Roddy Doyle, one of the leading Irish writers, has been praised for the “pitiless realism” (Foran 1996: 6) with which he explores some of the most significant problems and themes in contemporary Ireland (Smyth 1997; Donnelly 2000). Even in his most comic novels Doyle does not ignore the dark side of existence: “It is this coincidence of light and dark that makes all Doyle’s novels distinctively his own, and deeply, rather than superficially, realistic” (McCarthy 2003: 118). In his desire to tell the truth Doyle has dealt with issues that Irish society has tried to ignore: dysfunction, domestic abuse, marital breakdown, damaged children. Although Doyle has claimed that his novels are not sociological tracts, but stories about people (White 2001: 153), the reading of his novels confirms “his sense of the necessity for Irish writers to speak the truth against hypocrisy” (McCarthy 2003: 8).

As Foran has pointed out, Doyle is aware of the fact that being Irish has always been a burden and a responsibility for him and this is obvious in the way in which he uses the power that fame has given him to challenge and confront (1996: 6). McCarthy has suggested that this “irreverent” attitude towards the establishment, traditions and conventions is due to the fact that Doyle belongs to a generation of writers that emerged from adolescence with no regard for authority, institutions, traditions and conventions (2003: 230). Doyle himself has emphasised the subversive and iconoclastic function that literature should fulfil: “To me, one of the greatest enemies of writing is political correctness and it’s only going to get worse, I suspect. It’s the refusal to acknowledge satire. It’s important to upset and outrage people” (Costello 2001: 91). Doyle asserts that when one of his novels arouses hostility it means that the job was well done (Newson 2017). Joseph O’Connor in his praise of Doyle’s work has claimed that if the real purpose of art is to change the world, the only way to do it is by changing the way people see it, and this is certainly what Doyle tries to do with his novels (1995: 141). Doyle believes that to make people accept the dark side of life is not only a challenge, but a political engagement and a responsibility (Drewett 2003: 346). However, he has explained that, when he defines himself as a political writer, he does not mean that he writes with the aim of forcing the issue: “[…] I write about Irish, urban characters and they drag the politics behind them, not the other way around” (Sbrockey 1999: 538).

McCarthy states that “Family and The Woman Who Walked into Doors compose an obscene scream in the face of a complacent middle class that did not want to know about alcoholism, spousal and sexual abuse, professional blindness and institutional apathy” (2003: 156). This description can be partly applied to Smile (2017), a novel which, like The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996), deals with abuse and powerlessness. In fact, Donnelly’s description of The Woman Who Walked into Doors is relevant to Smile: “Doyle’s primary concern in this novel [Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha] and in his next, The Woman Who Walked into Doors, is to articulate the hurt, anger, fear and confusion of someone who is powerless and vulnerable” (2000: 25). Whereas Paula Spencer is the victim of domestic violence and has been beaten, kicked, hit, burned and raped by her husband for seventeen years, the Head Brother raped Victor, the narrator of Smile, seventeen times under the pretence of teaching him self-defence. Doyle has explained that Victor’s powerlessness derives from the fact that the Brothers know that he is a safe target (Dunne 2017). Victor has no big brother to warn him: “Never smile back at him. Never get ten out of ten. Never get below five – don’t give him any excuse to keep you back after the bell” (Doyle 2017: 19-20; original emphasis). Moreover, his father is very ill, and the Head Brother knows that he will not tell his mother about the abuse in order not to add to her suffering. Both novels are stylistically similar, since they are narrated in the first person, which, in the case of The Woman Who Walked into Doors, Doyle has justified in the following terms:

[…] I felt that a book about domestic violence was going to be a more powerful book if told from the point of view of the victim, and if the book could be somehow her exploration of what went wrong and what happened to her. And I just thought it would bring people much closer to the subject than if there was a witness, if there was a third person narrator. (Sbrockey 1999: 546; original emphasis)

By allowing Victor to tell his own story, Doyle offers the reader an iconoclastic vision of Ireland’s recent history and more precisely of child abuse inside the Catholic Church. Doyle was aware of the fact that writing about institutional abuse in a conventional way could be tiring for the readers: “When you are half listening to the news in Ireland and you hear the word priest perhaps or you hear the word Christian brother or orphanage or laundry or nun, you expect or half expect a dreadful story to come. And at this stage you almost sigh and you think ‘Oh not again!’” (Newson 2017). This is why he decided to write a story that would shock the readers and take them out of their zone of comfort (Waterstones 2017). In fact, the novel has been described as “at times almost unbearable to read” (Schaub 2017) and reviewers have emphasised that the ending is “disorienting” (Lennon 2017) and “devastating and comfortless” (Cummins 2017).

