Finished Roddy Doyle's Paula Spencer with gratifying ease this evening, reading the final pages on the bus to Orchard Road. Now wondering why I got stuck in the middle. Probably it was connected with the rather dense nature of what on the surface appears quite a casual narrative. Doyle is doing that extraordinary thing - paying close attention to another's life, one that most of us would dismiss as mundane and limited in the extreme. Even Paula's alcoholism is nothing special, simply the most degrading aspect of a life that appears hopeless all round. Yet Doyle reaches beyond all this to the complex, suffering human being at the centre and convinces you she's more than worthy of consideration, partly because of the richness of consciousness that leads to that unexpected density in the novel.
To take a single example: the way Paula's experience and gradual acceptance of the mobile phone given to her by her daughter Nicola are woven into the narrative, creating almost a kind of poetry of texting in the later stages is both funny and extraordinarily insightful. Doyle really gets that sense of how a simple thing like the phone can mean so much to people in terms of the way it infiltrates their lives. And he does this without in any way patronising the character - it's an experience we all might recognise.
There's a kind of charity in Doyle's work that is deeply moving, partly because it's so unsentimental.
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