Roddy Doyle’s new novel, The Women Behind the Door, follows 1996’s The Woman who Walked into Doors and 2006’s Paula Spencer, together narrating Paula’s life from adolescence to her 60s in north Dublin. Here, Paula speaks at last from a position of relative and hard-won security, living alone and holding on to recovery from alcoholism as she negotiates the lifelong effects of domestic violence, addiction and poverty on herself and her children and grandchildren.
Like its precursors, The Women Behind the Door is set at about the time of writing, playing with the challenges of contemporaneity, which for the past few years has meant writing about Covid, or at least, for writers as committed to realism as Doyle, not pretending that Covid didn’t happen. In fact, lockdown suits Doyle’s interest in domesticity, community and several kinds of confinement. This novel begins and ends on the day of Paula’s first Covid vaccination, 7 May 2021, with other chapters on particular dates in 2022, when Dublin residents were forbidden to go outside a 5km radius from home, and 2023, when normal interaction was tentatively possible once more. The novel takes realism to exact times and places, down to particular Dublin streets and buildings at named hours of named days. I haven’t checked, but it’s the kind of writing that makes you believe Doyle has probably got the weather and certainly the passing of starling murmurations correct: any of us might have passed Paula, walking the boundary between invention and observation like Woolf’s Septimus Smith in flu-stricken London.
This sequence of novels is interested in the theatre of domestic space, what happens behind the closed doors of the titles, and how those dramas reach or seep out into public and social life. Paula thinks a lot about doors, the permeable and often contested boundaries between interior territories of bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchens, and especially the front door, a less permeable boundary between public and private life which is especially fraught in an abusive household. She can’t pass the front door without remembering all the times she tried to leave her violent husband and was too afraid. “I stood at the door – sometimes on my own, all set to go. Did you know that?” she says to her now-adult daughter Nicola, who did know, and was afraid too, and remembers also the times Paula told her children to pack to run away, lined them up by the door and then didn’t open it.
Both women repeatedly return to the moment Paula saw her husband Charlo looking at Nicola in a way that convinced Paula that Charlo had begun to abuse Nicola too; she hit him on the head with a frying pan and pushed him through that door, bleeding and confused. Paula remains afraid of the doorbell, always worried about who might be waiting for her, never able to feel entirely safe in the house where she spent years cleaning her own blood off the walls and floors, seeing rooms from strange, blurred angles as she lay on the floor after being assaulted, mapping the sightlines and sounds of her children’s knowledge of violence. Nicola’s own memories and resentments seep through Paula’s narrative; it’s an interestingly spiky portrait of late-life maternal ambivalence.
In some ways, Paula has not come far at all, has hardly moved, ageing in the neighbourhood of her birth and the house of her married life. Her memories of childhood, adolescence, working life, parenthood, sex, birth, love, pain and death are written over each other in a small part of a small city. But this is a novel of maturity, not only because of Paula’s backward glance but because the narrative centres a voice and point of view with limited agency. Doyle rejects the long tradition of first-person working-class fiction shaped around the idea of ascent or redemption into heroic achievement. Paula’s hard-won peace comes not from growing into control of her relationships, working life and economic status but in reckoning with the limits of agency and, crucially for the reader, in the possession of a wild and hilarious narrative voice. One of Paula’s joys in later life is strong friendships with funny women. She has learned a measure of self-compassion that stops well short of self-pity, and combines it unusually with a gloriously sardonic sense of humour. The book deals with hard times and dark matters, but there’s always light in the writing.
• The Women Behind The Door is published by Jonathan Cape (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
