The followup to 2011's Two Pints finds the master of Dublin dialogue on savagely funny form
Ventriloquising skill … Roddy Doyle. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian
If there's one thing Roddy Doyle does brilliantly, it's dialogue. All his novels – from the Man Booker-winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha through the Barrytown Trilogy (which includes The Commitments) to more recent work – have been liberally salted with speech, set out at such breathtaking speed that his characters don't even wait for inverted commas; different speakers are simply indicated by a new line and a dash.
By the time of his most recent novel, The Guts, the dialogue had swelled to take up the bulk of the book. Two More Pints follows the publication of Two Pints in 2011. These dialogues are the logical extended form for his ventriloquising skill. Almost Beckettian, stripped bare of setting and description, they might as well be issuing from two illuminated mouths speaking from a dark stage.
Rather than a stopgap between "proper" novels, the Pints are a different art form. The speakers, discussing the day's news, are male, married with children and grandchildren, and we assume they are sitting in a Dublin pub. Each conversation is dated for context, although subject matter is easily established in the first few lines: "Wha' d'yeh make of the photographs?" "Wha' photographs?" "Kate Middleton."
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By the time of his most recent novel, The Guts, the dialogue had swelled to take up the bulk of the book. Two More Pints follows the publication of Two Pints in 2011. These dialogues are the logical extended form for his ventriloquising skill. Almost Beckettian, stripped bare of setting and description, they might as well be issuing from two illuminated mouths speaking from a dark stage.Rather than a stopgap between "proper" novels, the Pints are a different art form. The speakers, discussing the day's news, are male, married with children and grandchildren, and we assume they are sitting in a Dublin pub. Each conversation is dated for context, although subject matter is easily established in the first few lines: "Wha' d'yeh make of the photographs?" "Wha' photographs?" "Kate Middleton."
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