Book review: Roddy Doyle's pandemic short stories highlight our need for connection
Roddy Doyle. Picture: Maura Hickey.
Life Without Children contains 10 heart-wrenching stories written during the pandemic. They chronicle the crisis of our times and its impact on relationships, jobs, and our own psyches.
‘It’s only the bleedin’ flu’ says the man in SuperValu. A taxi driver in England calls ‘The coroona carry on....a lood a shite’. Each story is highly resonant: A young nurse is emotionally overwrought at the end of her working day, after two of her patients die; an Irish father of four on a business trip in Newcastle, who has just heard about the virus, finds himself among stag and hen parties, coughing and sweating and pressing up all around him. He washes his hands for fifteen seconds, but is excited too, by the atmosphere. When asked if he has any children, he says no, and wonders what he might do next.