The reason why the reader is so distressed when s/he finishes the novel is because s/he has been led to believe that by narrating his story, Victor, like Paula, is confronting and understanding the terrible facts of his past. As Marsh has explained, Paula’s self-consciousness is heightened as she fearlessly faces her predicament and it seems that Victor has achieved this same self-knowledge: “Paula’s hard-won self-awareness strengthens her and finally allows her the possibility of escape from the unwanted role into which her life has forced her” (2004: 156). In his analysis of The Woman Who Walked into Doors, Persson argues that “Paula telling her own story is partly a survival strategy, partly a strategy for empowerment” (2006: 69) and, apparently, Victor has also defeated the forces that nearly destroyed him. In fact, Doyle has argued that what defines his characters is that they are “are resilient, great survivors” (Taylor 1999) and Victor seems to belong in this group. In fact, he seems to possess what White considers to be the five keys to survival in a Doyle novel: courage, resilience, hopefulness, self-understanding, and humour (2001: 142).

In this journey towards self-awareness and empowerment, both Paula and Victor are rescued by people who love them and not by institutions or friends who do not want to know about their abuse (McCarthy 2003: 181). In the case of Victor, the person who saves him is his wife Rachel Carey, a television celebrity. She helps him fight back his demons and have a normal life: “She saved me and, later, she carried me. Her assertiveness, the way she grabbed me, pulled me into her, turned her back and remained the boss, her willingness to cry, the way she took sex, took and gave – I can see now that it saved me. It stunned me and made me. I’d fallen in love with an adult. I wasn’t a fraud; I was a slow starter” (Doyle 2017: 119). Under her influence Victor achieves the resilience and humour which Doyle considers to be the great source of strength in Paula’s case (Drewett 2003: 343).

But what is most revealing about Rachel is that she seems to possess all the best qualities of two of the most interesting female spouses created by Doyle: Miss O’Shea and Aoife Rabbitte. The three of them challenge the reader’s expectations, because, as Doyle has argued: “[i]n a way all fictional characters should subvert, if they are going to be alive on the page. They have to be more than real including the naturalistic way” (Tekin 2014: 109). The aim of this article is precisely to analyse the similarities between these three outstanding characters. We will show that they are powerful women who refuse to conform to the patterns of patriarchy. They reject the model of marriage in which power resides in the husband and submissiveness is expected of the wife. They are intellectually superior to their husbands, whom they mother and guide in the most important moments of their lives. In the case of Aoife and Rachel we will also focus on how their comic view of life is connected to their compassion and generosity. The examination of these three female characters will be enriched by the reference to those studies relevant to the issues we deal with.

A Star Called Henry (1999) is the first instalment of The Last Roundup trilogy, which aims to challenge Irish myth and identity through its central character, Henry Smart, a child from the slums who decides to join those fighting for the Independence of Ireland. In this “revisionist tale of Irish history” (Jacklein 2005: 129), which offers the reader a detached and non-sentimental perspective on Ireland, Henry finds the love of his life, Miss O’Shea, an extraordinary and unconventional woman. McCarthy has pointed out that in A Star Called Henry, a novel that includes more female characters than all the author’s other novels combined, Doyle moves forward in his concern with feminist issues. He underlines the thematic relevance of Melody, Granny Nash, Dolly Oblong and Miss O’Shea and describes the latter in the following terms: “while her feminist values are not anachronistic, she is more allegorical than realistic, though no less enjoyable for that” (2003: 220). Throughout the novel the narrator highlights Miss O’Shea’s bravery, intelligence and her refusal to conform to the image of the ideal woman of the age. She is everything but submissive and meek, and does not believe that the domestic sphere is the most appropriate for a woman. She is a convinced feminist, who wants to participate in the struggle for Irish Independence in the same way men do: “I didn’t come here to make stew, Henry, she said […] I’m here for my freedom. Just like you and the men upstairs” (Doyle 1999: 122). When the revolutionaries try to remove her from the General Post Office, she shouts that she “can fire a gun as well as any man!” (Doyle 1999: 132) and, in fact, once she decides to contribute to the freedom of Ireland nothing can stop her. One of the leaders of the revolution, Ivan Reynolds, asks the boys to cut O’Shea’s hair off and then burn her mother’s house and barn because she does not follow the orders she is given. She does not care and goes on fighting for the ideals she believes in. She is “the holy terror”: “Our Lady of the Machine Gun, they’re calling her, mister. She’s robbing banks and the big houses and killing those new Tan bastards into the bargain. She’ll soon have us free of them and that’ll be a day worth getting up for” (Doyle 1999: 269). Ivan tells Henry Smart, her husband, that it is fine for Miss O’Shea to join Cumann na mBan, a female Irish republican paramilitary organisation, and give the boys “rucksacks and sangwidges”, but “she’s going bananas out there” (Doyle 1999: 313). This statement is significant because Doyle has explained that he based the character of Miss O’Shea on the extraordinary women who founded Cumann na mBan, some of whom were quite eccentric (Drewett 2003: 345). In fact, the brave defence of the principles she believes in leads to her imprisonment in Kilmainham together with another three hundred diehard women and girls. And when in the last years of her life she has a stroke and cannot move or speak, she only gives up and dies when Henry lies to her and tells her that the war is over. In the final book of the trilogy, The Dead Republic (2010), she is finally buried as a heroine, as a woman who did not allow anyone or anything to stop her from achieving her goals in a patriarchal society which only expected women to perform a submissive role and thus contributed to the creation of a new nation:

