Michael's Reviews > The Guts

Outstanding, joyful read for me about a middle-aged Dubliner negotiating the challenges of colon cancer while taking chances with his music revival business. Jimmie Rabbitte returns decades after his roles in Doyle’s “Barrytown Trilogy” (1987-1991).

Again Doyle is the master of dialogue and a special understated deadpan humor mixed with slapstick. But how can a story about someone facing cancer be funny? Somehow Jimmie’s ability to scramble and even dance on the thin ice of his life is so poignantly sincere, laugher is the best way to root for him without crying to. For example, here is his disclosure to his father in the first pages:

--…How’s Ma?
--Grand. Are yeh having another?
--No, said Jimmie. --I’m driving.
--I have cancer
--Good man.
--I’m being serious, Da.
--I know…
--Jesus, son.
--Yeah.
--Wha’ kind?
--Bowel
--Bad.
--Could be worse.
--Could it?
--So they say, said Jimmy.
--They?
--The doctors an’ tha’. The specialists. The team.
--The team?
--Yep.
--What colour are their jerseys?
Jimmie couldn’t think of an answer. …
--Fuck the drivin’. Have a pint.

Jimmie is so embedded in his large family (e.g. wife, mother, 23 total in his extended clan), just spending days telling them all keeps him so preoccupied at first, he can almost believe his front that he is “grand” and that he can fight it successfully. But at times, such as here in the parking lot at work, his façade crumbles a bit:

He couldn’t get out of the car. He couldn’t move.
…He never understood static electricity. This was the same as static….
He’d touch something, the wrong thing, and he’d die. That was how he’d start, if he was trying to explain it. But, actually, he didn’t have to touch anything. That was what paralysed him. Earlier, in bed, he woke up thinking he’s died. He was waking into his last thought. If he woke up properly, he’d be gone; he’d never have existed.
It would go away. He just had to wait.
Terror. That was it.
He’d be grand. The dread will be gone –it was going; he knew it was nothing. He’d just wait another minute.
He’d be angry then. He had the routine. He’d get rid of that too. He’d slam the door, fire off an email—reply to some fuckin’ eejit and have to apologize later.
Fuck it.
Fuck it.

Soon enough Jimmie is invigorated by some creative and cockeyed schemes to get his juices flowing and to head off bankruptcy with his business. He has been making a living through internet music sales. He ferrets out locally developed music from decades past and does what he can to revive interest in it. Starting with Celtic punk, he will dig up old recordings, track down old band members and engage them to submit them or new recordings for sale, and then promote sales by producing local performances. For example, he has just discovered a husband and wife who once performed as the Halfbreds and had a raucous song he finds “savage” (his highest accolade). His one attempt at a recording with rented studio time ends up with them having a physical fight. Using the song as is, fight included, only adds to its success at sales. Another scheme is to make hay with an upcoming worldwide gathering of church officials, a Papal Encyclical, by making an album of songs from the time of the last such gathering in Dublin, 1932 But he has such trouble finding a key song that is sexy enough to sell, he gets the brilliant idea of making one up with the help of his talented children.

Throughout this tale, Jimmie is living in total connection with family, friends, and business contacts through the new media-- smart phones, email, iPods, the whole nine yards. But Jimmie hasn’t really changed, and it’s like father, like son, like father. His scheme of making a go of a soul band featured in “The Commitments” gave way to his father’s to succeed with a chip van in “The Van”, and now we circle band to a new outrageous approach to surviving a new recession and way not to “go gentle into that good night.” Toward the end of the book, the whole stew of his get-rich schemes reach a wonderful crescendo with a big musical festival, where three of his bands have a venue. All your imaginings about the joys and miseries of camping out for a festival are outrageously brought to life through Jimmie and his other middle-aged buddies taking it on. Jimmie attends with an estranged brother he hasn’t seen in decades and a childhood buddy, Outspan, who was the drummer in “The Commitments” and now is on his last legs with lung cancer.

Doyle obviously loves his characters, and the whole crew were vibrantly alive for me. Jimmie’s father, his wife, his kids, and his buddies are all wonderfully drawn in this zoo full of life. For old time’s sake, Imelda, a back-up singer with “The Commitments”, makes the scene to fan the flames of his rusty old lusts. When asked in a PBS interview how it was he could make a comedy about a man struggling with cancer, Doyle explained how it was a way in his family to use humor to disarm tragedy: .
When you laugh it’s a way of confronting it. It’s, I think, one way of confronting it—when you laugh at things, you’re not evading them, you’re running headlong into them. And even these days with texting, something awful happens. The first thing that arrives by text is a joke. It could be perceived as cruel, but it is, I think, a way of coping. And, yeah, in the book--I hope it’s not tasteless.

This book was provided by the publisher through the Goordreads Giveaway program.