In “57% Irish,” a man decides to devise a test of Irishness by measuring reactions to three things: Riverdance , the song “Danny Boy,” and Robbie Keane’s goal against Germany in the 2002 World Cup. And in the wonderful title story, Jimmy Rabbitte, the man who formed The Commitments, decides that it’s time to find a new band—a multicultural outfit that specializes not in soul music but in the folk songs of Woody Guthrie.
This is classic Roddy Doyle, full of his unmistakable wit and his acute ear for dialogue. With empathy and insight, The Deportees and Other Stories takes a new slant on the immigrant experience, something of increasing relevance in today’s Ireland.
Author Notes
Roddy Doyle is the author of five previous novels, including a Booker Prize nominee, The Van, and a Booker Prize winning international bestseller Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. He has also written several screenplays, most recently When Brendan Met Trudy. His first children's book, The Giggler Treatment, will be published in September by Scholastic. He lives in Dublin.
(Publisher Provided)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Doyle's dynamic first collection of short stories offers light and heartfelt perspectives on the effects of immigration on Irish culture. Originally serialized for a Dublin newspaper, all eight stories draw from the conceit of "someone born in Ireland [who] meets someone who has come to live" there. The opener, "Guess Who's Coming for the Dinner," covers familiar ground-a self-proclaimed "modern" father is taken aback when his daughter invites a "black fella" to dinner-but Doyle's wry sense of humor saves the narrative from triteness. Fans of Doyle's previous work will revel in the title story, a follow-up to The Commitments that finds Jimmy Rabbitte masterminding a multicultural revival of Woody Guthrie music. The later stories find Doyle experimenting with different styles and voices: "New Boy" charts an unlikely friendship between a nine-year-old African immigrant and two "small, angry Irish boys," while "Black Hoodie" finds a timid, indifferent teenager discovering his passion for civil rights and a Nigerian girl. There are some abrupt endings that veer toward the convenient, though this may be an unavoidable consequence of their serial origins. Doyle's immense talent as a writer is neatly showcased throughout, and his sharp wit adds a richness to every tale. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Doyle, a former Booker Prize winner best known for his Barrytown trilogy of novels (The Commitments, 1987; The Snapper, 1990; and The Van, 1991) about life in blue-collar Ireland, now presents a collection of short stories revolving around the immigrant experience in Ireland. Doyle focuses on how an affluent Ireland in the mid-1990s became a destination for people from other countries (Nigeria, Poland, Romania, and others) seeking a better life and, in the process, challenged resident Irish to reexamine their attitudes. He wasn't a racist. He was sure about that now, positive he thought. So reflects a father about himself as his daughter brings home a Nigerian boyfriend in the story Look Who's Coming to the Dinner. The Commitments gets a sequel in The Deportees, in which Jimmy Rabbitte forms a new group and receives threatening phone calls for his efforts. New Boy tells of a nine-year-old African boy and his troubling first day at an Irish school. All the stories were originally serialized in the multicultural newspaper Metro Eireann; all are imbued with Doyle's trademark wit and insight into the Irish character; and all are about people he clearly loves but is unafraid to hold accountable for their imperfections.--Eberle, Jerry Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
In his first story collection, Roddy Doyle comes to terms with the new face of his homeland. DECLAN is Irish and Declan is black. Declan has come from Ireland to study in New York; sick to death of his Dublin professors droning on about Irish writing and its influence on the world he decides, in the penultimate story of Roddy Doyle's first collection, to prove that the Harlem Renaissance kick-started Ireland's best writing of the 20th century. "And, if he couldn't do it, he'd cheat; he'd make it up. Yeats had died clutching his copy of 'The New Negro.' Beckett never went to the jacks without 'The Souls of Black Folk' under his arm." As Doyle notes in a foreword to "The Deportees," his novel "The Commitments" (his first, written in 1986) caused something of a stir for a line delivered by a young man named Jimmy Rabbitte: "The Irish are the niggers of Europe." Jimmy's mid-'80s naivete gave coarse, heartfelt expression to an Irish sense of alienation and oppression that would lead, of course, to the formation of an all-Irish soul band, and that found further fame when "The Commitments" was made into a delightful film. But times have changed: "Twenty years on," Doyle continues, "there are thousands of Africans living in Ireland and, if I was writing that book today, I wouldn't use that line. It wouldn't actually occur to me, because