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Death throes of Celtic Tiger provide backdrop to sequel The Guts, which revisits much-loved characters
"You were wondering if money was going to continue to exist. Really, the collapse of society seemed just over the horizon for a time. The politicians looked as if they were drunk or hungover, and they might have been. And they disappeared from public view. It was like the country had no government."
This, in all its strangeness and extremity, was Ireland in the wake of its financial collapse, as recalled by Roddy Doyle, and for the novelist it became a plangent backdrop against which to set a story. In the aftermath of the bank bailouts, amid the death throes of the Celtic Tiger, the author of the Booker-winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha found himself drawn back after 26 years to the characters of perhaps his best-loved novel, The Commitments. The result is a sequel, The Guts, and its author's public appearance on Saturday is one of the most keenly anticipated events of the opening weekend of the Edinburgh international book festival.
"I wondered what the Rabbitte family would be doing," he says – referring to Jimmy Rabbitte, the central character of The Commitments, an ebullient account of a group of young 1980s Dubliners who form a soul band. "I gave them solid thought for the first time in a long, long time." In The Guts, the hero of The Commitments is now middle-aged and, like his homeland's economy, ailing: he has cancer of the bowel, his business is struggling, and the novel is a more sombre affair than its youthful precursor – but still buoyed up by Jimmy's charm and irrepressibility. As usual, the novel's patina comes from the streetscapes of Barrytown, a fictionalised version of Kilbarrack, the suburb of Dublin in which Doyle grew up and later worked as a teacher.
Doyle was bugged, he said, by the peculiar 1980s nostalgia that seemed to be accompanying "the re-emergence of the word 'recession' in the Irish vocabulary. I remember the early reports were accompanied by a soundtrack of Eurythmics songs. I felt there was a lazy nostalgia going on – it felt like whoever had compiled those reports was looking back on a time when they were at school or college."
Doyle had other reasons for turning back to The Commitments. He has recently completed the book for a musical version of the novel, previewing at the Palace Theatre in London from next month.
Doyle fended off many expressions of interest in a musical adaptation in the wake of Alan Parker's hugely popular 1991 film. "I didn't want to be defined by [The Commitments] – and the best way to do that was to write a very different sort of book, The Woman Who Walked into Doors." He did return to the Barrytown milieu in his novels The Snapper and The Van, but The Woman Who Walked into Doors was something completely different: a stark exegesis of a family blighted by domestic violence that saw him denounced from the pulpit in Ireland and accused of threatening the sanctity of marriage.
But after 20 years had elapsed since The Commitments' writing, Doyle found himself rereading the book: "I read it cold; I didn't feel proprietorial, I just read it. And I was very happy with the novel." The time felt right for a musical, he said and, while interviewing various writers for the task of adapting it, "found myself answering questions I was asking". The central question is, said Doyle, how to operate within the conventions of musical theatre and still portray characters who cannot actually, for the bulk of the narrative, actually play their instruments. It is a conundrum he has solved, but how, he will not say: "It's too much of a giveaway."
Highlights of the 30th Edinburgh international book festival, which runs from Saturday to 26 August, include events with novelists such as David Peace, Kate Atkinson, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Neil Gaiman. Kate Mosse will guest curate a series of events on feminism, there will be a major strand examining the graphic novel and comics, and a series of debates and discussions will look forward towards the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence. The rabbi Lady Neuberger will debate religion with the former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, and the broadcaster Andrew Marr, in his first public appearance since suffering a stroke, will appear to talk about a new edition of his 1992 book The Battle for Scotland. This year's Guardian Debate on 23 August will inquire whether Britain needs a state-run broadcaster.
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