“The woman who walked into doors” was first introduced in a mid-90s TV show created by the Booker Prize-winning Roddy Doyle, whose subsequent novels developed that woman’s story and the second of which, Paula Spencer, bore her name. The initial response was relentless and polarised, with some critics outraged by his representation of domestic abuse and sceptical that such a grim phenomenon could exist in modern-day Ireland.
The Woman Behind the Door, Doyle’s latest novel, begins in 2021. Paula is 66, many years sober, a widow and mother to adult children. She’s “elated” to receive her first dose of the coronavirus vaccination, though if the person administering it saw “the state of her skin, years ago — but never that long ago — when she was her husband’s beloved punchbag, he wouldn’t have mentioned the sting the needle might give her.”
Paula’s current stability, her close friendships, her part-time job, her sobriety and her chosen solitude have been hard-fought. Now she has a life all her own; it has been decades since her husband Charlo was “shot dead by the Guards”. When she returns from that initial vaccination appointment, though — the first tentative steps towards liberty — there is another woman behind the door, the last person Paula would expect to arrive unannounced. It’s Nicola, her most capable child, Nicola who “had been Paula’s mother for years”, seemingly happily married and a mother herself; “the safest thing in Paula’s life”. Nicola says she isn’t going home or back to her job and the question, then, is why? “Will you let me in?” she asks.
Of course Paula does, but Nicola’s presence is both balm and blight: she’s a “teenager in a menopausal body” and this blend of humour and sympathy, the unlikely pairing of the two women under one roof, provides a great deal of comedy. “No one should have to have middle-aged children,” Paula thinks. “Job done, good or bad. Leave your ma alone.” And how, she wonders, “is she supposed to mother the woman who’s been mothering her for thirty years?” When Paula contracts Covid, “breathing like the Irish Sea”, the isolation period sees the pair barricade themselves from the world: it’s within this enforced space that a conversation begins, the first of its kind.
Doyle has long been praised for his use of vernacular, dialect and slang: talk is at the heart of his work and this book is no exception, whether via the interiority of thought or the audible babble of jokes, jeers, recrimination, fury. Paula and Nicola’s quick-fire exchanges become sparring matches that once started can only escalate: Paula is “all set for round two or three”. These cycles mirror the hourglass structure of the plot, from Nicola’s initial arrival in 2021 to 2023 and back again. “The Covid” seems the least frightening virus of all, and the pair’s discussions focus intermittently on such contagions, the dark legacy of misogyny, the guilt and self-hatred that Paula believed, mistakenly, “had skipped a generation”. For Nicola, her mother’s suffering has precluded her own ability to describe the trench-like depth of its impact: “You’ve already more or less told me,” she says, “that you had it worse — because I never bled on top of one of my children.”
This latest instalment forms a trilogy, though a follow-up hasn’t been ruled out. Doyle’s other three-parter is The Last Roundup, where the history of his protagonist, Henry, was charted from the 1916 Easter Rising to life in the US and back to Ireland. In the first of that series, Henry reflects on his surroundings: “It was my world and it could be as big and as small as I wanted it to be. There was a corner and, beyond that, more corners. There were doorways, and more doors inside.”
There is a strong sense in this novel, too, that for each interaction, each passing glance, there are similar portals waiting to be opened. Segments of fleeting narratives show tragic, poverty-stricken lives colliding briefly, from a minor accident with a delivery cyclist to a woman who picks something up in the supermarket before, on seeing its €1.79 price tag, returning it to the shelf.
As with Doyle’s other work, Dublin is the urban life force outside the door. Paula observes the homelessness crisis manifested through tents erected across Henry Street “like two different cities, two different times of the day”. The precariousness of, and danger inherent to that life is subtly compared to Paula and Nicola’s own situation, were Charlo still alive: in Ireland, gardaí reported an increase of 25 per cent in domestic-abuse calls during the pandemic. Paula realises that despite being the site of such brutality, where her husband “battered the mother out of her”, her home and her patient listening can provide the “sanctuary” required.
The Woman Behind the Door by Roddy Doyle Jonathan Cape, £20, 272 pages
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