I walked in front of the men who carried her to the republican plot in Glasnevin. I walked past old and new republicans, and young women who were claiming the women of 1916 as their own, the women who’d been hidden, no streets or train stations named after them, the names forgotten, except on the side of a swimming baths or the odd block of flats. They stood as we buried their new discovery, one of their dead heroines who’d been living all along. (Doyle 2010: 322)

The celebration of Miss O’Shea’s achievements could only have been possible in a novel like The Dead Republic, which, as most critics have argued, explores the manipulation of national myths in order to distort reality (Charles 2010; Dillon 2010; Nathans-Kelly 2010). As Moynihan has pointed out, the recognition of O’Shea’s contribution to the revolution is highly relevant, since the national narrative has historically marginalised the role of women in the struggle for Irish Independence (2011: 59). In this sense, Granny Nash, Henry’s grandmother, plays a similar role in A Star. Henry provides her with books by female writers in exchange for information: “I’d noticed something: she got excited when the books were by women” (1999: 165). McCarthy has accurately explained how through the titles of these books “Doyle inserts into the masculinist tale of the fight for Irish Independence allusions to the unfamiliar alternative histories of women’s oppression, survival and triumph in a patriarchal world that includes Irish nationalism” (2003: 221-2).

Echoing Miss O’Shea, Rachel is also a convinced feminist who rejects the way in which patriarchy wants to enslave her by forcing her to play traditional roles. She refuses to believe that a woman’s main aim in life should be to become a wife or that marrying is the only route to happiness. She gets very angry with her father when she starts her own business and he, who thinks that because he went guarantor of the loan is actually the boss, has four hundred pink bags made for her:

-What’s the problem with them? I asked.

-They’re fucking pink, for a start. Have you ever seen me wear anything pink?

[…]

-It’s none of his business, she said.- He doesn’t trust me. I’m only a girl and girls are for marrying. And the heels – he made the whole thing look pornographic. (Doyle 2017: 105)

Her favourite series is Remington Steele, “one woman’s cheerful fight against male domination” (Doyle 2017: 111), and she objects to Victor “demeaning people, especially women” (2017: 47). She also tries to avoid the use of words that can be offensive to women: “I hate saying it, Victor, I hate the word. But he’s a cunt – he really is” (Doyle 2017: 137). Victor even says that she laughs like a man: “I don’t mean she sounded like a man – Jesus, no. But she threw her head back, even in the car seat, and guffawed” (Doyle 2017: 82). Rachel defends the causes she believes in – abortion, contraception – no matter what the consequences might be for her: “Rachel visited the Irish Family Planning Association clinic on Cathal Brugha Street. She walked past the prayer groups reciting the rosary outside. And she was recognised. Hoor. Slut. Prostitute. She was followed. She felt the drops of holy water hit the back of her head. She saw the spit on the back of her jacket when she got home to the loft” (Doyle 2017: 156; original emphasis).

