Discovering that all losses, even death, are not equal
A Greyhound of a Girl. Roddy Doyle, Marion Lloyd Books, £10.99. Kindle: Not available
SINCE coming to attention with The Commitments some two decades ago, Roddy Doyle has earned himself a secure and well deserved reputation as a novelist of the first rank.
Far removed from the small rural reveries and churchly repressions of a nation haunted by its past and still not quite certain about its own freedoms, his fiction focused on a society perched on the cusp of monumental change. As the Ireland of the late ’80s and early ’90s crawled scar-creased and punch drunk from a decade of crippling recession, and with the fool’s gold promises of a brilliant Celtic Tiger dawn yet to crack the horizon, inner city Dublin was a void heaving with all manner of life begging to be lived.
Whether such writing was fortuitous in its timeliness or whether it was shaped and honed by the very world it so vividly reflected, Doyle hit a note which resonated and brought him to international prominence.
The Commitments was a small but notable earthquake in certain bookish circles and certainly broke new ground for the Irish novel, and with such follow-ups as The Snapper, The Van and his Booker Prize-winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, the author cemented his status as an emerging giant of Irish fiction. Innovative in his use of language, possessed of an impeccable ear for the dialogue of the backstreets and the pubs as well as an innate ability to create fully fledged, beautifully sculpted characters, his energetic style bridged populist and literary with a natural and enviable ease. In fact, it felt like the purest distillation of rock ‘n’ roll.
Since then, much has changed. Though still broadly content to mine the environment he knows best, Doyle has, over the past decade, diversified the scope of his writing from the strictly novelistic form and has undergone explorations of stage, screen and the short story with varying degrees of success. And not quite as an aside, he has in recent years also been quietly forging an impressive second career writing books for children. A Greyhound of a Girl represents his seventh excursion into the pre-teen and young adult market. Suitable for readers aged eight and up, but with plenty of appeal for the adult market too, this is a sweet, intriguing and comically supernatural tale about a little girl’s struggles in the face of her grandmother’s imminent death.
We first encounter the sassy 12-year-old Dubliner, Mary O’Hara, at a moment of loss. Her best friend has just moved house and her life suddenly feels bereft. Within pages, though, she has recovered, purged of her pain through the cathartic exercise of making French Toast. She is growing up, learning the lessons of life, slowly but surely gaining understanding not only of her surround but also of her inner existence. She is finding herself, discovering, though missteps just as much as right turns, who she truly is as a person.
But a bigger lesson lies in wait, one that will educate her to the fact that not all losses are equal.
Her grandmother, Emer, a wisecracking old woman who lost her own mother to a ’flu epidemic while still a toddler, is confined to a hospital bed and ailing fast.
Mary’s older brothers can’t bear the hospital but she never refuses an opportunity to accompany her mother, Scarlett, on a visit. Scarlett is the sort of mother who attacks every sentence with enthusiasm (“Even your whispers end in !!!s”). But she is good hearted and always happy of the company, and together, mother and daughter attempt to console one another with tears and laughter on the long daily commutes.
The problem, or one of the problems, is that Emer can’t let go of life. Fear of death has something to do with it, parting from her loved ones the rest. Then, while walking home one afternoon, Mary meets a strange woman, Tansey, oddly young, even more oddly old-fashioned. Mistaking her for an eccentric new neighbour, Mary mentions the encounter to Scarlett. Conversation, initially casual, soon enough becomes revelatory. Tansey is, in fact, Emer’s mother, a ghost. Dead at a tragically young age, she had been too worried about the infants she was leaving behind and found herself unable to leave. “I was disturbed when the last breath came. There was no peace in it.” So she stayed, watching over her loved ones, watching them grow. And now she was here to help her little girl, an old woman in her eighties, prepare for the end of one stage and the beginning of the next.
In prose that comforts and soothes, an adventure is proposed, with the intent of returning them all to the old home place, a Wexford farm that has long since passed out of the family hands. Emer is rescued from her hospital bed and a midnight road-trip reunion, one that gathers four generations and which propels them into the past. Questions are asked and answered, explanations offered in a quest for understanding and, in a variety of ways, for healing. The trip is, in short, nothing less than a matter of life and death.
Structurally, the book offers the challenge of a constantly shifting narrative between the four main characters, and chapters that bound between time periods. Some of the flashback scenes are particularly well done, such as the two-year-old Emer’s last sight of her mother, flu stricken but smiling from the second last step of the stairs, or the juxtaposition between her own deathbed moments and the remembered details of that long-ago wake, and the regret she felt at not being able to kiss Tansey goodbye. “Her daughter had kissed her. Her granddaughter had kissed her… She’d been kissed by people who loved her. But still.”
Authoring children’s books requires a particular set of skills, and Doyle clearly has these in abundance. Every action here has a subtle consequence, and every twist and turn of the narrative tends to teach something about life. The themes explored are not easy ones, addressing as they do the big subjects of death and aging, but they are dealt with in a gentle, compassionate way. What emerges most memorably from this tale is the unconditional nature of familial love and the strength and value of blood ties, with a special underlining of the things in life that truly matter.
Though limited by the obvious confines of pitching his wares to such a young target audience, the style is instantly recognisable. Doyle is a master at writing dialogue, with a particular knack of writing in the vernacular of children, but even in his adult novels it is the innate humanity of the characters that always emerges.
Here, the dialogue has, out of necessity, been stripped of realistic crudities, but the writing has been adjusted so that nothing of worth is lost, and the story carries itself along with well-practiced ease.
The result is a triumph of the form, poignant, clever, never less than honest in its addressing of serious issues, and imbued with delicate infusions of humour and pathos.
With A Greyhound of a Girl, Roddy Doyle has created a minor gem of a novel.
