Roddy Doyle

profile by Joe Wiebe
posted November 15, 2004

On his flight into Vancouver, Roddy Doyle was squashed between two big men. “There was a football team of some sort on the plane,” he tells me when we sit down to lunch at his downtown hotel. “Actually, it was a huge bunch of men — there was a lot of them, and they were all huge.” He was coming in from Winnipeg, so these must have been Blue Bombers on the way to last Saturday’s defeat at the hands of our beloved Leos. “Really, really nice guys,” he insists, “they were all actually talking about God and religion, which was fascinating.”

It’s doubtful that Doyle’s next book will involve the CFL, but then again, you never know. No one could have predicted he would write about Louis Armstrong, but that’s just what he has done in his latest novel, Oh, Play That Thing!, which showcases the famous jazz artist as a central character. I ask him if he ever imagined he’d write about Satchmo back when he was writing his first novel, 1987’s The Commitments.

“Oh, that’s a long time ago,” he laughs. “No, I didn’t. And in fact, I think in The Commitments, jazz is written off as being wanking. I don’t know, I haven’t read the novel in years, but that came from the heart. That line was there for laughs, but I really did mean it.”

As compelling as Louis Armstrong is, Doyle’s protagonist, Henry Smart, is just as interesting. As told in 1999’s A Star Called Henry, Smart was born in Dublin in 1901. A participant in virtually every important (and bloody) event in the first quarter of twentieth century Irish history, he is a handsome man, good in a fight, smooth with the ladies, and carries a wooden leg (his father's) that was his favoured weapon as an IRA assassin.

But Henry’s IRA days are over; now, he is trying to make his life anew in America as so many Irish did before him. Doyle says, “It just made sense because so many people left Ireland that he would do the same thing. He has no choice. It’s the New World, still is in a sense.”

After running afoul of the mob in New York, Smart makes his way to Chicago where he meets Louis Armstrong and becomes his “white man,” allowing Armstrong access to places where unofficial segregation still ruled.

Louis Armstrong almost steals the show in this novel. To pull off his portrayal of the legendary trumpeter, Doyle researched the era heavily. Armstrong “bought a typewriter when he was very young and carried it around for the rest of his life, so there’s a huge body of letters and memoirs and writings about music.”

Armstrong is such a wonderful character in Doyle’s hands, I have to admit I was sad when he and Henry are finally forced to part company. “So was I,” Doyle agrees, “Personally, I would have liked to see the two of them succeeding.” But circumstances of the story do not allow that to happen, and Henry is forced to move on.

Dating back to The Commitments, Doyle renders music in his writing so well that you not only hear the song, you feel it vibrating in your bones, under your skin. I ask him if he enjoys incorporating music into his books.

“It’s hugely enjoyable,” he answers, “Taking snippets of lyrics and then trying to make sure that the narrative somehow or other knits with the lyrics outwards and forwards and backwards. The rhythm of the songs infects the writing, and that means every syllable counts. Trying to capture the frantic nature of a live performance. It comes from a deep respect and a deep love of music, so it is a pleasure.”

Oh, Play That Thing! closes with Henry meeting the Irish-American director John Ford in the Utah desert during the filming of My Darling Clementine. When Doyle finished the book in January, he “felt very washed out.” So, before figuring out where his hero will go next and then diving into the necessary research, he decided to write something else first: a short novel set in contemporary Dublin.

“In the eight years that I’ve been writing the thing, Dublin has changed so much and so dramatically, and I suppose I have as well. I’ve been watching the world grow up in my own household, Dublin becoming a much more cosmopolitan place.”

But Roddy Doyle is not abandoning Henry Smart, who will return for at least one more book. Henry, in the author’s eyes, is “a larger-than-life guy. He is Irish, would rather not be, but that’s part of being Irish as well. It’s a pain-in-the-arse being Irish.”

What about being Canadian? “I often wonder what room there is in this place for an angry Canadian,” he jokes, “He’d have to emigrate wouldn’t he? Go south of the border and scream a bit.” Maybe a CFL-themed novel isn’t so unlikely after all. I know I’d read it.