Ireland has become one of the wealthiest countries in Europe and the line would make no sense." The tales in this collection strive to come to terms with this new Ireland. Doyle is already well known for his impatience with the old Ireland, or at least with some aspects of it; a few years ago he remarked that "Ulysses" could have done with a good editor and added, for good measure, "I only read three pages of 'Finnegans Wake' and it was a tragic waste of time." Heresy, you'd have thought - but then one of the delights of Doyle's work is its fearlessness. In book after book he throws himself into the voices and hearts of his characters, and just when you think you know what he's up to, he moves on. Readers thought they had him pegged with the joyous Barrytown trilogy ("The Commitments," "The Snapper," "The Van"); but then he surprised us with the darker pleasures of "Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha," which won the Man Booker Prize in 1993. "The Woman Who Walked Into Doors" took on domestic abuse; "A Star Called Henry" tackled the Easter Rising. There have been plays and children's books - but never a volume of stories, until now. It is a form that suits Doyle's aim of bringing 21st-century Ireland to life. These stories were first written in 800-word chunks for Metro Eireann, a multicultural paper started in Dublin by two Nigerian journalists in 2000. In part, we are told, Doyle wrote them in response to the urban legends he'd started to hear about his country's newest inhabitants: Muslims slaughtering sheep in their backyards, a Polish woman who turns her flat into a brothel. In reacting to such squalid stories, Doyle sometimes goes too far in the opposite direction, and at first it might seem as if there's something rose-tinted about the view he wants to take. The first story, "Guess Who's Coming for the Dinner," takes on the theme of the film of nearly the same name when Larry Linnane's daughter Stephanie brings home "the black fella" Although the relationship is not what it seems, the warm, fuzzy feeling that Doyle's comic writing effortlessly conjures does not seem earned; a point, we know, is being made, and so the tale is never quite credible. The title story, too, doesn't really come off - but with it Doyle has set himself an impossible task. He's always resisted the temptation to write a sequel to "The Commitments," despite many requests - yet he slides by the issue with "The Deportees," about a new band formed by an older, married, Jimmy Rabbitte. The entry criterion this time? "White Irish need not apply." There are downs, of course, before the ups and the final, roaring Celtic-tiger success of this happy multi-culti mishmash - and yet the optimism can seem forced. Sad to acknowledge, perhaps, that it's the darker stories that work best. One of the strongest is "The Pram," in which Doyle shifts away from Dublin demotic toward chilling, modern-day folk tale. Alina is a Polish nanny, trapped in the employ of the fearsome mother of two creepy girls and a sweet baby boy. The mother, an executive harridan, is known only as "O'Reilly": "Everyone called her by her surname. She insisted upon this practice. It terrified her clients, she told Alina. It was intriguing; it was sexy." Alina feels threatened by the two clever daughters and resolves to scare them with a story of a child catcher, an old lady who lives in a forest and steals babies - and little girls - for their skin. The language shifts easily from a modern register to Alina's heightened imagining of parents who stand guard over their children: "And the fathers slept standing up, at the doors of their houses, their axes in their hands, at the ready." A story both genuinely frightening and genuinely moving is a rare treat indeed. Equally strong is "New Boy," about a refugee who begins to find a place, however difficult, in the shared world of childhood. It has similarities with "I Understand," whose central character - he calls himself Tom, but it's clearly not his name - has to negotiate between a violent past and a future that looks as if it's headed the same way. All these stories are about blended worlds and the problems inherent in that blending, no matter what wealth or luxury a place affords. The guys and dolls in Jimmy Rabbitte's new gang have last names like Boro, Bunuel, Stefanescu and Ivanov, and when he tries to bring them together as he had with the Commitments it seems as if it can't work: "The dynamic was different; they were older, foreign, the country was too prosperous, they weren't hungry - something." That "something" lies at the heart of this collection, and its elusiveness is captivating. As, of course, is Doyle's sense of humor. "These are stag and hen people, from England. Kevin, my Irish friend, explained. One of these people will soon be married, so they come to Temple Bar to fall on the street and urinate in their trousers or show their big breasts to each other and laugh." Everyone, Doyle reminds us, is an exotic somewhere, after all. Erica Wagner's most recent book is "Seizure," a novel. She is literary editor of The Times of London.
