As Roddy Doyle’s 12th novel begins, Victor Forde, a washed-up writer, has returned to the part of Dublin where he was born. He has a tendency almost to romanticise his loneliness, turn it into witticisms. It ‘would have been sad,’ he thinks, ‘a man of my age going back to some wrinkled version of his childhood. Looking for the girls he’d fancied 40 years before. Finding them.’
He is followed by a man who claims to be called Ed Fitzpatrick, and to know Victor from school. ‘Everything about him was abrupt, a bit violent.’ Victor can’t place him. And this initiates a deep dive into what Victor thinks he can remember: his youth as a music writer, ‘pretending to be Dublin’s Lester Bangs’, and a pro-choice radio pundit and his marriage to a celebrity. And, most memorably, his time at the local Christian Brothers school.
Anyone who has been to a boys’ Catholic school — even years after the decline of corporal punishment and institutionalised sexual abuse that the book makes its focal point — will be vividly reminded.
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