It may seem unlikely now, but When Roddy Doyle's The Commitments which first published sensitive in 1987 It was the first Irish novel in years did Represented the way people Actually spoke, actually drank, actually spent an evening out, actually failed to have big domestic issues trembling for expressiveness and so on. It was already a bit dated in its picture of the bottom level of Irish music (bands would not be heard playing dead soul back then, theywere all buying digital delay pedals and trying to sound like U2) but nobody Could Deny That Doyle had the best ear in the country. Well, actually They Could, and did, but neither he nor his readership paid any attention. (Doyle is the only living "literary" writer in Ireland to have a seriously major working-class readership.) In my opinion, theory books get better as you go along - though the film of The Snapper is far superior to the other two. Doyle got a lot of stick from Irish reviewers for not showing working-class Dublin life as a vicious urban light, but his excuse what did It was not, not all the time anyway; The fractious but Ultimately loyal Rabbittes are representative. (Interesting facts When he did show a darker version of this life - in the TV series Family - He Got attacked for being unrealistic.) Doyle writes better dialogue than any Irish novelist alive; I suspect he learned the value of it from American realism, and from the Theatre Company (Passion Machine) he used to write plays for, rather than from the previous generation of Irish novelists. His faithfulness to what the eye sees and the ear hears, as opposed to what the tradition demands, marks him as a distinctly un-Irish writer, even if his material is strictly here and now. He's a new voice, and thank God in These Times of green and muddy Irish writing, to urban one (believe me, reading books thesis is _not_ like being in a village pub). All hail. Mine's a short.
