Family introduced us to the Spencer family of North Dublin: violent father Charlo, alcoholic wife Paula and their four children Nicola, John Paul, Leanne and Jack. The two novels centre on Paula. The Woman Who Walked into Doors is her first-person account of her life, covering much the same ground as the serial, leaving her on her own after the death of Charlo in a police shooting. Paula Spencer takes up her story nine years later. She’s forty-eight and a recovering alcoholic, working as a cleaner. Her oldest two children are married and parents, but her youngest are at home still. Paula worries that they might be following in her footsteps, especially Leanne whom she expects of drinking. Told in the third person and present tense, Paula Spencer also shows a changing Ireland, a newly affluent member of the Eurozone, where most of her fellow cleaners are women from Eastern Europe.

At times, Doyle seems to be channelling Jennifer Johnston (a novelist he greatly admires) in this novel, with a use of short, spare sentences and paragraphs, and plenty of dialogue displaying his extraordinary ear for Dublin speech. This manner isn’t quite the same as that of his early novels The Commitments and The Snapper, in which the narrative passages weren’t so much sparse as skeletal. (The film version of The Commitments, for which Doyle co-wrote the screenplay, just for fleshing out the story and the characters is a rare case of a good book becoming a better film.) Doyle doesn’t quite have Johnston’s concision – and the novel is further unlike one of hers in its use of the present tense and Doyle’s characteristic en dashes to indicate dialogue – and the novel is at 276 pages somewhat overlong. Both of the Spencer novels are novel-length character studies and, for all the engaging characterisation and vivid scenes, somewhat static; though not without humour, they do also tend towards the downbeat. Doyle does introduce a new character late on to give the novel a hopeful, if still open-ended conclusion. Paula remains a likeable character despite her many flaws, and it’s good to spend some time with her again. I don’t know if Doyle is planning a third Paula novel: let’s hope not, and he leaves the Spencer trilogy as it is, in case the law of diminishing returns kicks in.

Gary Couzens was born in 1964 and lives and works in Aldershot. He has had twenty short stories accepted by F&SF, Interzone, The Third Alternative, Peeping Tom and other magazines, plus a large number of articles and reviews in The British Fantasy Society Newsletter, Zene and elsewhere. He has three novels in varying stages of completeness and has just started his fourth.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.