Because of their feminist ideas, both Rachel and Miss O’Shea challenge the patriarchal model of marriage in which power resides in the husband and submissiveness is expected of the wife. They subvert the idea that a woman needs to be under a man’s guidance by being the powerful and strong ones in their relationships. When Miss O’Shea and Henry are shot by the Tans, although both of them are badly wounded, it is Miss O’Shea who carries Henry to a save place and nurses him. When during the rebellion Henry is taken to Kilmainham, Miss O’Shea decides his “route of escape, and means” (Doyle 1999: 307). When many years later they meet again in Ireland, it is Miss O’Shea, who is already in her seventies, who rescues him when he sinks into the mud and cannot move: “She had ten years on me, but she still managed to pull me out of the muck and carry me to the kitchen, around to the back of the house” (Doyle 2010: 134). In fact, Doyle has admitted that one of the aims of his writings is to challenge stereotypical assumptions about women: “They always say there are no good roles for women, and I was going to point out and say, ‘well, in fact, in the case of Ireland, there have been good roles for women- I’ve written several of them!’” (Drewett 2003: 345).[1]

But Miss O’Shea is not only the one inside the couple with the best ideas, she is also the one who gives the orders, the one who tells Henry what to do and how to behave. We have to remember that she is his schoolteacher when they meet the first time and she will always play this role in his life: “I’m still your teacher, Henry Smart” (Doyle 1999: 321). Even when they have sex Miss O’Shea is in charge, reminding him that she is the boss:

[…] And now she let me hold and find her.

-Keep your legs down, Henry, she said.

She tickled my balls and I went towards the ceiling, and she slapped the side of my leg.

-Do what you’re told, she said. (Doyle 1999: 120)

McCarthy has argued that in one of Doyle’s novels, The Van (1993), the main male characters are represented as “childish men mothered by their wives” (2003:114) and this is perfectly applicable to Henry. Miss O’Shea behaves all the time as the grown up, telling Henry off whenever necessary. Thus, when Henry asks her if she had any children with her second husband: “Will you do your sums, for God’s sake? It was more than thirty years ago. I was nearly sixty” (Doyle 2010: 201). Most importantly, Henry does not resent his wife’s intellectual and moral superiority, but is proud of being her husband, because she is, as Doyle has argued, the love of his life (Tekin 2014: 116). When Ivan asks Henry to order his wife to back off and stop killing people, because she is interfering with his plans, his answer is very revealing:

-[…] Have you any control over your wife at all?

-No, I said proudly. (Doyle 1999: 312)

For Henry, it is vital to have Miss O’Shea’s approval. When Henry is called again into political action after his return to Ireland he is delighted, not because he will become a national hero, but because “Miss O’Shea was going to be proud of me” (Doyle 2010: 212). This inversion of the roles usually assigned to men and women is highly relevant, not only because it subverts the laws of patriarchy, but because, as Morreall has pointed out, in the comic vision, which is mainly anti-heroic, women often play a leading role and even outwit men (1998: 351). In this sense, it has to be highlighted that, although Doyle’s novels have darkened over the years and have increasingly dealt with more painful issues, comedy is present in all of them, with the exception of Smile. Comedy allows the characters and readers to transcend pain and suffering and thus celebrate the gift of life. Doyle is aware of the fact that human existence is an interplay between comedy and tragedy and considers that humour is an appropriate response to the tragic dilemmas of life.[2] He himself has asserted that for him comedy “is an extremely serious business”, and that writing about something tragic in a comic way does not make it any less serious (Drewett 2003: 347). In fact, when asked about The Snapper and how he transformed such a horrible thing as rape into something wonderful, he replied that there are two roads you can go, the bright or the dark one, and that he had obviously chosen the first one (White 2001: 156).

Whereas in A Star Called Henry, The Dead Republic and Smile the stories are told by the main character, in The Guts (2013) Doyle again uses a third person narrator. Doyle has argued that in the novels that are written in the third person and mainly based on dialogue he tries to get the narrator so close to an individual character that he seems to use “the second-and-a-half person, if that makes sense” (Taylor 1999). This is what happens in The Guts, in which by focalising the narration through Jimmy Rabbitte the reader perceives from the very beginning his unconditional love and admiration for Aoife. In this sense, although somewhat different, because society has changed, the relationship between Aoife and Jimmy Rabbitte is very similar to that of Miss O’Shea and Henry. It is obvious that, for Jimmy, Aoife is the love of his life[3] and that he recognises her excellence: “Maybe that was the steroids too – forgetting simple things. He’d ask Aoife. She’d know” (Doyle 2013: 186). Like Miss O’Shea, Aoife is the mature one in the relationship. She tells him to “grow up” (Doyle 2013: 26) and behave like an adult: “She was slagging him, the bitch, and telling him to start dressing like an adult again” (Doyle 2013: 106). She even treats him like a child:

-Pepper?

-No.

-What’s the magic word?

