Orwell was once asked why writers write, and he answered "to get revenge on their parents".
Not true, of course, but you'd sometimes wonder. From Synge's oedipal playboy bludgeoning his Da, to Martin Amis's recent carping at Sir Kingsley's undergraduate communism, it seems mammies and daddies are doomed forever to wander the margins of their offsprings' fictions. Certainly, the confessional era we now inhabit has seen memoirs and autobiographies (some very fine) filling the dumpbins of the nation's bookstores for reasons perhaps more therapeutic than literary. But Roddy Doyle's latest work may inaugurate a new genre: a shocking subdivision of contemporary literature in which parents will appear as nice, decent people who generally did their best. Poor Philip Larkin will be spinning in his grave. They tucked you up, your Mum and Dad.
Rory & Ita is a biography of Doyle's parents, told mainly in the words of the eponymous subjects. Childhood, courtship and marriage are recalled; family and work; snappers and commitments. Appealing vignettes punctuate the narrative, many casting light on the wider Irish scene. The book opens with a funny account of a trial during the War of Independence, in which relatives of Rory and Ita played various parts. And admirers of the acclaimed New Yorker writer Maeve Brennan (a cousin of Doyle) will find several lucid insights into her life and work.
Clearly, Rory and Ita could talk for Ireland, but they're the kind of talkers it's a pleasure to listen to. The deft touch of their Booker-winning son has been used to make selections, to illuminate details and contextualise the story. You sense him in the background, and that is often where he remains. Like all good biographers, he lets his subjects speak.
Yet this is decidedly a Roddy Doyle book, alive with acuity and spare, punchy prose, its few barbs thrown like well-aimed darts. (Charles Haughey is footnoted as "a former Taoiseach, and gourmet".) As for his narrative dexterity - Doyle's, not Haughey's - it isn't from the stones he licked it. His mother and father both spin good yarns, the boy weaving them together with skill and discretion. Rich pleasure is to be had from the conversational tone, the sense of vivid detail and subtle music. The book is always readable, engaging and revealing; suffused with a kind of eloquent tact.
Harsh critics may quibble that it focuses on "ordinary lives" - a reproach that could also have been levelled at Joyce and Raymond Carver - but this would be entirely to miss the point. The cornerstone of Doyle's writing is its unpretentious humanism, its ability to mine resonant meaning from the apparently unremarkable. Such an ethic has made Barrytown famous all over the world and is the guiding spirit of this absorbing book too. At one point Ita Doyle observes: "In all my life I have lived in two houses, had two jobs, and one husband. I'm a very interesting person". If her son has a mission that drives his work, you suspect it is to prove that such ironies are true.
The book is a window into a long-gone Ireland. A land of "going steady" and "none of 'that'" before wedlock, of the civil service marriage bar and "payments on the cooker"; where "the bicycle was central to civilisation. If you hadn't got a bicycle you were like a cowboy out in Arizona, walking along a dusty road". The requirements of modern courtship with which we New Men struggle had not yet come into being. "Rory was never late," remarks Ita approvingly. "And he always had a box of chocolates."
Life seems to have been simpler before the lifestyle was invented; a matter of what happened to you and not personal choice. "I took fatherhood in my stride," Rory Doyle recalls. "I never considered it a philosophical thing to look into. That wasn't part of the curriculum at all." But there is none of the cloying wistfulness of some Dublin memoirs, no nostalgia for the days of Bang-Bang and Dev. (The latter long fellow is here immortalised for a speech in which he advised the women of Ireland on the best method for sewing on their menfolk's fáinnes.) The developing nation haunts Rory and Ita's story, but it is glimpsed intermittently, like a giant through a fog. Big things were happening in this youthful republic, but they, too, served, who changed the nappies.
Given recent revelations of the horrors of modern Ireland, the extraordinary evil that festered in its crannies, it is good to be reminded that gentleness existed in that fearful country where so many were brutalised. This is a brave and tender piece of work. Its trio of parents should be proud of the baby.
Joseph O'Connor's new novel Star of the Sea has just been published by Secker and Warburg
Rory & Ita. By Roddy Doyle. Jonathan Cape, 320 pp. £16.99