Roddy Doyle interview

For Doyle, the notion of sending Henry to America was irresistible, since emigration is a part of virtually every Irish family's history, including his own. His two great-grandfathers on his mother's side left Ireland to make a new start; one went to the US and one to Australia, though each later returned to their homeland. 'I have no idea why they came back,' says Doyle, who still has cousins living in Long Island. 'But I really thought the US was the most interesting place Henry could go. And I was quite happily limited by the English language. I suppose he could have gone east to Europe, but then I only have a little French...

'Obviously, the link between Ireland and the US has been very strong and important. It's been to our advantage to have English-speaking neighbours to our left and to our right, from a cultural, political, and economic viewpoint. I think attempts were made to make Ireland an island in cultural terms, but the fact that the US gave us another culture to look at as well as the old colonial culture - not that I'm disparaging that - prevented that from happening. Plus, the US was a great outlet for all those people who could not be supported in Ireland.' Doyle loves America and goes there whenever he can. Yet, by necessity, much of his research for Oh, Play That Thing was gleaned from books, and the new novel includes a long and eclectic bibliography. 'It's extra-ordinary how close you can get to a place just by reading about it,' he says. 'Besides, my book is set in the US in the 1920s and that's not actually there any more so it's not as if you can visit.'

Since finishing Oh, Play That Thing, Doyle has spent more time Stateside than ever before. Earlier this year, he taught a five-month course on contemporary Irish fiction to third-level students in New York. Would he himself consider emigrating? 'No, I don't think so. The children are going through their education in Dublin. But certainly, if circumstances were differ-ent and if I weren't a parent, I would move around a lot more.'

Doyle's writing is so energetic, vivid and alive that Henry's adventures practically fall off the pages into real life. That other Doyle trademark also features heavily: music. His first book, The Commitments, (made into a hugely successful film) was about music; in all his other works music acts as a timeline, a reference point, a kind of soundtrack to characters' lives. This time, it's Louis Armstrong. When Henry shifts to Chicago, he becomes the sidekick and deal-cutter for the legendary jazz musician.

'I just love music and I always play it when I'm working,' says Doyle. 'Cleaning the kitchen is a lot easier if I'm playing music. And I always look at a car journey as a great opportunity to play music. If there is a type of music I'm enthusiastic about, then I enjoy finding out everything I can about it. Who invented it? Who plays it?'

But writing about Armstrong means mixing fact with fiction, a device that can be controversial. After all, Doyle turns Armstrong into a house burglar. Hardly fair, is it? 'I'm comfortable with "faction",' counters Doyle. 'I'm not the first person to do it and I won't be the last. And I think this was an easy one for me, in that I ended up liking Louis Armstrong so much - the hugeness of his personality, his genius, his modesty, his lucky escape. I mean, he learned to play trumpet while at reform school. He was just a working-class guy, like working-class guys all over the world, who managed to get a break. He was an easy character to write about, whereas if it had been Hitler it would have been very hard to make him human.

'And the fact that, to my knowledge, he did not break into houses does not annoy me one bit, because it isn't really a moral issue in the book. It's more an adventure, and I think it's funny the way he took to it, just the way he took to most things he was enthusiastic about. I'm not really too interested in whether this or that really happened, but rather that people are left with a favourable presence,' he explains.

Doyle, 46, quit teaching when Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1993. After it won, he was rich, feted - and afraid. His writing had always tapped into the lives of the working class and he worried that he might suddenly become estranged from it.

'When I gave up teaching, I did wonder if I was cutting off an artery,' he admits. 'But then that decision coincided with the arrival of children and they are an amazing source of inspiration.' Doyle is unpretentious, laconic and takes apparent pride in the ordinariness of his life. He still uses public transport and does the school run every morning before returning home to his office to work. 'I'm disciplined about writing,' he says. 'I work from about 10am to 6pm, Monday to Friday. I think I lead a relatively normal life. People think that because your name is well-known you must have a correspondingly high income. I don't want to complain - I am comfortably off - but even if I wanted to lead a more glamorous lifestyle, I couldn't afford to.'

He's opinionated, too, segueing from his views on football - 'now even the managers are younger than me; it used to be just the players, then the referees' - to the recent James Joyce festivities in Ireland: 'I'm a great admirer of Dubliners; and I think Ulysses was a great achievement - but I don't think the way it's carried around like a bible is very appropriate. And I find the whole industry around the man hilarious. You have these Joycean scholars studying Joycean scholars. You can actually carve out a career now as a Joycean scholar without having read Joyce.'

In many ways, Doyle reckons that winning the Booker made little difference to him. 'It was a kind of interruption for a while, a very welcome one and a lovely compliment and it meant that the book was translated into a whole lot of languages it might otherwise not have been. And since Paddy Clarke was falling off the shelves I found myself financially secure, so it gave me that security to become a full-time writer.

'But, no, Paddy Clarke didn't become like an albatross around my neck. I'd had that albatross already, in that I wondered whether I would be forever known as the person who wrote The Commitments. But in fact people rarely mentioned it. There was talk about Paddy Clarke for a while, but by that stage I was already writing The Woman Who Walked Into Doors and that couldn't have been more different. Paddy Clarke was every granny's Christmas and birthday present.The Woman Who Walked Into Doors was not.'

Certainly, some critics have identified a discernibly darker shift in Doyle's work, from the comic, relentlessly upbeat The Commitments and The Van to ten-year-old Paddy Clarke watching his parents' marriage implode, to the abused wife in The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, to the bloody history of 20th-century Ireland in his ongoing, The Last Roundup, trilogy.

As Doyle's own life has settled into content-ment, his writing has become bleaker. 'I don't think it's as simple as having one graph going up and the other going down,' he says. 'Having children is fantastic but it's also true that the longer you live, the more you become aware of your own mortality and that you will not be around for ever. Your child coughs and you drive straight to the hospital to find out what is wrong. You do become more rattled by it all.

'It's not that life is getting bleaker but, in the space of 18 years, I have done a lot of living and that changes you. My books should reflect that, and if they didn't there would be something wrong.'

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