No woman, no cry

Roddy Doyle makes a triumphant return to the intriguing character of Paula Spencer after 10 years and produces a wonderful read that is vintage Doyle. By Eamon Maher

Paula Spencer by Roddy Doyle. Published by Vintage €18.99

Roddy Doyle has long given a voice to the working-class community of the north Dublin suburbs with his Barrytown Trilogy and such novels as Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, which won the Booker Prize in 1993. In Paula Spencer, Doyle's latest offering, he returns to the character first introduced in the four-part RTÉ/BBC drama Family.

When it aired in 1994, Family caused a real furore in Ireland. Gone were the easy-going Rabbittes of Barrytown who, although they drank a lot and were often unemployed and broke, were nevertheless quite happy. With Family there emerged a much harsher portrayal of life in the working-class suburbs of Dublin. Paula was married to the violent Charlo, a petty criminal who regularly beat her and was abusive to their children. Doyle's 1996 bestseller, The Woman who Walked into Doors, revisited the Spencers and ended with Charlo being killed by gardaí during a botched kidnapping of the wife of a bank manager. Doyle has now returned to Paula, an alcoholic with the scars of psychological and physical abuse, a decade later.

Doyle's dialogues are a reproduction of the way his characters interact with one another. They describe things orally, often in a comically graphic manner. Characters like Paula Spencer are not well-educated, but they have resilience, imagination and the capacity to convey their innermost thoughts in an accessible manner. Doyle is clearly intrigued by Paula Spencer. In this latest novel, Paula is now in her late forties, has been off the drink for almost a year and is still working as a cleaner in Celtic Tiger Dublin. She is one of the very few native Irish employed by the cleaning company. Of her four children, two have left home, John-Paul and Nicola, while the other two, Leanne and Jack, are still living with their mother. Leanne is showing signs of developing an alcohol dependency and Paula blames herself for how she is turning out. "Leanne scares Paula. The guilt. It's always there. Leanne is 22. Leanne wets the bed. Leanne deals with it. It's terrible." This is the type of telegraphic style that Doyle uses throughout: it's a successful mechanism for conveying the thoughts of his heroine. He shows a remarkable ability to climb inside her head and convey her misgivings about what is happening to her children: Will John-Paul go back on heroin? Is Nicola happy? What will she do if Leanne continues on the same downward spiral that engulfed her? And Jack, the youngest and her favourite, will he get what he deserves from life? Caring for them is what keeps her going, but it's hard work. "She has to know where Leanne is. All the time. She's on her own here, but she's never alone. And it's not just Leanne. Her children are all around her, all their different ages and faces. She has four, divided into thousands."

She struggles daily with her alcoholism. On one occasion she even scours Leanne's room in search of a bottle, but only finds an empty beer can from which she vainly attempts to extract some liquid. She knows what her drinking has done to her and her family but can never say with certainty that she has recovered. She marvels at how her sisters, Carmel and Denise, can drink like fish and still not go under. She knows she is not the same woman she was 10 years ago. "Maybe it's age. And it's definitely the drink. She's not sure. Maybe it's the way the brain works to protect itself. It invents a new woman who can look back and wonder, instead of look back and howl. Maybe it happens to everyone. But it's definitely the drink, or life without it. It's a different world. She's not sure she likes it that much."

This is the sort of passage that makes Paula Spencer such a special novel. There is a telepathic relationship between the heroine and Doyle: one never knows who's leading whom. Has Paula assumed a life of her own, as happens with the more successful fictional creations? There is a sureness and a maturity about the way Doyle allows her the freedom to develop and even to reach some sort of accommodation with a much-changed Ireland. Carmel, her sister, is buying property in Bulgaria – it's a good investment opportunity, she tells Paula! Denise is having a fling with a man she met at a parent-teacher meeting. Change is everywhere. "The whole area has changed. She's been here since the beginning. It was a farm a few months before they moved in. It was all young families, kids all over the place. Out in the middle of nowhere. No bus of its own. Near the tracks, but no train station. No proper shops, no pub. No church or schools. Nothing but the houses and the people."

Paula doesn't express an opinion as to whether things have changed for the better or worse. She still has to work hard to provide food, clothing and some luxuries for her children. She gets Jack a computer for Christmas by doing a few extra bits of work and feels so proud when she sees how well he is able to surf the net. She is promoted to supervisor, but is still required to clean the office block with all the other employees. She doesn't complain because she knows how important it is for her to keep busy.

The novel ends with Paula arranging to meet an older man, Joe, whose wife left him for another woman. There is not going to be any fairytale ending, but Paula has prevailed and that in itself is a victory.

Critical reaction to Doyle's novels has always been mixed. Some find him wonderful, a writer who gives a voice to a working-class community that has not been the sustained focus of interest in the modern Irish novel heretofore. Others feel he is a lightweight, relying excessively on dialogue richly spliced with slang and foul language, and that his novels contain little 'real art'. Doyle himself has said: "The idea that they [the novels] are less literary because they use the vernacular – I don't agree. The decision to use the vernacular is a literary decision. The decision to use the word 'fuck' is a literary decision. It's a decision of rhythm... To use images from television instead of books, to use advertising jingles and such – it's a literary decision. I've tried to surround the characters with their own world. So that's where the language, the images, the music, and the rest come from – the same reasoning."

Paula Spencer is a triumph also for Doyle who, by returning to this intriguing woman after a 10-year lapse, shows that he is as good, if not better, a novelist now as he was during the 1990s. It is a must buy – it is vintage Doyle.