Roddy Doyle - Smile

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A very good novel from Roddy Doyle

I thought Smile was very good, and truly excellent in places.  It has ingredients that would normally put me off and if it hadn't had Roddy Doyle's name on it I suspect that I would never have tried it, but I'm very glad that I did.   

In Ireland, Victor, a middle-aged man ends up moving to his old home town after the break-up of his marriage, and we get the story of his growing up and early adulthood told in retrospect, complete with brutal treatment and sexual exploitation at the hands of the Brothers at school…it just sounds tediously familiar.  The thing is, though, that Roddy Doyle can really write.  I don't mean that he's verbose or "literary," but that his prose is incredibly readable, his characters are very real and completely convincing and his dialogue is brilliant.  The book was a genuine pleasure to read.  Chiefly, he catches superbly the sense of an adolescent boy growing up – that mixture of arrogance and insecurity, the precariousness of one's position among one's peers, the disbelief that a desirable woman could possibly be interested in you…and so on.  Even though my education and upbringing were very different from Victor's, these internal experiences of a young man rang completely true to me and I found that aspect of the book truly excellent.  There is also a fine, quite light-touch evocation of the religious conservatism of may in Ireland in the 80s which I found very neatly done.

The last quarter or so didn't work quite so well for me as Victor's present-day life becomes more prominent and the shady, slightly menacing figure of a man who claims to know Victor from schooldays intrudes.  The climax is rather weird and I'm still not sure I fully understand it – but it still packed a powerful emotional punch for me, from which I'm still reeling slightly.

I have rounded 4.5-stars up to 5 because so much of the book is exceptionally good, it's so well written and the ending is extraordinary.  Despite minor reservations, I can recommend this warmly.

(I received an ARC from NetGalley.)