Book Review: Bullfighting, by Roddy Doyle

Article first published as Book Review: Bullfighting: Stories by Roddy Doyle on Blogcritics.

Perhaps it's unfair, but for many readers it is nigh on to impossible to read a collection of short stories about Ireland by an Irish author without comparing it to what has to be the emblematic collection of Irish stories, James Joyce's Dubliners. Happily the stories in Roddy Doyle's new collection Bullfighting doesn't suffer from the comparison. These are thirteen stories that can hold their own with the best that Ireland has to offer, and that's no mean feat. If there's one thing the Irish can do, it's tell stories. Doyle is no exception; he does them proud. He writes with humor and pathos. He has a justly acclaimed ear for the Irish voice. He has keen insights into the Ireland of the twenty first century and keener insights into the men and women who inhabit it.

The stories in Bullfighting, eight of which had been first published in The New Yorker, all focus on aging men trying to cope with the problems of getting old. They are no longer working, or they are getting ready to retire. Their bodies are falling apart. Their children have grown old and left the nest. The passion has gone from their marriages. They reflect on a past when they felt useful and needed. "Recuperation," the first of the stories in the collection, sets the theme. Hanahoe, the protagonist, is out walking for his daily exercise as recommended by his doctors. As he walks he reflects on both his past and his present. He sees the changes in the city: a kickboxing sign on a local school, Africans selling the Herald, McDonalds, women in trainers who walk faster than him. He thinks back to things that were and things that might have been. In some respects it is a very depressing story, but then at the end when he huddles into a bus shelter, he meets a friendly little girl waiting for her mother. She talks to him and this little bit of human contact renews him: "The rain is gone. It's bright again." While there's life there's hope.

That is the key to most of these stories; no matter how depressing things seem to get, the rain goes and skies brighten. In "Animals," the aging out of work father counts his life, not in coffee spoons, but his children's pets, the fish, the birds, the rabbits. He thinks back to the time he accidently backed the car over their dog and then lied to the family about it. When he tells his son about it, the son reassures him: "We all knew we had a great da." "The Dog" is about a couple that drifts apart, held together for awhile by their pet. In "The Photograph" a photo of an old friend at 25 placed on his coffin provides a kind of epiphany (to borrow a term associated with Joyce) for the protagonist. "Sad," he muses, "and good had become the same thing."
Some of the stories connect aging with changes in behavior. "Blood," a comic story about a middle aged man, who suddenly develops an inexplicable taste for blood dripping raw meat, is certainly the weirdest of these. But then there's "Funerals" where a man begins to take pleasure in ferrying his elderly parents around to the funerals of their relatives, friends and acquaintances, and "Teaching" where the protagonist has to balance his teaching and his drinking as he finds himself meeting the children of his old students in his classes.

"Bullfighting," the title story, takes a quartet of middle aged men to Spain for what seems like a fairly depressing vacation. They are staying in a shoddy house owned by one of the men's brothers. The town, although people seem to be awake at all hours, is described as quiet and boring. There is a bullfighting arena, but even that is described as boring. They drink, they swim, they read. When they are ready to leave, the protagonist in an almost drunken stupor wanders into the bull ring as a bull is being unloaded from a truck. While the bull never comes near him, it is as though the experience has in some way liberated him from the aging process. He goes back to the house and vomits in the pool, but that's alright. "This was living, he thought. This was happiness."

Other than "Blood" perhaps, these are stories that deal with the ordinary events in the lives of ordinary people. In most of them nothing significant seems to happen. Men take walks, alone or with dogs. Men have problems with wives. A man finds a dead rat in his kitchen and it seems to upset the order of his universe. A man watches his sleeping wife and thinks back to when they were young. These are stories in which little happens, but what does happen is everything. They are the stuff of lives lived. It is the gift of Roddy Doyle that he is equally at home writing about movie making and the IRA—check out his Henry Smart trilogy—as he is about an ordinary guy rushing off to the hospital with kidney stones. And he can make you care about both.

Book Review: The Dead Republic, by Roddy Doyle

The Dead Republic is the final novel n Roddy Doyle's trilogy about the life of Irish revolutionary Henry Smart which began with A Star Called Henry and Oh, Play That Thing. Born in 1901, Henry begins as a hit man for the IRA until it is determined that he is a liability to the movement and his execution is ordered. He escapes to America where he and his family trek around the country until he becomes separated from them in a train accident which also costs him his leg. This last installment of the trilogy begins in 1946, where Henry turns up collapsed on the desert set of a John Ford film. In something of a parody of the grand entrance he is discovered inadvertently by one of the film's stars, Henry Fonda, who has stepped out behind a rock to relieve himself.

Henry becomes involved with director Ford who wants to shoot a film about the Irish uprising based on Henry's life. Henry agrees, but soon discovers that there is a great divide between movies and life. What Ford is creating is a sentimentalized version of Henry's life; one that Henry finds insulting to everything he remembers. In a story much reminiscent of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, Henry learns that there is a significant gap between one's reality and the artistic representation of that reality. Presumably, they are collaborating on the film that was to become The Quiet Man, but very soon Henry discovers that there is a difference between life and art.

Like the characters in Pirandello's play, Henry keeps complaining about the liberties that Ford wants to take with his life. Like the Stage Manager in Six Characters in Search of an Author, Ford keeps trying to explain the need to telescope the events of a life time into two hours of screen time. Henry complains: "He knew what I was doing. I was reclaiming my life. I knew what he was doing. He was making me up. There were two stories being dragged out of me." And Ford's story was nothing but a sentimentalized idyll. The grim grit of the revolution was out, and the beauty of the red headed colleen, as played by Maureen O'Hara was in.

Henry goes along with it for awhile, but when they finally go back to Ireland to begin shooting and he gets a look at the final script, he runs off in search of the truth of his past. This leads to a happy period of anonymity, equivalent to a kind of tending to one's garden, as he becomes caretaker in a boys' school near Dublin and romances a woman who may or may not have been his lost wife. The dreamland lasts until he is caught in a terrorist bomb blast, recognized as a icon of the revolution and taken up by the IRA as a heroic connection to their roots—a connection to be exploited for their current purposes.

Like John Ford, the leaders of the IRA want to create a Henry for their own purposes. Neither is concerned with the reality. They are all concerned with creating a reality that will have the desired effect—be it aesthetic or political. For the IRA, Henry becomes a tool for their propaganda. As one of their leaders tells Henry, the war for independence is about "the ownership of the definition of Irishness." "The copyright," he goes on. "The brand. Who owns Irishness, hey?" Henry Smart, the real Henry Smart, is unimportant. The Henry Smart that they create, that Henry Smart, is significant, and that Henry Smart is to become a kind of saint of the revolution.

In Roddy Doyle, Ireland has once again produced a truly gifted story teller. He weaves in and out, back and forth through a half century of a man's life with finesse. He has created in Henry Smart, a character who embodies a "brand" of Irishman quite different from the stereotypical version created by Ford, embodied in character actors like Barry Fitzgerald. He has created a complex round character who is both idealistic when he can afford to be idealistic, and practical when necessary. He has created a character that is not perfect, a character who like most of is flawed, and not always strong enough to do what we know we should. Still, when push comes to shove, Henry will do what little he can.

While the story line of The Dead Republic is clear enough for those who haven't read the first two books, it would probably be a good idea for readers to start at the beginning. Besides, Henry Smart is a character worth knowing about from the start.