To know him is to love him, usually

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. Roddy Doyle heard of the magazine, liked the idea, and offered his services. As he says, in his introduction:

There’s a love story, a horror story, a sequel, sort of, to The Commitments. Almost all of them have one thing in common. Someone born in Ireland meets someone who has come to live here . . . Today, one in ten people living in Ireland wasn’t born here. The story — someone new meets someone old — has become an unavoidable one.

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.