Kirkus Review
The novelist's first story collection holds more socio-cultural than literary interest. One of Ireland's most popular and prolific contemporary writers, Doyle (Paula Spencer, 2007, etc.) offers eight stories focused on a single phenomenon--the proliferation of immigrants to his native land and the transformation of what it means to be Irish. Doyle writes in the foreword that in the 1990s he "went to bed in one country and woke up in a different one," a country inhabited by newcomers from Poland, Nigeria and other places who serve as the protagonists for these stories. He has continued to write short fiction for the weekly Metro Eirann, which bills itself as Ireland's multicultural newspaper, and where each of these stories first appeared in monthly 800-word installments. While Doyle's employment of dialogue and vernacular are characteristically colorful, the short fiction lacks the depth of his novels, with some of the characters seeming more like types than fully fleshed. The longest is the title story, a sequel of sorts to Doyle's The Commitments, with manager Jimmy Rabbitte returning to assemble a United Nations lineup to perform the songs of Woody Guthrie and others. Why? No clue. Another story, "Home to Harlem," concerns a student of literature who comes to America to research his questionable conjecture that the Harlem Renaissance had a profound influence on 20th-century Irish literature. Why does he think so? He can't really say, as the story mainly serves to show his confusion over a form that has an African-American category for race/ethnicity but none for African-Irish. As Doyle says of his stories, "Almost all of them have one thing in common. Someone born in Ireland meets someone who has come to live here.... Today, one in every ten people living in Ireland wasn't born here." Point taken, but what might have been entertaining as a newsprint monthly series seems slight in book form. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
If you love Doyle's novels, you'll want to read this first-ever collection of eight stories featuring outsiders looking to belong in Ireland. With a three-city tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Foreword Maybe it was Riverdance . A bootleg video did the rounds of the rooms and the shanties of Lagos and, moved to froth by the sight of that long, straight line of Irish and Irish-American legs -- t ap-tap-tap, tappy-tap -- thousands of Nigerians packed the bags and came to Ireland. Please. Teach us how to do that. I suspect it was more complicated. It was about jobs and the E.U., and infrastructure and wise decisions, and accident. It was about education and energy, and words like 'tax' and 'incentive', and what happens when they are put beside each other. It was also about music and dancing and literature and football. It happened, I think, some time in the mid-90s. I went to bed in one country and woke up in a different one. That was how it felt, for a while. It took getting used to. I'd written a novel, The Van , in 1990, about an un-employed plasterer. Five or six years later, there was no such thing as an unemployed plasterer. A few years on, all the plasterers seemed to be from Eastern Europe. In 1994 and 1995, I wrote The Woman Who Walked Into Doors . It was narrated by a woman called Paula Spencer, who earned her money cleaning offices. She went to work with other working-class women like herself. Ten years later, I wrote Paula Spencer . Paula was still cleaning offices but now she went to work alone and the other cleaners were men from Romania and Nigeria. In 1986, I wrote The Commitments . In that book, the main character, a young man called Jimmy Rabbitte, delivers a line that became quite famous: -The Irish are the niggers of Europe. Twenty years on, there are thousands of Africans living in Ireland and, if I was writing that book today, I wouldn't use that line. It wouldn't actually occur to me, because Ireland has become one of the wealthiest countries in Europe and the line would make no sense. In April 2000, two Nigerian journalists living in Dublin, Abel Ugba and Chinedu Onyejelem, started publishing a multicultural paper called Metro Eireann . I read an article about these men in the Irish Times , and decided that I'd like to meet them. Three or four years into our new national prosperity, I was already reading and hearing elegies to the simpler times, before we became so materialistic -- the happy days when more people left Ireland than were born here; when we were afraid to ask anyone what they did for a living, because the answer might be 'Nothing'; when we sent our pennies and our second-hand clothes to Africa but never saw a flesh-and-blood African. The words 'racist' and 'racism' were being flung around the place, and the stories were doing the rounds. An African woman got a brand new buggy from the Social Welfare and left it at the bus stop because she couldn't be bothered carrying it onto the bus, and she knew she could get a new one. A man looked over his garden wall and found a gang of Muslims next door on the patio, slaughtering an Irish sheep. A Polish woman rented a flat and, before the landlord had time to bank the deposit, she'd turned it into a brothel, herself and her seven sisters and their cousin, the pimp. I heard those three, and more, from taxi drivers. I thought I'd like to make up a few of my own. I met Abel Ugba and asked him if I could write for Metro Eireann