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RODDY DOYLE
ASK most novelists which of their books they like best and invariably they reply that it's impossible to choose.
Roddy Doyle has no such qualms - of his eight, his favourite is The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, about a battered Dublin wife called Paula Spencer, which is why he's returned to write about her in his new novel.
Now an alcoholic struggling to get her life together, Paula is nine years older than when we last saw her. Her city has changed beyond recognition as the Celtic Tiger economy has started roaring ahead.
"A rising tide lifts all boats," an Irish Taoiseach once observed, and it's true: even poor, beached, stranded lives like Paula's now have opportunities they never had before.
"When I wrote The Van in the 1970s," said Doyle, "it was possible to have a novel about unemployed plasterers. Now it wouldn't be."
Paula Spencer is, he says, the ideal commentator on this new, affluent, young and optimistic Ireland - "she's not right-on and middle-class like me".
The other question Doyle is always asked is how he is able to write women so well. No, he said, he doesn't show his work in progress to anyone, but once he had finished he did show the novel to victims of domestic abuse at a women's refuge to see if it rang true. No prizes for guessing their response.
GEORGE ALAGIAH
LAST week, the same week in which George Alagiah's book was published calling for a government rethink on multiculturalism, Ruth Kelly, the Communities Minister, announced just such a thing was going to happen. It would be nice, if fanciful, said Alagiah, to imagine that the two things were connected.
In A Home from Home, Alagiah stresses that while multiculturalism has worked in parts of Britain, in places like Tower Hamlets it has led to de facto segregation and the immigrant population excluding itself from Britain's civic life. Unlike Rageh Omaar, whose talk about being a Muslim in Britain was disappointingly woolly, Alagiah gave a clear-sighted analysis about what was wrong with, for example, teaching Bengali rather than English to the children of Bengali parents.
His own positive experience of immigration started off from a privileged position, he admitted, but he wanted to make it work for everyone.
(C) 2006 The Scotsman. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved
