Book review: Living after a history of abuse

Roddy Doyle’s ‘The Women Behind The Door’ picks up from Paula Spencer’s last outing in 2006

Roddy Doyle catches the tone of voice of working-class Dublin with uncanny accuracy. Picture: Andy Gibson.

• The Women Behind the Door 
• Roddy Doyle 
• Jonathan Cape, €16.99 

Roddy Doyle revisits the indomitable Paula Spencer, immortalised as The Woman Who Walked into Doors in her debut in the 1996 novel, and revisited in Paula Spencer in 2006. 

Like Doyle himself, Paula is now 66, but there the similarity ends. Paula is an alcoholic and an abuse survivor. 

She has moved on from office cleaning to a part-time job in a dry cleaner’s, where she enjoys the company of her fellow worker Mary, her best friend, who shares Paula’s off-beat sense of humour. 

True to form, the story is told largely through dialogue, with Doyle catching the tone of voice of working-class Dublin with uncanny accuracy.

The novel opens on May 7, 2021, the day on which both Paula and Mary are to have their first Covid vaccination. 

Doyle’s account captures perfectly the strangeness of that time, people nervously venturing out, some for the first time in months, to public spaces, in this case The Helix theatre, reconfigured as a vaccination centre. 

Reassured by a young girl, Paula is vaccinated by a polite, mildly flirtatious young man, presumed to be a doctor. 

Like many people, including her friend Mary, Paula felt a strange elation after experiencing the collective effort to vaccinate the over-65s.

Paula has a “man friend”, Joe — a better-educated man living in Howth — who takes her to operatic recitals. 

He reads two papers on Sundays, cover to cover. Neither of them let age inhibit their sex life. 

“The last time she had sex, she saw the hearing aids on the table beside Joe’s bed. So.”

She is aware of his obsessive tendencies and she keeps a well-judged distance between them.

She is also still suffering from the long-term after-effects of domestic violence, even over 30 years later. 

She’d been knocked to the floor so often that she still hates to sit there, even when playing with grandchildren: 

“It always made her a bit nervous, even dizzy. She’d been knocked to the floor so often — getting back up was always terrible, terrifying.”

She says the real damage is not being able to face her children who have seen her at her worst — being dragged around by her hair, for example.

Vaccination day is also the day that Paula’s daughter Nicola turns up on her doorstep, asking to stay. 

Nicola is Paula’s most successful child, having made herself middle-class.

But now she has left her husband and three daughters (aged 22, 20, and 15), saying she cannot go back because she would kill them. Paula understands.

While Paula and Nicola share the dangerous knowledge that marrying young and having three or four children is not necessarily the best path for many women, their relationship is mainly confrontational. 

Nicola objects to being called “hon” by her mother: “Stop calling me hon — please, it’s embarrassing”, and refuses to agree that Tony is a good husband because he doesn’t hit her. 

Nicola explains that her problem is not Tony, it is the fact that she does not want to be a wife.

But Nicola somehow fails to come alive and engage the readers’ sympathy. She has none of the quirky qualities that make Paula so engaging. 

The chronology is strange too, with the first and last chapters taking place on the same day in May, 2021, while the middle section takes place in 2022 and 2023.

There is an overlong sequence in which Paula muses about everything she sees as she walks in the O’Connell St area, within her 5km limit, and another in which she talks us through her sufferings during a bad case of Covid. 

But true admirers of Paula Spencer will find these minor drawbacks.