By any measure, Roddy Doyle is more than a player in Ireland’s literary landscape. It would be no exaggeration to say he is to national literature what The Pogues are to Irish music, Yeats is to Irish painting. Doyle’s recurring character, Paula Spencer, is equally beloved and revered. Doyle and Paula have seen each other through major events in Ireland’s recent history. She was first envisioned for television, appearing in RTÉ’s Family. Doyle’s unflinching and gritty portrayal of a deteriorating family unit had an unprecedented impact. For every admiring review there was its reproving other. Aired just days after Riverdance’s seismic debut at Eurovision, Family brought a euphoric nation sharply back to earth. Doyle’s Family, and subsequently Paula Spencer, muddied the waters of nationalism, inopportunely, when they were at their strongest. While The Woman Who Walked Into Doors (1994) and Paula Spencer (2006) saw the returning figure through the duration of the Celtic Tiger years, the most recent iteration of Paula, in The Women Behind the Door, fittingly sees her through the pandemic.
Doyle reminisces on the beginning of his literary fascination with Paula Spencer. “I was quite curious about Paula because Family was limited to a few months in her life and we only saw the end of her marriage. I began wondering what it was like in the early days. Was it always bad? What was it about Charlo that she fell in love with? What was the charm?” Her characterisation, now unfurling across a cumulative 750 or so pages, evidences his extreme curiosity.
Perhaps surprisingly, there’s nothing chronological or scheduled about when Doyle revisits Paula Spencer. He says that he’s “never thought in those terms”. There seems to be, however, a serendipitous impulse behind how she was most recently revisited. Doyle reflects that when he was getting vaccinated at the Helix Theatre at Dublin City University, it occurred to him that the same venue had staged a production of The Woman Who Walked Into Doors years before. “That put Paula back in my mind,” he says. Subsequently, Doyle abandoned his current project, deeming it somewhat redundant and dwarfed by this new normal. Like every post-pandemic writer, Doyle was confronted with the decision of whether to include Covid-19 in his novel. Ultimately it was his steadfast commitment to social realism and, as he candidly admits, the financial imperative of writing for a living that led Doyle to not only include the pandemic, but to structure his novel around it. On a logistical level, the lockdowns accounted for Paula and Nicole being under the same roof where they could no longer elude sensitive topics. It’s these fraught conversations that unravel across the novel’s pages.
When the conversation came to titles and specifically, why he chose to circle back to the 1996 title in The Women Behind the Door, Doyle revealed that he normally begrudges these more arbitrary aspects of writing. “I am really poor on titles,” he confesses, instead he typically defers to his agent who is particularly gifted in that department. Nevertheless he finds the intertextuality to give the novels a “rounded quality” that at once encapsulates the constants and variants in Paula’s life.
“The relationship between the private and public continues to preoccupy both Paula and Doyle”
One such constant in the Paula Spencer corpus is that of doors. Doyle comments that “they do serve a practical purpose but I think they have a symbolic role as well”. He continues that whether a door is open or closed carries significance beyond the physical door itself. The Woman Who Walked into Doors, for instance, evokes the excuse commonly used by domestic violence victims to conceal their injuries. Although the door motif is consistent, Paula’s relationship to it is not. In the earlier novels, she is afraid of the door bell and the hallway is the site of her beatings. This time round, Doyle masterfully inverts his own motif. He offers that “the door is different in some way. It protects them”. Ostensibly, it protects them from Covid-19. Paradoxically also, this time behind the door is the potential for reconciliation and healing as Paula’s daughter returns home, seeking refuge from her own domestic issues. The relationship between the private and public continues to preoccupy both Paula and Doyle.
“Certainly The Women Behind the Door concerns itself with a second kind of pandemic, that being rampant hatred of women”
When asked whether any contemporary issues in Ireland, besides Covid-19, informed his writing, Doyle reasoned that he “tends to think of people, not issues”. With this being said, he admits the formative effect that misogyny would’ve had on Paula. He cites her tendency towards self depreciation as symptomatic of a culture of sexism at large. Specifically, Nicole’s moment of crisis after hearing her brother-in-law make a sexual comment about his niece is borrowed from Doyle’s own encounter with misogyny. He remembers overhearing a man call his younger female relative “hot” once, recalling that “even though she didn’t hear it. He said it. The violence of it lingered”. Certainly The Women Behind the Door concerns itself with a second kind of pandemic, that being rampant hatred of women. The novel also pertains to generational trauma as Doyle elaborates on the psychological fallout of the Famine and the Cromwellian conquest. “Going back to the Famine really isn’t that long ago. That has to have a huge impact on the psyche,” he elaborates. Its reverberations endure in Doyle’s fiction and Irish society alike.
On a more analytical level, Doyle elaborated on the dynamic between comedy and tragedy in The Women Behind the Door. He admits that he finds this question a peculiar one as “that hand in hand stroll of comedy and tragedy seems so natural. The older I [he] get, the more natural it seems”. He considers that this duality is particularly pronounced in Ireland where, historically ‘“anything that’s comic is right next door to something that isn’t”. Paula’s colleague and friend, Mary, best embodies this doubleness as she turns Paula’s otherwise tedious cleaning job into a source of joy.
“As a fixture of the Irish literary scene for 30 years, Paula Spencer has earned her stripes as one of the country’s most iconic fictional characters”
As a fixture of the Irish literary scene for 30 years, Paula Spencer has earned her stripes as one of the country’s most iconic fictional characters. Accordingly, to “Which Irish literary character would you like to see Paula in conversation with?” Doyle almost instantaneously responded with Ulysses’ protagonist, Leopold Bloom. “I would love her to meet Leo Bloom. He’d be almost giddy talking to Paula. Almost childish in the company of this woman.” He imagines Paula and Edna O’Brien’s Cait Brady and Baba Brennan as possible friends; before confidently endorsing that “She would hold her own against them all”.
It seems premature, with The Women Behind the Door having been released just last month, to push about another Paula Spencer instalment. Similarly, it’s too soon for Doyle to know whether, let alone when, there will be one. “The next one, I haven’t a clue if there’ll be a next one,” he admits.
