Irish writer Roddy Doyle. Photo / Mark Nixon
Roddy Doyle recently spent five hours talking to inmates at Brixton prison in London. Not about the recent triumphant overturning of the British Government ban on the number of books prisoners can receive, though Doyle seems happy enough about that - "that made no sense at all" - but a ghost story he's written, partly for them, which sees the same tormented segment of life repeating over and over for his narrator.
It's a purgatory not too far removed from the limbo of prison life, he thinks, sitting in his publisher's upmarket office with a faint air of fatigue creeping out from beneath his smile as he sees me, and the corporate coffee trolley, coming.
"There was a young man [at Brixton] wondering if the narrator will ever escape from this loop he's in, and I was saying 'No, probably not.' I looked at his face and said, 'It's probably quite similar to being in here' and he just nodded. He saw an affinity between the little hell this man is in, and the hell that they are in."
The prison visit was strangely satisfying, he reflects. At Brixton, they asked him fascinating questions, more refreshing than the same old chestnuts journalists put to him: "I always find questions from the public more interesting, less predictable - I don't wish to be mean - and these guys are members of the public, even though right now they are withdrawn from it."
If it's a dig, it is a courteously worded one. Maybe he has reason to be weary. He is arguably Ireland's biggest literary export among his contemporaries, with a backlist stretching across almost three decades and a Booker Prize long under his belt for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993). He later tells me that following the publicity around this fourth novel, he felt like public property and wanted to leave the whole hullabaloo behind.
He's still in demand, 17 years on. Irish football manager Roy Keane hired him as the ghost-writer for his bestselling memoir, The Second Half (2014); his Barrytown trilogy - The Commitments, The Snapper, The Van - which is set around the Rabbitte family, refuses to fade from popular culture, returning in film adaptations, stage plays and West End musicals. And with that, perhaps, come the same old questions.
And yet, the initial reserve turns into - or turns out to be - earnestness as he begins talking about writing Dead Man Talking. Written for the Quick Reads series for adults with lower literacy, it will surprise everyone, whatever their literacy, with its twisted reality and its sinister sense of life on repeat.
Although it animates an afterlife that Doyle's atheism doesn't accommodate, it does relate to the end of a life - that of Doyle's father's, at the aged of 90.
"One of the reasons I wrote about the shadow-land between life and death is because my father died while I was starting the book. I had seen dead people before but I hadn't seen anyone die. I was watching my father die, the whole family was in the room, and actually, there was a long period where we were wondering 'is he dead?' because it's a very, very slow withdrawal from the world. It's fascinating in its way, that life withdraws so, so slowly, so I worked with the idea of this withdrawal, the idea that the story would be in this zone between life and death."
Few could accuse Doyle, 56, for confining his writing to one particular form. He has written screenplays including adaptations of his own books, stage plays, short stories, children's books and memoirs as well as 10 novels. A certain generation may, in fact, better know books such as The Commitments through the adaptations themselves. He doesn't seem concerned by that, nor by the doomy surveys that warn that people are becoming television watchers rather than readers: "The death of the book was announced a while ago but sales were good last year; vinyl is the coolest thing again; things that are announced as dead are not."
Doyle began writing while working as a secondary school teacher in Dublin, "teaching English with a bit of geography in the good years, and a bit of English with geography in the bad ones". In 1982, at the age of 24, he took the extraordinary step of booking himself a ticket to London for the school holidays and renting a bedsit in Wood Green, North London, to devote the summer to writing fiction.
"It seems like a bizarre thing to come away to London to avoid distractions, and by that, I would say friends - and pints - frankly." It worked. By the end of three months, he had enough material for a novel, and although it ended up "being a really, really bad novel", it gave him the confidence to begin the Barrytown trilogy with The Commitments complete by 1987.
There was also a conscious decision to write about ordinary people's lives, in ordinary language, which was partly inspired from the multiplicity of voices he heard around him as a teacher. "I was in my seventh or eighth year of teaching and it had a colossal impact on me, being among all these voices ... Like a lot of writers, I knew I wanted to write but I didn't know what I wanted to write about. When I wrote The Commitments, it clicked. I felt this was the world that was familiar and I could make it a bit unfamiliar and sparkling."
Latterly, Doyle's books have been preoccupied with, and populated by, middle-aged lives - married couples flourishing or foundering, children growing up, parents getting cancer and midlife men propped up in the pub with a pint. The short story collection, Bullfighting (2011), is full of such tales, as is the fourth addition to the Barrytown series, The Guts (2013), which sees Jimmy Rabbitte's return as a 47-year-old man diagnosed with bowel cancer.
This was, says Doyle, a reflection of what began to happen around him about 12 years ago. Family and friends were being diagnosed with cancer; his three children were growing up, he found himself attending far more funerals than weddings. "There, you'd meet these middle-aged people that you'd last seen as kids. It's not without its humour when you see a bald guy coming towards you and the last time you saw him was when he was 13."
If Doyle has mined the life around him for creative inspiration, then his characters might, if they peer out of the books, see glimpses of themselves in him. He speaks with little pretention. He is as likeable and as gently funny, always within easy reach of a good punch-line. Like his verdict on Ireland's new laureateship for fiction, for which he was a contender though he told them he wasn't much interested (it went to Anne Enright in the end): "You [the British] have a population of 60-odd million and you have two laureates; Ireland has a population of four million and has three. There'll be one for plumbing being declared next week."
Dead Man Talking (Jonathan Cape), released as part of the Quick Reads programme, is available from book.depository.com.
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