The Deportees
by Roddy Doyle

(Viking)

In the forward to his new collection The Deportees and Other Stories, Roddy Doyle explains that “Almost all of them have one thing in common. Someone born in Ireland meets someone who has come to live here. The love, and the horror; excitement, and exploitation; friendship, and misunderstanding.” The wave of immigration that has swelled Ireland since the ‘90s is partly a result of the country’s new prosperity. To Doyle, it felt like going to bed in one country and waking up in a different one. “I’d written a novel, The Van, in 1990, about an unemployed plasterer. Five or six years later, there was no such thing as an unemployed plasterer. A few years on, all the plasterers seemed to be from Eastern Europe.”

Waking up in a new bed is not necessarily a bad thing, and in The Deportees Roddy Doyle uses the immigrant’s excitement and drama as a springboard for seven stories set in Dublin, and an eighth, about a black Irish student in Harlem. “Guess Who’s Coming for Dinner” begins the collection on a familiar note; it’s just about like the Sidney Poitier film, except that it’s an Irish girl bringing a Nigerian man home to dinner, and an Irish da who has to come to grips with it. It neatly illustrates how Ireland, like much of Europe, is about where the United States was in the ‘60s in terms of race relations. In “New Boy”, Doyle uses the simple but vivid narrational technique he employed in Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha so that we not only see but live an African boy’s first day in an Irish school. “The Pram” brings us into the world of a Polish nanny, and “I Understand” puts us in the shoes of an illegal Nigerian worker being blackmailed by street thugs. Doyle even recruits Jimmy Rabbitte Jr., his hero from The Commitments, for his title story. Now married with three children and a fourth on the way, Jimmy is putting together another band: this one international, playing (of all things) covers of Woody Guthrie songs. He names the band The Deportees, and at one point the drummer is in danger of becoming one, hiding out in Jimmy’s house. Although the band is different, Doyle’s snappy, artless writing style and natural ear for dialect are as brilliant as ever. In one memorable scene, Jimmy meets his Nigerian lead singer, King Robert, for the first time in a bar.

Jimmy ordered the pint from the Latvian-looking barman who’d joined the Portuguese-looking one. The place was getting busy, beginning to nicely hop. Jimmy turned back to King Robert.
—Your English is very good, by the way.
—As is yours, Mister Rabbitte. You speak it like a native.
And now Jimmy stared at him.
—I will now sing, said King Robert.
And it happened. After the births of his kids and maybe, just maybe, the third time he’d ever had sex, this was the best, most fantastic fuckin’ moment in Jimmy’s life. A black man standing six inches from him opened his mouth and sang ‘Many Rivers to Cross’. Jimmy died and went straight up to heaven.

The stories in The Deportees were initially serialized in the multicultural newspaper Metro Eireann. Because of this the stories are broken into small sections of 800 words, with characters and points of suspense introduced accordingly. The whole effect is a bit like Dickens on speed—many of the stories, and “The Deportees” in particular, could have been easily expanded into full novels. Doyle introduces his characters quickly and sails them off into the sunset quickly too; reading the collection is a bit like going on a fabulous bus tour of Dublin, but not being allowed to get off and sightsee. Even so, this collection is an important step in a new direction, for Doyle and for Ireland too.

Ping's stories juxtapose naive and refined characters, layering Chinese fairy tales over life's cold reality. Each story delves into the characters' hopes and the opposition they face with their families and culture. The Last Communist Virgin is a rich and compelling diary of humanity and quiet triumphs.

- Joel Van Valin