The Committments - Roddy Doyle

...Ohhh, painful, no not the staples, but that soul racket.

Yes this is the subject of Irish writer Roddy Doyle’s first novel, called the Commitments, an Irish Soul band and yes of course Alan Parker made it into a classic movie of the same name.

Plot

The book is centred in Dublin’s working class district, Barrytown (I do not know whether Barrytown is a fictional location or not) and focuses on ...
...soul to the people of Ireland, named the Commitments.

The founder of the band is a Jimmy Rabittee, who is to his friends the fountain of knowledge for music and what is cool and not cool, he even has an album called “scrapping foetus off the wheel”, so to his friends he must be cool. Two other original members of a group called And And! And Outspan, a novice guitar player and Derek a bass player (who has never played the ... more

Get away with you, you mad eeejit, an Irish soul band, no little whistle, no fiddle, no diddly dee music, you must be mad. Give me some diddly dee music and that nice Irish lass, jigging up and down with her arms stapled to her sides. Ohhh, painful, no not the staples, but that soul racket.

Yes this is the subject of Irish writer Roddy Doyle’s first novel, called the Commitments, an Irish Soul band and yes of course Alan Parker made it into a classic movie of the same name.

Plot

The book is centred in Dublin’s working class district, Barrytown (I do not know whether Barrytown is a fictional location or not) and focuses on the formation and dissolution of an Irish band to bring soul to the people of Ireland, named the Commitments.

The founder of the band is a Jimmy Rabittee, who is to his friends the fountain of knowledge for music and what is cool and not cool, he even has an album called “scrapping foetus off the wheel”, so to his friends he must be cool. Two other original members of a group called And And! And Outspan, a novice guitar player and Derek a bass player (who has never played the bass), approach Jimmy to manage them and the wheels start turning. Added are Joey the lips Fagan, an old trumpet player that has supposedly toured with Ottis Reading (but is in fact slightly mad); James Clifford a rogue piano player who is studying to be a doctor; Deco the singer (a pretentious twat, (sorry for the use of that word girls!)); and Dean Fay, the sax player, who has never played the Sax. In addition for some sex appeal Jimmy adds three young Irish girls, Bernie, Imelda and Natalie, to be the backing singers.

That is the band and the book follows them through all the trials and tribulations, as members learn to play, learn to play together and perform to Dublin, (well in small Dublin pubs and Community centres). Can the band cope with the egos amongst it? Do any of them ever learn to play their instruments? Is the band successful? If so can the band stay together with its mixture of personalities and raging hormones in the young men? (Yes, they all want a piece of the backing singers and the mad and old Mr Fagan gets more than his fair share!)

What makes the band more than a cover band is the add libbing of lyrics into classic songs such as the Night Train, adapting it to be a song about the train that takes all the drunken Irish people home on a Friday night and some of these lyrics are great.

OK, so that is the basic plot, lets not give it away, what about the rest?

Style

Well, for a start Roddy Doyle is not one to write in a conformist way, in fact nearly the whole book is written as conversations between the band members. This gives it a fast pace and an interesting style as a lot of detail that would be described by other authors is left out. This is perhaps why the book is so short, just 140 pages and so you fairly fly through it.

The other innovative part of the writing style is that Roddy Doyle actually writes how the music sounds, so in parts of the book he writes the trumpet, piano and drums as sounds they make. Like Duh Duh Duh, Dee Dee Dee, now although this is innovative, after a while this gets tiresome and to my mind adds nothing to the book or literature.

But a great part about the book is the witty interchanges between band members, in some parts the book will have you chuckling to yourself as this blokes tease each other and clash as the various personalities come to light. Roddy Doyle has a gift in being able to see a certain person and then characterise them in his books. Anybody that has Irish friends will be able to identify the type of people in the book and their attitudes to life. It is the imagery he invokes of the petty squabbles in the band that make this a good and interesting read.

Message

Strangely for a Roddy Doyle book, the commitments is thin when it comes to portraying an underlying message of society, no subject is really addressed, except in part the poverty that still exists amongst some of the working class in Dublin and the world that many people inhabit and try and escape from. In reality this book is part piss take and is certainly comic and will amuse the reader all the way through.

Conclusive thoughts

Will you like this book? Well if you like Doyle, you will like this, it does not have the strong social message of the woman who walked into doors, but it is amusing and portrays ordinary people pursuing a dream to be in a band. (What young boy did not want this at some stage?)

But, the way the book is written at a fast past, does confuse the reader in parts and the writing of music, does not in my view quite work.

But this is still a good book and very funny, but perhaps not up to the standard of Roddy Doyle’s latter works, but for the first time ever, I think a film may be better than the book, simply because it will capture the music better than writing it.
 

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