Roddy
Doyle takes the literary notion of the ‘unreliable narrator’ to
its ultimate end with a Walter Mitty-type character it is very hard
to like, mainly because Victor Forde doesn't like himself. The book
Victor Forde fails to write in ‘Smile’ is another literary
conceit Roddy Doyle brings before the reader. The core of the story
is loneliness, assuaged by middle-aged fantasies. The foundation of
the story is rape.
With
the recent reactions surrounding the alleged rape on trial in
Belfast, Roddy Doyle's novel is a timely delving into the concept of
consent and of
the
consequences when it is not present. Consent
is
a fragile concept, readily broken, mis-used, mis-understood
and trodden underfoot. In the case of a man
raping a woman, it is
wholly
askew to ask if the
woman consented to
the sexual intercourse in the first place. Already there
is a yawning field of doubt for bad justice and worse law to plough.
It is as if the woman has no agency but to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’
to what a man asks her to accept in matters of sexual congress. This
is the model of sexual relations most favoured by heterosexual
pornographers. It is not consent that is being tested. It is mutual
agreement. Do both adults agree, as equals and without coercion, to
the sexual intercourse? And, if not, then the crime of rape is
committed.
In
‘Smile’, multiple rapes, committed by an adult on children, are
revealed and recalled, late on. The adult rapist is more powerful
physically and institutionally. There can be no doubt coercion,
direct and indirect, is involved.
The
raped narrator, Victor Forde, lives a victim’s life, often
minimising the crimes perpetrated upon him, blaming himself and
creating a fantasy of edgy public admiration, daring efforts to shock
on national radio and in other media and socio-sexual success that
borders on heroic.
As
the story unfolds, Victor Forde shyly re-connects with men and women
his own age. His social and sexual capacities are tested. At the
point he may be about to find ease in such society, a former
school-mate, another loner, but one more caustic and chilling,
confronts Victor Forde’s fantasies in a laddish bout of violence,
because Victor Forde may have ‘stolen his girl’, a middle-aged
woman, whose husband ‘is working away’.
Victor
Forde is hapless. All the men are hapless, to varying degrees. Only
Fitzpatrick, the bully, also deeply traumatised by a paedophiliac
Christian Brother at school, appears to have some agency. Only
Fitzpatrick appears to be ‘doing’ something, even if it
re-traumatising one of his fellow victims.
‘Smile’
is not an easy read, for a number of different reasons. There are
longuers of middle-aged men swallowing pints and talking shite. There
are detailed, unbelievable
sexual encounters with a vivacious, compliant and
intelligent woman, Rachel.
In another novel, Rachel
would not have stuck it out with Victor, the failing writer. She
would not have had a son with him.
But
she does in this novel. For her, consent and agreement are part of
Victor’s fantasies. She is only saved from victimhood by being a
literary fiction. All this leaves the reader wondering about their
son, the one Victor never meets. Perhaps he is too much of a fiction
to even appear.
The
rape by the Christian Brother, so long repressed by Victor Forde
until asserted by Fitzpatrick, is visualised as wrestling by a
bigger, more powerful man on a smaller, weaker boy. It is named as
grimly as Iago’s infamous call that ‘they are now making
the beast with two backs’. Except the boy has
not agreed to this tussle, groping and violation. This crime.
Perhaps
there is another Victor Forde novel in which the
narrator
gathers agency and moves from victim to survivor? Perhaps Roddy Doyle
will create another less hapless character, more enabled by his
future than disabled by his past? He is a master novelist and
certainly capable of anything
he choses.
For
the present, readers can frown, or like Victor, simply cry, for there
are no smiles here, despite the angsty Dublin crack and the timid
social and cultural references.
Smile, Roddy Doyle, Vintage, 2018; ISBN-10 1784706353
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