-Thanks. (Doyle 2013: 228)

Again and again, she proves to be the wise and strong one inside their marriage. She is the only one who realises how his illness is affecting their children. He needs Aoife to guide him, to let him see that Mahalia’s bad behaviour at school is due to his predicament (Doyle 2013: 192), that he frightens the kids when they see the state of him after every session of chemotherapy: “Jimmy, I’m tired of this. I really am. You’re flogging yourself. But, actually, you’re not. You’re flogging us. Me” (Doyle 2013: 184). She helps him make the most important decisions: when to tell the children that he has cancer, or what to do when his business is affected by Ireland’s economic meltdown.[4] She looks after him and knows what is best for him before he realises it. Although he is reluctant, she insists on him having a dog because it will help him through his illness. And when she notices that Jimmy is depressed, she reaches out to his friend Outspan to cheer him up: “Aoife was still smiling. But there was a bit of that thing, the desperation he’d seen when Outspan had been in the house” (Doyle 2013: 225). She encourages him to go to a rock festival with his friends and his brother Les, because she knows that it will help him overcome his depression after the ordeal he has been through with the operation and the chemotherapy. And not only does Jimmy have a great time, but, most importantly, recognises that he owes it to Aoife: “He was numb, a bit. Happily numb. Aoife was off wandering with the kids. She was leaving him alone. He was here now, with these men, because of her. They were back under their tree, sitting around Outspan’s purple chair” (Doyle 2013: 323). Jimmy, like Henry, is not only proud of a woman who “missed nothing” (Doyle 2013: 101), but wants her to be proud of him as well: “He wished Aoife could have heard him say that. He’d tell her later” (Doyle 2013: 180).

Aoife is defined by her compassion and acceptance of others, and this is highly revealing because she reminds us of Paula Spencer in Paula Spencer, the sequel to The Woman Who Walks into Doors. Paula loves her family and feels no resentment towards those who in some way or another have hurt her, like her mother, who never said anything when Paula came home with a black eye or splintered fingers. She is not even envious of other people having a better life than hers and is capable of feeling sympathy for those people others tend to despise, like the immigrants from Nigeria or Romania, who have come to Ireland looking for a better life. In fact, as Jeffers has argued: “With Paula Spencer Doyle moves from speaking for all women who must endure men like the insidious Charlo and the Irish cultural and legal system that sanctions domestic violence, to portraying one who advocates tolerance and acceptance of racial diversity in the new Ireland” (2009: 264). Doyle creates characters like Paula or Aoife who are defined by their compassion and acceptance of others, because he himself in his work shows this sympathy and understanding of humanity, which is clearly seen in his refusal to judge his characters: “Although he is removed from them, his ‘forgiveness of just about everything and everyone’ is the overwhelming characteristic of his relationship with his creations” (White 2001: 12). White believes that Doyle has inherited this empathy, this capacity to “look past the stereotypes and see the person” from his mother Ita (2012: 84).

Jimmy and Aoife laugh a lot together in order to transcend the pain generated by the cancer he is suffering. Like some of the most brilliant characters created by Doyle, they are capable of laughing at themselves and confronting their problems and tensions without falling into despair because they recognise and enjoy the incongruities of life. In fact, most scholars on humour (Sypher 1980; Craig 1989; Morreall 1983; Bakhtin 1992; Gutwirth 1993; Hyers 1996) agree that the sense of humour leads above all to a perception of incongruity and the acceptance of the awkwardness of the human condition: “For all the doubts and contradictions and absurdities which comedy entertains, there remains as its center of gravity the joy of life and a gratitude for the gift of life” (Hyers 1996: 170). But although laughter helps both Jimmy and Aoife to cope with the difficult situation they are going through, she also stops him every time he tries to joke about his own death, because sometimes there are limits to laughter or, as Berger puts it: “There are occasions when no one either can or should laugh, when the tears are too bitter” (1997: 118).

Rachel Carey’s relationship with Victor reminds us of Miss O’Shea and Henry and Jimmy and Aoife. It is obvious that she is the strong one and the one who ‘mothers’ Victor. Like Aoife, Rachel tells her husband to “grow up” (Doyle 2017: 26) and does not hesitate to inform him that the first time they met she thought that he was “stupid, sweet and lovely” (Doyle 2017: 83). She encourages him to write the great Irish novel which in the end he will never produce, and makes him believe in himself: “She made me work, she made me want to work; she made me believe in what I was doing or bracing myself to do. She really did. I can just about remember that; I can just about feel it. I wanted Rachel to be proud of me. I remember too, I wanted to deserve my sex. She had nothing to gain from me” (Doyle 2017: 86). Like Henry and Jimmy, Victor knows that the difference between Rachel and him is that “I worked for her approval but Rachel didn’t work for mine” (Doyle 2017: 101).

