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.
One couple’s evenings seem to orbit around TV series and trendy dinner parties. There is something heartbreaking about the idea of a future measured out in box sets. But the story also reveals the wife’s empathy and sensitive handling of her husband’s depression after losing his job.
In another story, a woman walks away from her marriage during lockdown.
This is a book full of such moments. Characters are at a juncture. Faced with a choice, they can do (or say) one thing, or its opposite. These brink moments hint at a recklessness caused by some kind of psychological unravelling.
Each of the stories is an illustration of Doyle’s intuitive insight into human nature: our frailties, vulnerabilities and, most of all, our need for connection.
The settings are detailed and yet not solid — this feeling of shaky foundations reinforces the general anxiety and destabilisation of our current times. Against backgrounds of empty or thronging urban streets, claustrophobic apartments or houses, loneliness, anxiety, and feelings of isolation become the over-riding emotions.
Daily, the world is bombarded with new language. As the eponymous story puts it: ‘Social distancing is a phrase that everyone understands. It’s like gender fluidity and sustainable development. They’re using the words as if they’d been translated from Irish, in the air since before the English invaded.’
The dialogues — Doyle’s trademark signature — never fail to ring with an utter authenticity. In ‘The Curfew’, a man receives a call from his doctor, who tells him he has coronary artery disease:
Don’t google, she tells him. She sounds cheerful. He likes that.
–Okay.
–That way lies madness, she said.
–What’s an angiogram? he asked.
–You can google that one, she said.
–That’s just information.
He liked her. He couldn’t remember what she looked like.
–Can I google stents?
–You can. But leave it at that.
While all the stories in this collection are touched with the Doyle magic, the book is worth buying for the final story alone. ‘The Five Lamps’ opens with a man watching the news: the streets of Dublin, empty. And he thinks to himself, ‘I’ll find him now.’
He puts a sleeping bag and duvet into the car, drives to the capital and sets about looking for the son he hasn’t seen in four years. Although he dislikes the city, he finds kindness over and over again, in the most unexpected quarters.
I had to put the book down to shed some tears, more than once. And that’s the best accolade I can give.
- Life Without Children by Roddy Doyle
- Jonathan Cape, €15
