Short Stories:It seems remarkable in a city so aware and so proud of its literary heritage, that Dublin's transformation into a multicultural, multilingual boomtown has gone largely unrecorded by its many authors (unlike, say, TV and film-makers who have addressed the subject in films such as Once), writes Catherine Heaney
Still, who better than Roddy Doyle to step up to the plate; it seems fitting that the man who brought the city, in all its ebullient, profane glory, to the world with his Barrytown Trilogy, should be our guide through its 21st century reincarnation. This collection of short stories - Doyle's first - started life in Metro Éireann, the multicultural newspaper set up by two Nigerian journalists in 2000, and as such it can claim to be a real part of the immigrant experience it chronicles. As Doyle explains in his foreword, he "went to bed in one country and woke up in another one", and it is this sense of wonder at a place that is as unrecognisable to its own inhabitants as its new arrivals that lies at the heart of these stories.
As well as being a whistle-stop tour of the city, The Deportees is also something of a sampler of Doyle's range as a writer - all present and correct are the family men and happy chancers of his early comic novels (indeed Jimmy Rabbitte resurfaces in the title story, but more on this later), but also in evidence is the more introspective, emotionally nuanced writing that characterised later works, such as The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. In the opening story Guess Who's Coming for the Dinner, Larry, the father of four daughters who prides himself on his open-mindedness in talking to them about sex, finds himself reacting very differently when one of them brings home "a black lad". This is vintage Doyle, full of the sardonic wit and one-liners that made his name, and there is a certain tenderness in the way Larry, an Irish male with all the usual blind spots and awkwardness, tries to come to grips with his own prejudices.
Each story focuses on the everyday encounters between someone Irish and a person from elsewhere, and it's these moments, as the author points out, that create the endless possibilities for comedy, misunderstanding, empathy, hostility, romance.
In Black Hoodie, an Irish teenager falls for the Nigerian girl he's working with on a school project about stereotyping - that the project involves shoplifting from department stores is the start of problems that land them in Pearse Street Garda station. Doyle never misses out on the comic potential of a cultural collision - on meeting his beloved's imposing, sombre father, our would-be Romeo says: "He's huge. He's like a whole African country, Uganda or somewhere, that just stood up one day and put on a suit." But equally, he doesn't flinch from recounting the nonchalant racism and everyday bigotry that foreigners in Ireland - particularly those of colour - must face, be it a garda's throwaway remark about "jungle drums" or a nanny forced to hear herself referred to as "my Polish peasant".
The shorter form also allows Doyle to explore paths which he might not take in his longer fiction - there is an old- fashioned chiller, The Pram, in which Alina, a Polish nanny, decides to teach her charges a lesson by scaring them with a ghoulish tale of a baby-snatching witch - the story's real monster being the children's mother. That classic rite of passage, the first day of school, sets the stage for New Boy, in which a young African boy who has witnessed his father being shot by soldiers back home must now prove himself in an Irish playground. In 57% Irish, in an Ireland of the future, a young man devises an Irishness test for the government's Minister for the Arts and Ethnicity based on reactions to, among other things, Robbie Keane's goal in the 2002 World Cup. The satirical tone, while a departure from the other stories here, doesn't quite work - it's just not sharp enough to successfully needle its subjects, but it does give Doyle a chance to get in a few quips about the collapse of the euro, and Roy Keane "before he quit football and took up his post at the UN".
Inevitably though, it is the title story, a sequel to The Commitments, which will draw the most attention. Jimmy Rabbitte, now a father of four, is forming another group - this time, though, "White Irish Need Not Apply" (a nod to the famous "Irish are the niggers of Europe" line in The Commitments). Instead, he puts together a line-up of Romanians, Nigerians, Russians and Spaniards and The Deportees are formed. It's a classic romp through Doyle's Dublin, from African shops on Parnell Street to a 21st birthday party in Sutton - along the way there's an ill-fated gig on the Liffey and a baby delivered under the pedestrian bridge at Fairview, all to a soundtrack of Woody Guthrie.
Doyle isn't breaking any moulds here, but then he isn't trying to - this is an unabashed return to old territory, with no intention to be anything loftier. Perhaps Doyle, and others, will grapple with the more subtle and complicated issues of immigration when these seismic changes have had more chance to sink into the cultural psyche, but in the meantime, he's an affable recorder of the sad, the sublime and the ridiculous in our new city.
Catherine Heaney is a contributing editor to the Gloss magazine
The Deportees and Other Stories By Roddy Doyle Jonathan Cape, 242pp, £16.99
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