Love

I heard the author interviewed on NPR and it sounded like a really good story. The author when speaking was quite interesting. I found the dialogue in the book to be stunted, shallow and boring. The characters were one dimensional and I couldnt connect with them. I love a good Guinness but I just didnt love the book.

This astonishingly banal novel by the otherwise capable Irish novelist Roddy Doyle was a disappointment and a bore from the outset. Here’s the premise: two old middle class friends in late middle age go on a Dublin pub crawl during which they discuss the not-very-remarkable late-marriage infidelity of one of the two. That’s it. The whole story. Except for the tacked-on, mawkish, sentimental ending that has little or nothing to do with the rest of the novel.

It’s difficult to come up with a novelistic premise less interesting than men indulgently discussing their mid-life crises. At least if the novel related the crisis itself, maybe. But just talking about it? I rarely if ever stop reading a novel in the middle; I had to gag to force myself through this.

Pints go down. Calls of nature, since the lads are lads in the Irish sense, being in their 60’s, spending hours at the pub, the pubs, telling the story of their shared youth, their separate adulthoods, since one left for the UK. Wives. Girlfriends. Sex. Love. Rarely work. An engagement party. Children. Love. Hate. The hours pass. Then revelations. Things which hadn’t been shared. Could have been, but weren’t shared. An amazing achievement which could find itself on the stage.

I felt a bit like Davy in the novel – he just wanted to go home and I just wanted to get to the end of this book. I didn’t find it all that humorous, and quite frankly, the yammering of Joe trying to get to the point and reason of his decision to leave his wife was tiresome.

Several years ago an author I respect told a hilarious story about spending a year in Ireland, writing a novel there, then hiding it away so that it “never would see light of day.” His reasoning was that he felt he lacked the mastery of the rhythm of the brogue, so essential to any story based in Ireland. (He ended up making all the characters deaf, which made all present roar.) Roddy Doyle, being a native, has no such problem. This account of a night-long pub crawl by two old friends who haven’t seen one another in some time, is almost entirely dialogue. It could almost serve as a script by itself. I had problems with some of the content, but the foul mouthed, increasingly incoherent exchanges rang true, and the observations of one of the two characters were truly moving.

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