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2000s: A man from the past walks into someone’s present and future
Smile
What you need to know before your trail
Victor Forde goes to Donnelly’s pub very evening for a pint.
He’s just moved into the area and so is keen to get to know the neighbourhood. One evening his drink is interrupted. A man in shorts and pink shirt brings over his pint and sits down. He seems to know Victor’s name and to remember him from school. Says his name is Fitzpatrick.
Victor dislikes him on sight, dislikes too the memories that Fitzpatrick stirs up of five years being taught by the Christian Brothers.
He prompts other memories too – but it’s the memories of school, and of one particular Brother, that he cannot control and which eventually threaten to destroy his sanity.
Locations
Reset- Ireland - Dublin
- A: Temple Bar
- B: Doyle's Bar
- C: Croke Park
- D: Cathal Brugha Street
- E: St Anne's Rd
Travel Guide
Dublin
A city stained by memories and pain, its streets paved with disturbing images of a life once lived
Victor Forde is now a lone single man who spends part of each day in Donnelly’s public house. Here he drinks to his problems and remembers the misery, pain and ruined lives caused by the sexual abuse within the Catholic Church which was prevalent in the 1950s but which still haunts decades later.
“Donnelly’s Bar”
“I’d moved in in the summer, so it was all done in daylight. Waking up, getting out, coming home, climbing the stairs, opening a window, cooking the diner, strolling down to Donnelly’s. A pub in daylight is a different place, – it’s less of a pub. It’s a good time to start, a good time to mov in I could sit back and watch the the room become a pub.
Trail Gallery
Booktrailer Review
Tina Forster of Mature Times: @MatureTimes
This is a novel unlike any he has written before. In many ways it is redolent of a mix of the serious social faults and the childish innocence of his previous books, with dark clouds obfuscating the facts making this hero Victor difficult to relate to.
Written in the first-person, Victor tells us he is a writer and that he no longer lives with his wife Rachel who is a television celebrity. But we know little more about the how and why. Jumping through various stages of his life we also learn that he went to school to be taught by the Christian Brothers and that he was the first of his family to go to University.
So much of what he tells the other, very few, characters in his book is a lie that we never get to know the real man: but does Victor really know himself?
Through the backdrop to his life in Dublin in 70s and 80s we share the idiosyncrasies of the place with its anachronisms of culture and religion that has created the enigma of what is really true.
When Eddie Fitzpatrick, a former classmate of Victor’s, turns up in the local pub memories are examined but still the truth seems obscured.
So cleverly written we are caught up in the narrative and the final reveal is deeply disturbing. Doyle has again proved himself an author who can create the sense of time and place that takes the reader into the backstreet bars of Dublin and shows the dangerous undertow of life in Ireland.
Booktrail Boarding Pass: Smile
Destination: Dublin Author/Guide: Roddy Doyle Departure Time: 2000s
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