Swash backwash

Doors – as means of escape or entrapment, of release or privacy – proliferate in Roddy Doyle’s new novel. At the beginning of The Women Behind the Door, in which three older women are en route to their first Covid vaccination, a confused man is trapped in a lift; initially, he is mocked by the women, but a form of compassionate recognition comes to the fore: “Everything about him was defeated. He was lost in his body”.

This is Doyle’s third book to feature Paula Spencer, who first made her appearance as a recently widowed victim of domestic violence in The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996) and then appeared as a recovering alcoholic in Paula Spencer (2006). Like the other two novels, The Women Behind the Door is both a minutely observed, caustic account of Paula’s current situation and a subtle yet frequently savage commentary on contemporary Ireland. Doyle has a deserved reputation for empathetic writing, yet he continues to put his characters through the mill.

Paula is now in her late sixties, with an older lover, to whom she appears indifferent and keeps at arm’s length: the kind and patient Joe, who removes his hearing aids during sex. She congratulates herself on her sobriety, her part-time job behind the counter at a dry cleaning firm after years of back-breaking office cleaning, on her newish best friend Mary, with whom she exchanges WhatsApp messages in all-caps, and on her steady yet distanced relationship with her four children and grandchildren.

Of Paula’s two sons, the younger, golden boy Jack, is a university professor in the United States; the other is a former heroin addict. Of her daughters, it is Nicola, the eldest of the children – “a goddess” and “perfect girl” in Paula’s eyes, when she isn’t being described as a “menopausal bitch” – who “manages” her mother, funding her, checking up on her. Then Nicola turns up on Paula’s doorstep one evening and announces she has left her husband and three children. Paula’s baffled, guilty attempts to engineer a role reversal – to parent the child who has always parented her – are met with a vicious rebuttal, and the two-hander she and Nicola then play over the course of the novel is vintage Doyle, the sparse dialogue and scabrous repartee by turns heartbreaking and comic.

The past hangs heavy. Usefully, in terms of structure in a book about physical and psychological isolation, Doyle sets his narrative at various points between early 2021 and 2023, moving back and forth between these time frames. The lockdowns brought about by Covid bring a sort of comfort to Paula, who has “been living with restrictions for years”, but they also recall unwanted memories and voices, particularly that of Charlo, her long-dead criminal husband, shot by police not long after she hit him over the head with a frying pan and kicked him out when she caught him “looking” at the teenage Nicola – the fallout from this ugly incident the reason for her daughter’s current, haltingly articulated distress. Paula’s simultaneous yearning and disgust for Charlo reflects the contradictory responses of the long-term abused, as do her moods – from childishly elated to despairing (about poverty and ageing); she is too immured in her loneliness even to entertain living with Joe, relishes her independence, yet is afraid to come home at night.

The wider world occasionally thuds in, providing moments that could be filed under “clumsy social comment intervention”. While getting in her state-sanctioned lockdown walk in the centre of Dublin, Paula frets about the thin tents home to Roma refugees. An attempt to help a young Brazilian delivery rider when he is knocked off his bike is another instance of displaced mothering. In an ironic swipe by Doyle, in January 2023 she buys a four-pack of supermarket toilet paper, “which should see her through this war in Ukraine”. The great set piece is Paula’s own experience of Covid: days lost to time, with Nicola leaving food and water outside her bedroom door, while Paula wrestles with illness and nightmares. The closed door represents the mother/daughter impasse, while Paula’s “swash backwash” of thoughts and sensations during these feverish days could be a metaphor for the whole novel, its protagonist condemned to be alive to the past yet hobbling forwards into a future of sorts.

Catherine Taylor’s memoir, The Stirrings, is the winner of this year’s TLS Ackerley prize

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