The Women Behind the Door by Roddy Doyle
Written with consummate skill and a fine sense of tragedy in way that only the Irish can manage this novel examines hatred, love, abuse and redemption between men and women and between mother and child.
Roddy Doyle once again gives us an intimate portrait of a woman in conflict with herself and the world. Paula Spencer is the widow of a criminal and abuser, mother of four children, all flawed in one way or another and a person out of sync with her world. She alternates between joy and sorrow in a daunting flurry, castigating herself with guilty memories then engaging in rapturous episodes of love and happiness, all within one moment. She is a troubled soul within the definitive meaning of the term.
Her oldest daughter, Laura appears at her door without prelude, asking to stay and vowing not to return to her own husband and children, even going to the extent that he states she “wants to kill them”. Reticent and vocally vindictive in turns, she slowly reveals the reasons for her abandonment of her family and her return to a mother with whom she shares a rocky and uncertain relationship. Harsh words alternate with brief glimpses of love in a dizzying cascade, powerfully revealed by Doyle’s facility with common speech and understanding of the motivations behind daily lives. These people seem real in the grittiest and most visceral way. With pretty salty language, Paula and Laura hammer out a future much in doubt, even to the very end of the book.
Engaging and appalling in equal measure this narrative flows uninterruptedly throughout the days of isolation brought about by Covid, reluctance to admit past terrors, desire to escape sad lives and a burning need to find peace. It is a gut-wrenching novel that looks deep into the psyches of women who have been victimized and feel themselves to the cause of their own troubles. A battered woman who thinks her battering is her own fault, brought about by generations of women treated similarly and with like feelings of guilt and the men who seem all too ready to engage in the kind of behavior that fulfills these feelings will cause the reader to examine their own attitudes to the phenomenon of spousal abuse. There are no easy answers here, perhaps no answers at all except to try and wring whatever love is possible from broken lives.