Rowdy

Now that you have the basics, you’ll be able to understand the rest.

Let’s Lighten Up a bit. Music …. what’s in it to be in a band? For lots of us Catholics it might be described like this:

They'd been in the folk mass choir when they were in school but that, they knew now, hadn't really been singing. Jimmy said that real music was sex … They were starting to agree with him. And there wasn't much sex in Morning Has Broken or The Lord Is My Shepherd.

Today we’ll feature Ireland’s greatest living author, Roddy Doyle.

Wikipedia (underwhelmingly) gives us this:

Roddy Doyle (born 1958 in Dublin [just like GT12]) is an Irish novelist, dramatist and screenwriter. Several of his books have been made into successful films, beginning with The Commitments in 1991.

Doyle grew up in Kilbarrack, Dublin. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from University College, Dublin. He spent several years as an English and geography teacher before becoming a full-time writer in 1993.

The above quote is from his best-known work “The Commitments”, itself the first volume of his Barrytown Trilogy. The three works (“The Snapper” and “The Van” comprise the rest of the trilogy) look at working (when lucky) class Ireland through the experience of Jimmy Rabbitte and his family. Brutally funny, profane and clear eyed.

When explaining the need for an Irish Soul Band, our protagonist says something you can’t say in America:

The Irish are the niggers of Europe … An' Dubliners are the niggers of Ireland … An' the northside Dubliners are the niggers o' Dublin - Say it loud. I'm black an' I'm proud

Personally, I think the Catholics in the North had and have a better claim to that derogation but after one’s country’s been ruled by invaders for 800 years who am I (or you) to make that distinction? Remember folks, in Britain, one term for the Irish is “white nigger” (cf ‘Oliver’s Army’ –by Elvis Costello)

From there Doyle’s depictions of brutality were not played for laughs. Looking at the horrors of Irish childhood (‘Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha’) or at the horrors of Irish men (“The Woman Who Walked Into Doors”) his version of Dublin life makes Joyce’s Dubliners seem liberating and ecstatic.

With “A Star Called Henry” Doyle turned his attention to the sweep of Irish history in the 20 century. And you must read this book. You will need oxygen for the first five chapters - the writing literally took my breath away.

Here, Henry tells us a little about his birth:

"I was a broth of an infant, the wonder of Summerhill and beyond. I was the big news, a local legend within hours of landing on the newspapers."

From Amazon.com’s review:

"Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood." The quote is from Frank McCourt's memoir of growing up impoverished in Limerick, circa World War II. But the sentiment might just as easily have come from the fictional lips of Henry Smart, the hero of Roddy Doyle's remarkable novel of Dublin in the teens, A Star Called Henry. The son of a one-legged hit man, young Henry is the third child born but the first to live through infancy. He is also the second Henry--the first having died, and become a star in the mind of his mother.

She held me but she looked up at her twinkling boy. Poor me beside her, pale and red-eyed, held together by rashes and sores. A stomach crying to be filled, bare feet aching like an old, old man's. Me, a shocking substitute for the little Henry who'd been too good for this world, the Henry God had wanted for himself. Poor me.

Soon, his father has all but abandoned the growing family, and at 9 Henry is on his own, running wild in the streets, thieving to stay alive. Depressing as all this sounds, Doyle has invested his narrator with such an appetite for life, and rendered him so resolutely unsorry for himself, that it seems almost insulting to pity him. By the time he is 14, Henry has become a soldier in the new Irish Republican Army and in one long and harrowing chapter, we view the events of the Easter Rising of 1916 from his position in the thick of it. It's not a pretty sight by any means, as the populace is divided in its support and various factions within the Republican Army threaten to splinter and annihilate one another before the British even get there. When the shooting starts, Henry aims not at the British but at the store windows across the street.

"I shot and killed all that I had been denied, all the commerce and snobbery that had been mocking me and other hundreds of thousands behind glass and locks, all the injustice, unfairness and shoes--while the lads took chunks out of the military."

Though the uprising is eventually crushed and the leaders executed [as we have reviewed earlier - GT12], Henry escapes to live--and fight--another day.

We leave you with this you tube video from The Commitments. This is another song that Mr G. Baker, Mr. JK and myself used to perform in the olden times (it was one of the first songs I insisted upon playing). I myself played this song at a wedding … the two honorees went to see the movie on their first date, a date that found both of them in the same position as the protagonist of the song - cheating.

The Dark End Of The Street