The Deportees

Description

Stories that take a new slant on the immigrant experience, from the Booker Prize-winning author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

Watch for Roddy Doyle’s new novel, Smile, coming in October of 2017

Roddy Doyle has earned a devoted following amongst those who appreciate his sly humor, acute ear for dialogue, and deeply human portraits of contemporary Ireland. The Deportees is Doyle’s first-ever collection of short stories, and each tale describes the cultural collision-often funny and always poignant-between a native and someone new to the fast-changing country. From a nine-year- old African boy’s first day at school to a man who’s devised a test for “Irishness”to the return of The Commitments‘s Jimmy Rabbitte and the debut of his new multicultural band, Doyle offers his signature take on the immigrant experience in a volume reminiscent of his beloved early novels.”The Deportees confirms Doyle’s standing as a rare genius of socially conscious literary comedy. . . . His mastery of the ordinary Dubliners’ speech informs all these stories and lends them an urgent credibility.”
–Los Angeles Times

“Doyle’s short stories rest on the comical limitations–and emotional largess–of his Irish characters. . . . At the same time, they question what it means to be Irish when the face of Ireland has changed. In exploring the theme, Doyle makes sport of everyone.”
–San Francisco Chronicle

“One of the delights of Doyle’s work is its fearlessness. . . . In book after book he throws himself into the voices and hearts of his characters. . . . All of these stories are about blended worlds and the problems inherent in that blending, no matter what wealth or luxury a place affords.” 
–The New York Times Book Review Roddy Doyle is an internationally bestselling writer. His first three novels—The Commitments, The Snapper, and the 1991 Booker Prize finalist The Van—are known as The Barrytown Trilogy. He is also the author of the novels Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993 Booker Prize winner), The Woman Who Walked into Doors, and A Star Called Henry, and a non-fiction book about his parents, Rory & Ita. Doyle has also written for the stage and the screen: the plays Brownbread, War, Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner, and The Woman Who Walked Into Doors; the film adaptations of The Commitments )as co-writer), The Snapper, and The Van; When Brendan Met Trudy (an original screenplay); the four-part television series Family for the BBC; and the television play Hell for Leather. Roddy Doyle has also written the children’s books The Giggler Treatment, Rover Saves Christmas, and The Meanwhile Adventures and contributed to a variety of publications including The New Yorker magazine and several anthologies. He lives in Dublin.

INTRODUCTION
Roddy Doyle’s eight novels have established him as one of the best-loved chroniclers of the contemporary Irish experience. The toughness and charm of his characters in the face of poverty, domestic abuse, and the weight of stifling social norms have won him millions of readers around the world and have spawned three highly acclaimed films. The Deportees and Other Stories continues his winning streak in writing perceptive, poignant, and funny fiction about Ireland. For all the familiarity of Doyle’s voice and setting, however, The Deportees represents a break from his past fiction in two significant respects: the structure of the book, and the social demography of his subjects.

The Deportees is Doyle’s first collection of short stories. While his previous novels have traced the misadventures of a single character within a teeming social milieu, each of the eight stories in The Deportees has a different protagonist. What’s more, most of the stories were written in eight-hundred-word installments for serial publication in the monthly periodical Metro Eireann. These segments—six to fifteen in number, depending on the length of the story; sometimes titled, sometimes not—give the stories a pleasing built-in momentum, with a quick turnaround or mini-climax punctuating the narrative every couple of pages or so, tugging the reader along.

The second, equally obvious departure marked by The Deportees and Other Stories concerns the ethnicity of its primary characters. With two exceptions, every story in the book prominently features characters who are immigrants or expatriates or both—four of them, specifically, from Africa. Doyle writes in his introduction that “one in every ten people living in Ireland wasn’t born here” (xiii), and that this nation-changing influx came on startlingly quickly: “I went to bed in one country and woke up in a different one” (xi). Against this roiling backdrop of change, tension, confrontation, paranoia, and acceptance, of black men and women coming to live and work in one of the oldest, most tradition-bound nations in Europe, Doyle constructs these cunning, twisty tales, playing off the reader’s embedded expectations and stereotypes like a maestro.

In these days of globalization and terrorism, with venomous debates over immigration and identity, The Deportees has explicit relevance. Speaking of contemporary fiction as having a “message” is, of course, considered ridiculously unfashionable and grade schoolish; yet these stories are so unexpected in their turns toward the accidentally humane, so humble and cheering in their humor and small decencies, that one cannot help but feel that the simple act of reading them is somehow bearing witness to the possibility of a saner, freer world. Doyle has a clear eye, and is unafraid. Those are especially valuable traits for a writer, so far, in this still-new century.

ABOUT RODDY DOYLE

Roddy Doyle was born in Dublin in 1958 and attended University College, Dublin, before becoming a teacher in Kilbarrack, North Dublin. He has written eight novels, including Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, which won the Man Booker Prize in 1993. Each of the books in his Barrytown trilogy has been made into a successful film, with Doyle doing the screen adaptations himself. He has also written several stage plays and books for children and young adults. He lives in Dublin, Ireland.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

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