Doyle treats festival to new work

Author Roddy Doyle today premiered his new short story about a multi-ethnic band in his home town in Ireland.

The Booker Prize-winner read out The Deportees to an appreciative audience of 580 at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

The story, which is a sequel to his 1987 novel The Commitments, follows some of his much-loved characters years on from the implosion of the soul band.

Jimmy Rabbitte is now a 36-year-old father-of-four who wants to set up a new band reflecting Dublin’s multi-racial society.

The advertisement he places in a local newspaper reads: “Brothers and sisters, do you want the Celtic Tiger to dance to your tune? White Irish need not apply.”

The rock band he forms includes a black African man on lead vocals, a drummer from Moscow, a Romanian father and son who play trumpet and accordion, an American female singer and a guitarist from Roscommon.

Rabbitte hires his old friend Mickah Wallace, the psychotic drummer from The Commitments, as security after he receives crank telephone calls accusing him of being a “nigger lover”.

Wallace is now a born-again Christian and father-of-three, recently released from Mountjoy Prison where he served an 18-month sentence for stealing his uncle’s Ford Capri.

In keeping with the multi-racial theme of the story, he works for a take-away outlet called Celtic Tandoori.

Explaining why he decided to write The Deportees, Doyle said: “Anybody who’s familiar with Ireland, particularly Dublin, and has been back and forth over the last few years, can’t help but notice that it’s changed a lot.

“Ireland is now, even with the downturn in the economy, one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

“And it suddenly became a magnet for people in a way that I never imagined would happen. So it’s quickly becoming a multi-racial society.

“I suppose what I had to do was wake-up to the point that the Dublin I grew up in and the Dublin I was in was no longer the Dublin that was out there beyond my door.

“And I had to start listening to new voices and new things.”

He also said that Jimmy Rabbitte was the character he felt “closest” to, and had wanted to revisit him in midlife.

The 44-year-old father-of-three also revealed that he had recently completed a memoir of his parents, who are aged 79 and 77, but said it was not a sentimental book.

“They rarely stop moaning about the good old days when people had rickets but they were happy,” he said.

“There is a huge market for Dublin in the rare old times, but I didn’t want to do the nostalgia thing.”

The former English and geography teacher, who is now a full-time writer working from 10am to 6pm, also said that he was a third of the way through the second volume of his historical trilogy, the first novel of which was named A Star Called Henry.

The author has been among a record 550 writers who have converged on the Scottish capital for its 13th book festival, which has attracted more than 120,000 visitors and finishes on Monday.