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The Deportees

To know him is to love him, usually

Roddy Doyle
Cape, 242pp, ££16.99,

Cressida Connolly

Wednesday, 12th September 2007

The eight short stories which form this collection began life in a multicultural magazine called Metro Eirann, which was set up in 2000 by two Nigerian journalists living in Dublin.

No one could say this is a bad premise for a book. Nor is it, really, a very new one: meeting a stranger must have provided the beginning for more stories than any other plot device. That the stranger should be met with some suspicion or fear adds to the unfolding of the narrative. And racism today is, after all, a kind of suspicion mixed up with a kind of fear. So the reception that a stranger could expect in contemporary Dublin might not be so very different from that he or she might have received in Ancient Greece, say, or Victorian London.

In Roddy Doyle’s version of things, though, it only takes a shared meal or a pint or a giggle at a teacher for people to get along famously. Racism is as soon overcome as a case of the hiccups. The central character from The Commitments, Jimmy Rabbitte, is here revived to form a band, the eponymous Deportees. He places an ad: ‘Brothers and Sisters, Welcome to Ireland. Do you want the Celtic Tiger to dance to your music?’ And, hey presto, there they are, no auditions needed: marvellous at music, familiar with the work of Woody Guthrie, alive with rhythm. In another story, a father of five who blows a gasket when he hears that one of his daughters is seeing a Nigerian changes his mind when the lad turns up at the house. The visitor has nice manners, a suit and — bejaysus! — appreciates the wife’s chocolate pudding. That’s all it takes:

There was a black man sitting across from him and he wanted to be his father-in-law. He wasn’t sure why, but that didn’t matter.

But it does matter. It matters if a writer as good and observant and witty as Doyle is disingenuous or facile; if he sacrifices uncomfortable truth for feel-good liberalism. In making all immigrants dignified, good-looking, upstanding types, only too eager to learn how to make friends by quaintly saying ‘bollix’ and drinking Guinness, he is over-simplifying for comic effect; just as he is when he caricatures the Irish as hard-drinking, heavy-swearing blokes with masses of children and hearts of gold. It is, of course, possible to be both truthful and funny. For that reason, the darker stories here stand out: a brilliant Gothic horror in which an Eastern European nanny exacts a ghastly revenge on her vile employers or the tale in which an African kitchen worker is threatened by a would-be gangster. A story in which a post-graduate student devises a test to weed out incoming immigrants — by gauging their reaction to, among other things, Robbie Keane’s goal for Ireland in the 2002 World Cup — is an excellent satire. At his best, Doyle writes some of the sharpest dialogue in current fiction and he can make you bark with laughter. The Deportees may not be Doyle at his very best, but it’s still a highly enjoyable read.