and, while we talked, the idea for the first story came to me. An Irishman's daughter brings home a Nigerian boyfriend -- enough to get me going. Abel suggested 800 words a month; the paper was a monthly. (It's now weekly.) I had the title, 'Guess Who's Coming for the Dinner', before I got home. Since then I've completed eight stories. There's a love story, a horror story, a sequel, sort of, to The Commitments . Almost all of them have one thing in common. Someone born in Ireland meets someone who has come to live here. The love, and the horror; excitement, and exploitation; friendship, and misunderstanding. The plots and possibilities are, almost literally, endless. Today, one in every ten people living in Ireland wasn't born here. The story -- someone new meets someone old -- has become an unavoidable one. Hop on a Dublin bus, determined to sit beside someone who was born and bred in Dublin, and you'll probably be standing all the way. The stories are all written in 800-word chapters. It's a restraint, and a good deal of the fun. I once read abouta character in a U.S. TV daytime soap who went upstairs for his tennis racket, and never came back down. No one missed or asked about him; daytime life went on. The stories in this book have their tennis-racket moments. Characters disappear, because I forgot about them. Questions are asked and, sometimes, not quite answered. The stories have never been carefully planned. I send off a chapter to the Metro Eireann editor, Chinedu Onyejelem, and, often, I haven't a clue what's going to happen next. And I don't have to care too much, until the next deadline begins to tap me on the shoulder. It's a fresh, small terror, once a month. I live a very quiet life; I love that monthly terror. Dublin -- December 2006 www.metroeireann.com Guess Who's Coming for the Dinner 1 Larry Linnane Loved His Daughters Larry Linnane liked having daughters. He got great value out of them, great crack. The second kid had been a boy and that was great too, having a son, bringing him to the football -- Under-7, Under-8, Under-9, all the way up until Laurence, the son, told him he thought he'd play better if Larry stayed at home. And that was grand too, the rejection, part of watching them grow up, even though he pretended he was a bit hurt and, actually, he was a bit hurt. But it had all been fine because Mona, the wife, had bought him a Crunchie to cheer him up and they'd even made love in front of the telly because the house was empty for the first time in years. And it became a habit -- the sex, not the Crunchie -- every time Laurence had a match, especially an away match, and especially enjoyable if it was raining out and he could think of Laurence getting drenched in Finglas West or Ballybrack while he lay on the couch with Mona under him or, on the really good days, Mona on top of him. -Not bad for forty-five! Larry shouted once, just before they heard the door slamming, and they were sitting up, fully zipped and dressed, and doing the crossword by the time the lounge door opened and three of the four daughters trooped in. And they refused to tell the girls why they were laughing and why they couldn't stop laughing. -We're just thinking of poor Laurence out there in the rain, said Mona. But it was the daughters who really made Larry laugh. They said that girls were supposed to be the quiet ones but, whoever they were, they hadn't a clue. His gang, Jesus, there hadn't been a minute, not a second's peace in the house since the eldest, Stephanie, was born, but especially since the other three came after Laurence. Tracy, Vanessa, Nicole, one after another, each one madder and louder than the last. -Bitch! -Wagon! -Wagon yourself, yeh bitch! Screaming, roaring, flinging each other down the stairs, tearing each other's hair out. The best of friends, in other words. And Larry loved every minute of it. The fights and reconciliations, the broken Barbies, stolen hairspray -- Larry watched it all, sat in his corner like a ref who'd been bribed by both sides and soaked up every wallop and hug. Larry was fifty now and the girls were women, fine, big, good-looking women and in no hurry to leave home, and that suited Larry just fine. Because they spoilt him crooked. He knew there was a kettle in the kitchen -- he'd bought it himself, in Power City -- but, honest to God, he couldn't have told you exactly where it was. -Would you like a biscuit with that cuppa, Da? -Lovely. -There's only plain ones left. -Not to worry, said Larry. -I'll manage. Give us two, though, love. To make up for the chocolate. They were always ironing and they never objected if one or two of Larry's shirts accidentally ended up on their pile. He loved the smell of the house -- fresh clothes, all sorts of spray fighting for air supremacy. Larry could fart all day -- and he did, at the weekends -- and no one ever noticed or complained. But it wasn't really about tea and ironing and the freedom to fart with impunity. What Larry really loved was the way the girls brought the world home to him. Every morning at breakfast, and when they came home for the dinner, before going out again, they talked and shouted, all of them together, and Mona in there with them. -He said it was the Red Bull that made him do it! -So I said, 'D'you call that a pay rise!' -The strap was killing me! -I'm thinkin' o' buyin' shares in Esat, did I tell yis? -Nicearse.com. Have a look at it tomorrow. Their voices reminded Larry of