In the third Paula Spencer novel, set during lockdown, mother and daughter are haunted by a history of violence, but revel in some late-life freedom
Roddy Doyle’s new novel, The Women Behind the Door, follows 1996’s The Woman who Walked into Doors and 2006’s Paula Spencer, together narrating Paula’s life from adolescence to her 60s in north Dublin. Here, Paula speaks at last from a position of relative and hard-won security, living alone and holding on to recovery from alcoholism as she negotiates the lifelong effects of domestic violence, addiction and poverty on herself and her children and grandchildren.
Like its precursors, The Women Behind the Door is set at about the time of writing, playing with the challenges of contemporaneity, which for the past few years has meant writing about Covid, or at least, for writers as committed to realism as Doyle, not pretending that Covid didn’t happen. In fact, lockdown suits Doyle’s interest in domesticity, community and several kinds of confinement. This novel begins and ends on the day of Paula’s first Covid vaccination, 7 May 2021, with other chapters on particular dates in 2022, when Dublin residents were forbidden to go outside a 5km radius from home, and 2023, when normal interaction was tentatively possible once more. The novel takes realism to exact times and places, down to particular Dublin streets and buildings at named hours of named days. I haven’t checked, but it’s the kind of writing that makes you believe Doyle has probably got the weather and certainly the passing of starling murmurations correct: any of us might have passed Paula, walking the boundary between invention and observation like Woolf’s Septimus Smith in flu-stricken London.
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