Like O’Shea and Aoife, Rachel is always there to rescue Victor when life burdens him with painful situations. Before meeting Rachel and because of the sexual abuse he suffered as a child Victor is incapable of having a normal sexual relationship with a woman: “I was sick of being the observer. There was never any sex. I was too shy and too stupid. I never knew if I was attractive” (Doyle 2017: 42). He could not look at a girl while he spoke or when he made her laugh. Parties were a real nightmare for him: “I hated parties […] I hated knowing I’d be leaving alone […] I didn’t know how to enjoy myself, hating the girl who’d smiled at me, hating myself for not crossing the room” (2017: 89). But all this ordeal is over when he meets Rachel. She is patient with him when the first time “nothing happened” (Doyle 2017: 94). And when, finally, he has an erection: “I was overjoyed, the happiest, the biggest man on earth, listening in and trying not to laugh until she did. And she always did laugh” (Doyle 2017: 96). It is very interesting that, as in the case of Miss O’Shea and Henry, in all their sexual encounters Rachel is the dominant one: “But Rachel didn’t ride and she certainly wasn’t ridden: Rachel fucked” (Doyle 2017: 123). Every time Victor describes their intimacy in detail, she is the one who controls the situation and decides how things are to be done: “And she fucked me. She pulled me to the floor by the sleeve of my jumper. Then she kneeled in front of me – she wasn’t smiling. She turned her back and dropped onto her elbows […] She backed into me and she kept backing into me, shoving herself right through me, long after I’d come” (Doyle 2017: 102).

Rachel also helps him develop a comic view of life, which allows him to enjoy the simple pleasures of life: “I laughed. I know now: I didn’t laugh much until I met Rachel. It’s corny but true. I only laughed when other people were laughing. But now I started laughing. I started laughing, and she joined me” (Doyle 2017: 84). Quite significantly, Rachel, like Aoife, also warns Victor that there are moments in life when laughter causes more pain than bliss. After revealing on the radio that he had been molested by a Christian Brother as child, Victor starts telling humorous stories about school: “My account of the Brother molesting me had taken only three minutes […] Eight minutes after I’d told Myles and the rest of Ireland that a Christian Brother had placed his hand on my penis, I was laughing” (Doyle 2017: 172). Rachel realises that he is not using laughter to cope with his childhood trauma, but to bury it, thus causing more suffering to himself:

-But why did you mention the other stuff? she asked.

-What do you mean?

[…]

-The things you always do, she said.- The choir and the priest listening to his funeral. (Doyle 2017: 171)

Scholars like Bentley (1964), Morreall (1983) or Hyers (1996) have emphasised the coping function of laughter. Comedy allows us to see situations and people from a different perspective and thus help us transcend pain and suffering. Comedy does not turn a blind eye to reality, but tries to deal with the difficulty of being: “The comic dramatist’s starting point is misery; the joy at his destination is a superb and thrilling transcendence. Given the misery of the human condition in general, what could be more welcome” (Bentley 1964: 302). Unfortunately, Victor is not using humour to liberate himself from his terrifying past, but to conceal his frustration and sadness, and Rachel is aware of it.

As in the case of Aoife and Paula, Rachel’s comic outlook on life is connected to her compassion and generosity. As Sypher has argued, the highest form of comedy is that in which “laughter is qualified by tolerance, and criticism is modulated by a sympathy that comes only from wisdom” (1996: 212). Humour makes us more tolerant of people’s differences and shortcomings and more willing to forgive and accept them as they are: “You may estimate your capacity for comic perception by being able to detect the ridicule of them you love without loving them less; and more by being able to see yourself somewhat ridiculous in dear eyes, and accepting the correction their image of you proposes” (Meredith 1980: 42). Both Hyers and Sypher agree that only a few people can achieve this generous view of life and it seems that Rachel possesses this humour that is open to goodwill and love and which Hyers has described as the laughter of paradise regained (1996: 91-4).[5] We saw above how patient and understanding Rachel is when Victor is incapable of having sexual intercourse the first time they sleep together, but she shows her love for Victor in other instances as well. Although when the novel starts Victor and Rachel have been separated for a long time, he knows that he can still count on her, that she still cares for him: “I could phone Rachel now and ask her. She’d be friendly, nice; she’d ask me how I was” (Doyle 2017: 124). He knows that Rachel is so compassionate that she still loves him although he has proved to be a failure, although he never became the great writer he was going to be, although he disappointed her: “She was checking on me, making sure I was alright, going through the duties of an ex-wife with an unhinged, disappointing ex-husband, letting me know that I was loved, that I was needed” (Doyle 2017: 177). She even offers Victor’s mother a job because she knows that she cleans offices and wants something better for her.[6]

