Victor has spent decades on the edges of literary success, but seems now to relish his demotion to a rented flat and solitary nights with a book in the boozer. He met Rachel Carey outside a radio studio: she was parlaying her hip catering company into broad media celebrity And at Fitzpatrick’s bullying insistence, a so-far-nebulous set of memories about one or two of the teachers: “What was the name of the brother that used to fancy you? … Would he fancy us now, Victor?” Doyle’s protagonist shrinks from these weird intimacies, but finds himself drawn back to his local each evening, where his past comes to slow and uncertain life. Details gradually condense in Victor’s mind: a Christian Brothers school in a labyrinthine Georgian terrace the casual violence of religious and lay teachers alike a boyish choir rehearsing hymns for the funeral of an old brother, still living. More enigmatically, Fitzpatrick, whom Victor doesn’t recognise, claims they were at school together in the 1970s. This ex-builder in gaping shorts and pink shirt importunes Victor one night over his pint, then comes out with such lines as “The oul’ MILFs, you can’t fuckin’ beat them!” and “Did you ever get a tug from a woman that knits?”

–God, yeah.” But the comic bar-room clichés soon give way to the presence of a burly grotesque called Ed Fitzpatrick. “I stayed up at the bar a few times but I didn’t want the barman thinking that I needed someone to talk to.” Victor Forde, the unreliable 50-something narrator of Roddy Doyle’s new novel, is freshly separated from his wife and apparently stranded in one of those couple-of-slow-ones Doyle sketches whose stichomythic dialogue poorly approximates prime, pub-bound Flann O’Brien.

Roddy doyle ha ha ha