I see that the English are up to their old game of passing off Irish achievement as their own. In recent years I'd thought that this form of colonial hijacking was a thing of the past; indeed, in last Saturday's column I roundly declared that Irish writing was so fashionable these days that you didn't have to be any good to get published and praised - you merely had to be Irish.
Not so, if you're to believe the review of Roddy Doyle's - The Woman Who Walked Into Doors by Tom Shone in the Sunday Times. Mr Shone (taking time off from his regular job as the paper's movie critic) is full of praise for the book, whose author he describes as "British fiction's resident ray of sunshine," adding: "What other British writer can you name who has happiness licked?"
Mr Shone obviously hasn't national identity licked. Funny, though, how the literary efforts of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness have never been similarly embraced across the water. Still, one mustn't get touchy about these things, and I suppose if we can claim Andy Townsend, they can claim Roddy Doyle.
The novel was launched in that decidedly un British cafe, Bewley's of Grafton Street, on Tuesday night, and already it's walking out of the bookshops. For this reason, I doubt if Roddy Doyle will give two hoots what the critics think of it, one way or the other. Still, am I the only reader who assumed the book was going to tell us something more about Paula Spencer than we learned from the television series?
RODDY wasn't the only Doyle launching a book in the past week. Up in Buswell's Hotel, Brendan Kennelly was introducing the new novel by his former student, Rose Doyle. A journalistic colleague of mine in times past, Rose writes in a genre I generally don't read, but that hardly worries her, as millions of others read it avidly.
Her novels to date have concerned women struggling to come to terms with career, family and relationships, and her new one, Alva, is no exception. As I say, it's in a genre that one can easily feel snobbish about, though if I were as successful as Maeve Binchy or Deirdre Purcell, I'm sure I could take such snobbery on the chin.
Rose, in fact, has the same Irish publisher, Town House, as Deirdre Purcell, and she's now also being published by Macmillan in Britain. At the launch, Brendan read extracts from the book with considerable eloquence.
I didn't make it to the Guinness Hop Store for the launch of Talking Liberties, published by SICCDA (South Inner City Community Development Association) Heritage Centre, but I've been reading the 100 page book with real interest.
As far as I can recall, it's the first book about this historic part of our capital city since Elgy Gillespie's The Liberties of Dublin, which was published by the O'Brien Press in 1973. At that time Elgy (who now lives in San Francisco) was a resident of Brabazon Square and was consumed by a passion for the area that wasn't always shared by her less romantic neighbours, some of whom regarded her as a decided oddity.
And there's little that's romantic in the reminiscences of the six people who provide the oral history at the heart of the new book. The stark realities of living and dying, working and drinking, are vividly evoked. Even the seemingly inconsequential things are looked at with an unblinkered eye. Here, for instance, is Mary McCormack from the Iveagh Market recalling the business of having her hair washed:
"We had long hair, all of us girls, and my father was the one who washed it. You put your head under the cold tap in the yard, and your hair was scrubbed with carbolic soap till it glittered and glittered. My father used to hold our hair out and say when you see the sun glinting on your hair, it's done. It didn't do us any harm, but when they say the good old days, I cringe."
SICCDA Heritage Centre has produced a fascinating little book, which you can get either in bookshops or directly from the Centre at 10/11 Earl Street South, Dublin 8. It costs £4.50.
LOCK up your daughters. The latest edition of the Arden series of Shakespearean texts is crammed with explanatory notes, telling students exactly what Shakespeare meant with all his bawdy innuendos.
At school I studied The Merchant of Venice in the sanitised old Malone edition and thus didn't find out until much later the true meaning of Gratiano's final couplet:
Well, while I live I'll fear no other thing
So sore, as keeping safe Nerissa's ring.
Arden are intent on letting everyone know what Will was about: in such lines. But if you can't afford the new edition, you should get your hands on Shakespeare's Bawdy, the 1947 classic. (reprinted by Routledge) in which Eric Partridge explains all the rude references. They'd make Roddy Doyle, blush.