the Artane roundabout -- mad, roaring traffic coming at him from all directions. And he loved it, just like he loved the Artane roundabout. Every time Larry drove onto and off that roundabout he felt modern, successful, Irish. And that was exactly how he felt when he listened to his daughters. He'd brought them up, him and Mona, to be independent young ones, and that was exactly what they were. And he trusted them, completely. He was particularly proud of himself when they were talking about sex. That was the real test, he knew -- a da listening to his daughters talking about their plumbing -- and they did, not a bother on them -- and about their sex lives, confidently, frankly and, yeah, filthily. And Larry passed the test with flying colours. Nothing his daughters said or did ever, ever shocked him. Until Stephanie brought home the black fella. 2 A Black Man on the Kitchen Table It was June, the first really decent day of the summer. Nicole was eating her dinner with her legs sticking out the kitchen door, grabbing the bit of sun before it was hijacked by next-door's wall. All four of the daughters had sunglasses parked on top of their heads. Laurence, the son, had sunglasses as well, like the ones Edgar Davids, the Dutch footballer, wore. On Edgar Davids they looked impressive, terrifying, even sexy. On Laurence they looked desperate -- he looked like a day-old chick that had just been pushed out of the nest. Larry's heart went out to him. And that was why he wasn't tuned in to the girls' chat that evening. He was trying to come up with a nice way to tell poor Laurence to bring the glasses back to the shop. So he'd heard none of the usual prying and slagging, the good-natured torture and confession that he loved so much. He was wondering if Laurence still had the receipt for the goggles when he heard Vanessa asking, 'What's he do for his money?' -He's an accountant, said Stephanie. Larry sat up: no daughter of his was going to get stuck with a bloody accountant. -At least, he would be, said Stephanie, -if they let him work. -What's that mean? said Larry. They all looked at him. The aggression and fear in his voice had shocked even him. -They won't let him work, said Stephanie. -Who won't? -I don't know, she said. -The government. -Why not? -Because they haven't granted him asylum yet. -He's a refugee? -Yeah. I suppose so. -Where's he from? -Nigeria. Larry waited for the gasps, but there were none, not even from Mona. He wished now he'd been listening earlier. This mightn't have been a boyfriend she was talking about at all; it could have been someone she'd never even met. But Vanessa put him right. -You should see him, Da. He's gorgeous. And all the other girls nodded and agreed. -Dead serious looking. -A ride. So, it wasn't that Stephanie actually brought home the black fella. It was the idea of him, the fact of his existence out there somewhere, the fact that she'd met him and danced with him and God-knows-what-elsed with him. But, if it had been an actual black man that she'd plonked on the table in front of Larry, he couldn't have been more surprised, and angry, and hurt, and confused. He stood up. -He is not gorgeous! he shouted. Nicole laughed, but stopped quickly. -He's not gorgeous or anything else! Not in this house! He realised he was standing up, but he didn't want to sit down again. He couldn't. Mona spoke. -What's wrong? He looked at six faces looking up at him, waiting for the punchline, praying for it. Frightened faces, confused and angry. There was nothing he could say. Nothing safe, nothing reassuring or even clear. He didn't know why he was standing there. -Is it because he's black? said Mona. Larry didn't let himself nod. He never thought he'd be a man who'd nod: yes, I object to another man's colour. Shame was rubbing now against his anger. -Phil Lynott was black, love, Mona reminded him. Phil Lynott had been singing 'Whiskey in the Jar' when Larry and Mona had stopped dancing and kissed for the first time. And now he could talk. -Phil Lynott was Irish! he said. -He was from Crumlin. He was fuckin' civilised! And now Stephanie was right in front of him, tears streaming from her, and he couldn't hear a word she was screaming at him. And he couldn't see her himself now, his own tears were fighting their way out. And he wished, he wished to Christ that they could start all over again, that he could sit down and listen and stop it before all this had to happen. It was Mona who rescued him. -We'll have to meet him, she said. This was just after she'd hit the table with the frying pan. -No, said Larry. -Yes, Larry, she said, and he knew she was right. If he kept saying No they'd all leave, all the girls. It was what he would have expected of them. 'Stand up for your rights.' That was what he'd roared after them every morning, on their way out to school. 'Get up, stand up. Don't give up the fight.' The house was empty now. Mona had imposed a ragged peace. Larry and Stephanie had hugged each other, yards of brittle space between them. The girls had taken her down to the local. They'd be talking about him now, he knew. Racist. Bastard. Racist. Pig. His cup was empty but he hadn't noticed the tea. -It could be worse, love, said Mona. Larry looked at her. -He could have been an estate agent, she said. From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from The Deportees: And Other Stories by Roddy Doyle All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
