SHORT STORIES: FERDIA MAC ANNAreviews BullfightingBy Roddy Doyle Jonathan Cape, 214 pp. £12.99
AN ICE-CREAM PLACE near where I live sells 99s through a narrow window in the wall. Cones filled with soft ice cream with bars of chocolate flake stuck in them, 99s are deceptively ordinary, simply too familiar to be classified as a proper reward. But they are delicious: creamy and underrated. I have a profound weakness for them. Almost nothing lifts a middle-aged man’s spirits like a 99.
Reading the stories in Bullfighting, Roddy Doyle's second collection of short stories, is a bit like gorging on 99s – or any treat that leaves you wanting more. The writing is focused and lean, and the humour is sharp and authentic. No wasted words. The characters seem familiar: everyday Dublin blokes who could be older versions of lads from his early works The Snapperand The Van. Though often leaving a bittersweet taste, the substance of the stories uplifts in the same way that confronting an unspoken yet obvious truth can invigorate.
The male protagonists in these stories are, without exception, undergoing midlife crises. However, you won’t find one of Doyle’s men getting his mojo back by leaping on to a gleaming Harley-Davidson or buying the Les Paul he always yearned for and starting a dad-rock band. Nor does he run off with the teenage babysitter. None of them indulges in any of the accepted tabloid scenarios for male midlife crisis.
Instead these hardy, down-to-earth types struggle to find meaning as they lament the loss of their younger selves. Epiphanies are born of quiet desperation, a creeping realisation that they have peaked. No longer "on call", as one character puts it, they face the emptiness of life after the school run has ended forever. In The PhotographMartin copes with baldness and weight gain but misses his grown-up kids as he refects on "freedom he'd forgotten about. For years, if he stayed in bed in the morning, it had to be carefully planned. Lizzie, his wife, had to be told. The kids had to be told, and nearly asked".
With empty-nest syndrome comes the realisation that dreams have been sacrificed to the all-consuming roller coaster of family life, which has now vanished like smoke. Defences against inevitable decline consist of an ingrained reticence towards expressing emotions coupled with a tendency to turn setbacks into a laugh. The recent past haunts them like a curse. In RecuperationHanahoe's daily walk around his neighbourhood, a doctor's prescription to get him "exercising", evokes a succinct reflection on his predicament: "It's depressing, a life, laid out like that. Mass, driving the kids to football, or dancing. The pint on Friday. The sex on Sunday. Pay on Thursday. The shop on Saturday. Leave the house at the same time, park in the same spot. The loyalty card. The bags. The routine. One day he knew: he hated it."
Hanahoe, like most of the characters in these tales, hail from Dublin’s invisible class, a rarely- heard-from group poised between what used to be termed upper working class and lower middle class. Ex-lads who still go to the pub (though nowadays only on Thursdays), follow the football and frequently yearn to cheat on their wives yet never do it. Like Hanahoe, an ex-lad wouldn’t “know what he’d do if a woman spoke to him”.
For the most part these men have lived relatively successful lives. They have held down jobs, reared their kids well and still have occasional sex with their wives. They live close to where they grew up and have remained friends with their childhood buddies. None of that helps them now as they deal with listlessness, unemployment, marriage breakdown, drink problems and the death of old friends as well as the onset of serious illnesses, such as colon cancer or the unimaginable diverticular disease.
An exception might be the protagonist of Blood, whose abrupt lust for the red stuff propels him on a midnight raid into next door's garden to bite the head off a neighbour's hen like the Northside's answer to Ozzy Osbourne. Chicken Vampire Man's neck biting works wonders with his sex life. He ends up in better nick than most of the other males.
At times these stories read like a novel in disguise. Hanahoe, Martin, Kev and others meld into the same flabby, discontented and confused Dublin bloke. The characters could all inhabit the same estate and drink in the same pub. Issues are universal, and, as with the best stories by Anton Chekhov and Raymond Carver, moments of icy clarity are often born of apparently small, mundane incidents. A wife’s mysterious phone call. The discovery of a dead rat in the kitchen. A sudden yearning for a pair of slippers. The search for a good chipper on the way home from a funeral. A husband’s concern at his wife’s new suntan. How to replace a child’s deceased zebra finch without the child noticing. Any man over a certain age, particularly fathers, should connect with Doyle’s themes of loss, suffering and midlife bewilderment.
I managed to contain my emotions until I met Tom, the protagonist of Sleep, who has just been diagnosed with cancer and has told nobody. Tom gazes on his sleeping wife and asthmatic son as he considers an uncertain future. "He had the cancer. She didn't – and that felt like success." That one evocative line had me crying like a lost whingeing eejit – all critical faculties out the window. It somehow crystalised the human spirit and love that pervades these profoundly truthful, wonderfully engaging tales. Bullfightingis an outstanding collection from a unique voice in world literature. And it left me wanting more.
Ferdia Mac Anna is a writer and director whose last book was a memoir, The Rocky Years