Although Rachel shares many things with previous heroines created by Doyle, there is, however, one aspect in which she is absolutely different: for the first time Doyle has created an economically and socially successful woman. She is a television celebrity, “a national treasure” (Doyle 2017: 80), has one flat in Paris and another in Barcelona and she and her husband are photographed together for some of the most popular magazines. They are good friends of influential and rich people “who’d brought their kids to school in helicopters” (Doyle 2017: 32). When Victor writes about her success he seems to reflect her feminist ideas, since he emphasises that she is famous for her achievements and that she has had to fight to become a celebrity because she is a woman:

[S]he never says she works hard. She never boasts. She never spoofs. She claims nothing special, nothing God-or blood-given. She never claims an interesting history, or a struggle to get to the top. Those of you who watch carefully will know that quite often Rachel says nothing. Not because she’s letting the men at it, but because she doesn’t need to. They hate her, the men. They love her and hate her. Because they need her. They’re expendable; Rachel isn’t. The show will go on without them but there’s no show without Rachel. (Doyle 2017: 120-1)

In the very last pages of the novel all our convictions are shattered. We realise that Victor has never been able to liberate himself from the trauma caused by being raped seventeen times by the Head Brother. In fact, the novel ends in a tone of defeat and despair: “I was crying. I couldn’t stop crying. And I can’t stop” (Doyle 2017: 214). Unlike Paula, he is not writing his story to confront the facts of his past, but to replace reality with a fantasy that we as readers have all along believed to be the truth. The reader discovers the metafictional character of the text and thus that Doyle has written a novel inside a novel. As Fitzpatrick, Victor’s self-reflection, says to him: “You’ve spent years wondering what the alternative Victor would have been like. Especially recently. Haven’t you?” (Doyle 2017: 210). Fitzpatrick forces Victor to face the truth: what the Head Brother did to him ruined his life. After the sexual abuse Victor has been incapable of having sex with a woman and therefore the story about him and Rachel is a whole lie. He did once meet her but did not have the courage to turn up at their date: “You were too frightened, he said.- Of what would happen or wouldn’t happen. Of touching her, yeah?” (Doyle 2017: 212). Victor has made the whole thing up because the past is so devastating that he cannot admit what really happened: “It would’ve been nice, wouldn’t it? Rachel” (Doyle 2017: 213).

Although Doyle tricks us into believing that Victor did marry Rachel and that they were very much in love, he also gives us clues throughout the novel to make us aware of the truth. Thus, when describing one of their sexual encounters, Victor writes: “She took my anger and made me laugh. The glory of it – her legs around me. Me. I don’t think I ever quite believed it. Or accepted it” (Doyle 2017: 112). People express incredulity that someone like Victor could have been with Rachel: “How did he end up with her?” (Doyle 2017: 123; original emphasis). He also explains to us that although he misses being married, “I’m not sure that I missed Rachel” (Doyle 2017: 132). Obviously, he cannot miss someone with whom he never got into relationship. Then, after telling us throughout the novel that Rachel is his wife, he changes the story and affirms that they “never did get married. I started referring to Rachel as my wife after ten years or so” (Doyle 2017: 158). Because we trust the narrator, this new development does not raise our suspicions, and we still believe that they were a happy couple. We do not suspect him either when he says that his friends at the pub are trying to find out who Rachel is: “The four of them were throwing Rachel around, like dogs with a toy. It struck me: Fitzpatrick wasn’t one of them either. He was outside, like me, looking in” (Doyle 2017: 135). But perhaps the best clue that Doyle gives us is when Victor, after meeting Brenda at the pub, remarks: “She was different. She wasn’t Rachel. She was fattish and human” (Doyle 2017: 182). Certainly, if Brenda, unlike Rachel, was human it means that Rachel was never part of his life.

The fact that the reader fails as a detective is highly relevant, because, as Lennon has argued, “Smile is something of a departure for Doyle – it’s the closest thing he’s written to a psychological thriller” (2017). Patricia Waugh has explained that the thriller is a popular form that provides a basis for some metafictional writing: “The existential boundary situations that recur frequently in the thriller are experienced vicariously by the reader, who is thus allowed to play through the uncertainties of his or her own existence” (1993: 84-5). But although Waugh’s statement is certainly a perfect description of what the reader experiences when reading Smile, a metafictional text par excellence,[7] it also has to be admitted that Doyle is an author who has always challenged the reader to fill in the gaps, form opinions and add details (Martín 1998: 113). Doyle firmly believes that the reader is involved in the creation of the story and feels that his responsibility as a writer is “to be truthful in the fullest sense to the world of appearances but also to the world of silences, to record both what is said and what is not said by his characters” (McCarthy 2003: 82). Certainly, Smile is a novel in which the narrator’s silences tell us more than his words.

