posted on 18 Apr 2022

The Snapper by Roddy Doyle

I seem to be reading and reviewing Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy in reverse order. Back in October 2017 I wrote about part three, The Van, and now I’ve finally got around to part two, The Snapper. Almost everything I said about Doyle’s trilogy in the former review, applies here too:

“Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy is a rumbustious celebration of working class life in North Dublin at the end of the 1980s and the early years of the 1990s. It’s shot through with marvellous dialogue, superb characters that will stick in your mind forever, plenty of laughs, plenty of tears, domestic tragedies that somehow get absorbed and lived with and ultimately all three books result in a monument to a class, a culture and the bravery of simple human resilience.”

This episode in the Rabbitte family revolves around 19 year old daughter, Sharon who still lives at home, works in a supermarket on the check-out and loves her drunken nights out with her circle of friends. It’s not a good night unless you get completely legless – that is unless you do something completely crazy and end up pregnant. This is Sharon’s fate and it’s compounded by the fact that the father happens to also be the father of one of her friends and a bit of a middle-aged grotesque.

The plot, for what it’s worth, follows the progress of Sharon’s pregnancy, her attempts to keep the real identity of the father a secret and the extraordinary tender and evolving relationship with her father, Jimmy Rabbitte, Snr. Doyle builds a tangible, three dimensional portrait of family life with virtually no recourse to descriptive writing – almost everything we need is carried along on the dialogue that crackles and sparkles page after page.

The way Doyle handles the dialogue bursts with authenticity – this is the language he knows and he has used all his life and, as a result, it provides the spark of life for his characters. It’s quite astonishing just how much complexity and subtlety he brings to the overall experience of reading about the Rabbittes simply by the use of the odd phrase or inflection that carries a huge weight of understanding.

In other hands this could have been a misery memoir but Doyle turns it into a riotous comic experience without losing any of the seriousness of the situation and the life-changing fact that Sharon will be giving birth to her very own ‘snapper’. There’s no place here for the censorious or the po-faced – Sharon and her family are clearly going to provide an enveloping and loving place for any child to live in and flourish but no-one’s going to stop drinking, or swearing, or blaspheming.

Grazing some of the reviews that you’ll find online serves to illustrate just how critical it is to have an understanding and sympathy for the way language is being used here in order to fully appreciate the extraordinary skill that’s gone into the crafting of this book. American reviews are distinctly luke-warm and often critical of the way the book leans on colloquial language and the reviewer has clearly struggled to find an entry point.

For me, there is no other reason to read this book than the desire to wallow in the superb bath of words. It’s comic writing at its very best – there are some laugh-out-loud moments but that’s not the point of the comedy. Here laughter makes us one of the family, it gives us access to their world and, if we’re up for it, we can dive right in.

 

Terry Potter

April 2022