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Letter to the editor

Author Doyle finds new cast in 21st century Ireland

The influx of immigrants to a now prospering Ireland is grist for the lively, often shocking, always entertaining plots of The Deportees.

By Colette Bancroft, Times book editor
Published January 27, 2008

The Deportees
By Roddy Doyle
Viking, 242 pages, $24.95

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For a couple of centuries, Ireland's main export was its people. Millions of Irish emigrants poured across the sea to North and South America and points beyond, fleeing famine, poverty, religious and political oppression.

Now that human tide runs the other way. The economic boom dubbed the Celtic Tiger has drawn an enormous influx of immigrants, legal and otherwise, into Ireland over the last decade. They come from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, bringing a stream of unfamiliar cultures into a country that does not exactly have a history as a melting pot.

Irish author Roddy Doyle takes on the glitches and glories of the new Ireland in The Deportees. It's the first short story collection from a writer acclaimed for his novels, many of them linked by characters and story lines, like the Barrytown trilogy (The Commitments, The Snapper, The Van and the Last Roundup series (A Star Called Henry and Oh, Play That Thing).

Here Doyle is painting on much smaller canvases. He wrote these stories in 800-word chapters for serial publication on a multicultural Web site called Metro Eireann, founded by two Nigerian journalists living in Dublin. (Some of the stories were also published in McSweeney's and the New Yorker.)

In the foreword, Doyle writes that producing the chapters on deadline proved to be "a fresh, small terror, once a month. I live a very quiet life; I love that monthly terror."

Judging by these stories, it has been a fruitful challenge. Doyle's fiction has always been a rich mix of profane humor and poignant drama, and he hits that balance in miniature in these stories.

Some of them are downright fanciful, like 57% Irish, the tale of Ray, a researcher hired to create a test for determining how Irish an individual is. As the slick Minister of Arts and Ethnicity confides to him, " 'We want you to make it harder to be Irish.'

" 'I see,' said Ray.

" 'But,' said the Minister. 'You have to make it look easier.' "

The test Ray comes up with - it involves strapping people into monitors while they watch a dizzying stream of video that incorporates soccer goals, Riverdance, hordes of tenors and an Irish porn star named Shamrock Chambers - seems like a success. But its actual effect is tempered by Ray's secret life, which involves a girlfriend he affectionately calls Stalin and a baby boy named Vladimir.

In The New Boy, Doyle draws on his long experience as a teacher to take us inside the head of a youngster named Joseph during his first day in a new classroom.

He's not just the new boy; he's an African child in an Irish classroom, seated right in front of the local bully. He's also a boy who lost his father to war, saw his crumpled body, and learned something about dealing with a potential enemy.

Not every story has a happy ending. The Pram is a chilling piece about a Polish nanny working for a well-off Dublin family.

Humiliated by the mother, thwarted in a budding romance by the two young daughters, the nanny starts telling the children a ghost story about a haunted pram - just like the one their baby brother sleeps in. Doyle builds a sense of dread as the story slips out of the nanny's grasp, with terrible results.

The title story brings back the central character of The Commitments, published in 1987 and, in 1991, translated into one of the best movies ever made about the creation and breakdown of a band.

Dubliner Jimmy Rabbitte Jr. is older now but still mad for music, especially the music of black America - he names his kids Marvin, Mahalia, Smokey and (odd man out) Jimmy Two. He's a happy husband and father, but he misses the days when he managed the Commitments, an Irish soul band he created out of sheer force of will.

This time, the ad he puts in the paper to recruit musicians reads, "Brothers and Sisters, Welcome to Ireland. Do you want the Celtic Tiger to dance to your music? If yes, The World's Hardest-Working Band is looking for you."

Pretty soon he's up to his eyebrows in musicians from Moscow, Spain, Nigeria, Romania, even New York. The band, only half-jokingly named the Deportees, gives its own highly original twist to a repertoire that consists almost entirely of Woody Guthrie songs.

The Deportees' first gig is a birthday party for the daughter of a born-again Christian restaurateur named Fat Gandhi, and it turns into something of a miracle:

"Some of the aunts and uncles were leaving, but that was grand. The younger gang had the room now. The bottles came out, the funny tobacco; hands grabbed hands, faces met faces and mashed. The birthday girl took off her jumper and threw it at the roof. Christianity had left the tent. . . .

"Anything played by this band was dance music. They were that good. Jimmy looked at them. They were happy, sexy; they were cooking and Irish."

Colette Bancroft can be reached at cbancroft@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8435.

[Last modified January 23, 2008, 17:26:41]