This is the Ritual by Rob Doyle is April’s Irish Times Book Club selection. Published by Bloomsbury and Dublin’s Lilliput Press in January, this collection of short stories is the author’s follow-up to his novel, Here are the Young Men, one of the most acclaimed recent Irish debuts.
Over the next four weeks, we shall be exploring the collection in detail, with interviews and articles by the author, his editors, fellow writers and critics, culminating in a podcast interview which will be recorded at the Irish Writers Centre in Dulbin’s Parnell Square on Tuesday, April 19th, at 7.30pm, and published on irishtimes.com at the end of the month.
In This is the Ritual, a young man in a dark depression roams the vast, formless landscape of a Dublin industrial park where he meets a vagrant in the grip of a dangerous ideology. A woman fleeing a break-up finds herself taking part in an unusual sleep experiment. A man obsessed with Nietzsche clings desperately to his girlfriend’s red shoes. And whatever happened to Killian Turner, Ireland’s vanished literary outlaw?
Lost and isolated, the characters in these masterful stories play out their fragmented relationships in a series of European cities, always on the move; from rented room to darkened apartment, hitchhiker’s roadside to Barcelona nightclub. Rob Doyle, a shape-shifting drifter, a reclusive writer, also stalks the book’s pages.
Layering narratives and splicing fiction with non-fiction, This is the Ritual tells of the ecstatic, the desperate and the uncertain. Immersive, at times dreamlike, and frank in its depiction of sex, the writer’s life, failed ideals and the transience of emotions, it introduces an unmistakable new literary voice.
If the figure of the writer holds a fascination for Doyle, he is something of a writer’s writer himself. Fellow author Geoff Dyer wrote: “I’m tempted to quote Nietzsche back at Rob Doyle: he’s not a writer – he is dynamite! Except – like Nietzsche – he’s a tremendous writer too. And I have a suspicion that the author of this provocative and thrilling collection is going to get even better.” Kevin Barry called him “a tremendous talent. Every page fizzes with vitality.” Colin Barrett wrote: “The mutinous fragments of Rob Doyle’s fictions are bilious, provocative and unnervingly compelling.”
Reviewers were equally enthusiastic. “Doyle’s fiction deals with life’s major themes: sex, death, guilt, shame, the meaning of existence ... Doyle’s storytelling is compelling and engaging, suffused with wit, honesty and emotional intelligence,” wrote The Irish Times.
“Full of booze, books, sex and despair yet, despite the bleakness of its stories, skewered as they are on broken hearts and broken artistic dreams, Doyle’s cocky passion proves irresistible. He writes with the confidence of a literary giant ... A series of heartening and humane interior struggles. Doyle is as good as everyone – from John Boyne to Colm Toibin – says he is.” (Daily Mail)
“Bleak, brilliant stories . Don’t be put off by literary allusions. These compelling vignettes stand up for themselves ... They transport us beyond the routines of our daily round, and are visceral, scatological and frequently disturbing ... It’s refreshing to see a young Irish writer keeping up the cloacal tradition introduced by Swift and continued by Joyce.” (Sunday Times)
Colm Tóibín, choosing his Books of the Year for The Irish Times in 2014, wrote: “For sheer bravery and for style, for its integrity of vision and for its uncompromising tone, I also admired Rob Doyle’s Here Are The Young Men.”
John Boyne called it “a powerful, passionate and electrifying novel. Many writers try to recreate the traumas and anxieties of teenage years in fiction but very few manage it with as much conviction as Rob Doyle.”
The Irish Times hailed it as “a lament for the blank generation, the literary equivalent of the song from which it takes its name, Joy Division’s Decades. A powerful debut, maybe the first novel since Kevin Power’s Bad Day in Blackrock to interrogate the dark side of the young Irish male’s psyche.” The Guardian called it “a powerful and provocative novel and easily the most honest account of young Irish people for many years”.