Some years ago, in 1996, Doyle argued that, although Ireland was particularly healthy, “it’s a very unsettling place to be insofar as an awful lot of these stones which we’ve kept secret are being lifted up and these dark and horrible secrets are coming to the surface very very quickly. The reality of child abuse in the Church and what happened to orphans” (White 2001: 152-3). In the same interview Doyle admitted that one of the reasons he has been going for darker subjects is because “I am aware of my own luck, my own good luck, and I know that there are a lot of people out there who got my chunk of bad luck. While I’m flourishing, they’re not” (White 2001: 157). Maybe Doyle’s awareness of his own good fortune prompted him to write a shocking novel about child molestation. As Doyle has explained, the incident in which a Brother says to Victor that he can never resist his smile is based on his own experience. But, unlike Victor, the Brother never touched Doyle or suggested that he should stay after class (Newson 2017). Nevertheless, the memory of this unsettling episode remained consistently throughout the years, and he decided to write a fictionalised version of it in a way that would go beyond other molestation tales: “Smile is a novel that’s as original as it is brutal, and as painful as it is necessary. Doyle asks us not just to consider the ravages of post-traumatic stress, but to feel them, or as closely as we can, anyway” (Schaub 2017; original emphasis). Writing about one of Doyle’s novels, Smyth has suggested that recognising contradiction as the basis of society becomes even more traumatic when the individual is still a child “and even more so when the individual lives in a society that is in mass denial regarding the fragility of the family, one of its most sacred institutions” (1997: 80). This statement is perfectly applicable to Victor, who as a child becomes the victim of a society that sanctions abusive behaviour. Doyle has gone so far as to confess that, although it might sound brutal, he would have never written Smile if there had been something to save Victor (Dunne 2017). When asked about the possibility of Rachel having rescued Victor, Doyle has admitted that he really does not know if she could have saved him (Dunne 2017). Although Rachel has “the air of a fantasy woman” (Cummins 2017) because she is merely a figment of Victor’s imagination, what is fascinating about her is that she becomes the incarnation of what Doyle believes to be the perfect female partner. With Rachel, Doyle is not revisiting old characters in new ways as he has done in other novels, but using his own work as his inspiration to create a new heroine. Farquharson has argued that “Doyle’s most recent fictional career sees him enter a self-referential phase whereby he notes and plays with his own influence” (2010: 415) and this becomes obvious in Smile not only in the many references that Doyle makes to his previous works and which the reader easily recognises, but in his desire to create a female partner that embodies the good qualities of other extraordinary women of his fictional world. Although merely a dream, this was the only gift that Doyle could give a man whose life had been destroyed as a child and for whom there was no hope left.

Notes

[1] Caramine White has argued that Ita, Doyle’s mother, is a representative of Miss O’Shea, since both are strong and stoic. She also considers that most of Doyle’s characters share Ita’s resilience and perseverance when confronting suffering (2012: 70-72) See Rory & Ita (2002: 235-6).

[2] On the interplay between comedy and tragedy in The Woman Who Walked into Doors and Paula Spencer, see Díaz Bild (2000; 2012).

[3] It is true that Jimmy commits adultery with Imelda Quirk, one of The Commitmentettes, but readers “forgive” him because they realise that Jimmy is a scared cancer patient who is going through a rough patch: “The sex felt like an achievement. The day before his third session of chemotherapy, with memories of the second one still raw enough to make him cry, he’d managed it” (Doyle 2013: 168).

[4] Doyle has explained that one of the reasons he wrote the novel was because he was bugged by the peculiar 1980s nostalgia that seemed to be accompanying “the re-emergence of the word ‘recession’ in the Irish vocabulary” (Higgins 2013).

[5] Morreall (2010) has also emphasised that a comic perspective allows us to love others as they really are and see ourselves in a more objective way.

[6] Interestingly enough, Victor’s mother rejects the offer, because, like Paula in Paula Spencer, she likes her job and her company (Doyle 2017: 109). This is one of the many references that Doyle makes to his previous novels in Smile and which the reader familiar with his work easily recognises.

[7] For a detailed analysis of the metafictional elements in Smile, see Díaz Bild (2018).