The Woman Who Walked Into Doors by Roddy Doyle (From Swindon Advertiser)

The Woman Who Walked Into Doors by Roddy Doyle

6:20pm Tuesday 4th November 2008

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It's the wrong time of year, really, for a book about poverty, violence and alcoholism set on a Dublin housing estate.

So I'm glad that The Woman Who Walked Into Doors by Roddy Doyle turned out to be a quick read. His huge talent in this book is his ability to capture the spoken word - this reads like one of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads. And that makes reading it more like listening to someone talking away at you than actually reading.

Paula Spencer (nee O'Leary) is a woman from a typically quarrelsome, somehow depressing family, who falls for the cool, bad lad who's already been banged up for robbery. She falls in love with him at first sight and for the first time in her life she feels like someone, because she is with him.

The book chronicles, in a jumbled up, drunken disorder, her life from childhood, through puberty and her first flirtations with boys (whatever you do, you're a slut or you're tight) and her marriage to Charlo Spencer, elegant, subversive, charming, dangerous, rotten, handsome.

You watch her through her pregnancies, her beatings at the hand of her husband, the loss of her looks, her teeth, the pain in her back from the kickings and the disappointment as she watches her bright future turn bleak.

The clever thing about this book is the way, through its structure, it reconstructs in the reader the feelings of a battered wife. It doesn't start off happy and turn to gloom. Instead, it flashes between parts of Paula's and Charlo's romance from the happy, drunken, teenage beginnings to the fatal end and back again to the terror of being beaten while pregnant and round again to the joy of apologies and love after the abuse. Just as Paula, being beaten and hating her husband falls in love with him again just hours later, the reader is made to feel utter despair followed by love followed by fear followed by ecsatasy followed by anger. The endless chain of abuse by a loved one.

It's an easy read because Paula is so easy to listen to. It's a hard read because it's so brutal. It's a brilliant read because you can't help but feel the ups and downs this poor, broken woman feels. And let's give Mr Doyle his due: he is a man and yet he has captured a woman's voice and her experience of life perfectly.

Read it - but read something cheerful next. I'm searching my bookshelves for a happy book right now.