Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Delightful collection of 3 of Roddy Doyle's best-known books, 26 Oct 2000
By A Customer
Not least because all of them have spawned film versions, these three loosely connected stories are among Doyle's best-known. Filled with Irish humour and gratuitous swearing, in the face of adversity, they are never dull and usually hilarious. If you read the stories in sequence, I think each is better than the previous, but each can stand on its own. Doyle has a marvellous ability to handle quickfire dialogue, with all the Dublin trimmings. If you haven't encountered Dublin slang and profanity, you'll just have to translate as best you can. The stories are all based on collective or single members of the worthy Rabbitte family, of Barrytown, a run-down suburb of North Dublin. Their lives are dogged by poverty, unemployment and plain bad luck, but they take refuge in humour and inevitably in drink, the two usually going hand in hand. In many ways, the stories are about their various attempts to escape the mediocrity which has been thrust upon them and the farcical and outrageous situations which usually result. The stories are all enormously funny, but there is an undercurrent of sensitivity and a little sadness. The Barrytown Trilogy is well worth your time and money.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Doyle: "It's not a trilogy. It's just three books.", 13 Jul 2006
Though Doyle never intended to write a trilogy, his first three novels are so true-to-life and so representative of north Dublin that it is easy to see why they are now grouped as a "trilogy." All are set in the same blighted neighborhood, an area of overcrowded tenements, unemployment, and hardscrabble living, but also an area full of life, dreams for the future, rowdy friendships centered around the pub, and close families. Focusing on various members of the Rabbitte family, the novels show life as it is really lived here, with moments of high humor and often hilarious interactions alternating with moments of sad realization and broken dreams.
In The Commitments, Jimmy Rabbitte, Jr. forms a soul band from neighborhood musicians and singers, the band offering its members the opportunity to feel successful--at something! The Snapper concerns teenager Sharon Rabbitte, who, after a wild night at the pub, discovers she is expecting a little "snapper" by a man she loathes but will not identify. Sharon's pregnancy is a source of tension with her father, especially since there are already five other children in the family. The Van focuses on the father, Jimmy Rabbitte, Sr., now unemployed, who goes to work with his best friend Bimbo, who has bought a "chips" van for selling burgers, fish, and chips at sporting events, an experience that tests the friendship.
The dialogue throughout these novels is lightning-fast, filled with local dialect, crude profanities, witticisms, and can-you-top-this insults. In this neighborhood, survival is based on toughness and the ability to think quickly on one's feet, and the dialogue often resembles a stage play more than a novel. Characterization, which is thin in The Commitments gradually becomes more complex in later novels. The Snapper, with two main characters, becomes an intimate family drama, more emotionally moving than The Commitments. With The Van, Doyle develops into a real novelist, using dialogue to depict the complex tensions which evolve between two best friends who eventually find themselves at each other's throats.
The Rabbitte family is both individualized and symbolic of the neighborhood, and the three novels together show their need for dreams, along with their attitudes towards education, sex, factory work, and the church. We see their "escapes" from the workday, their physicality, and their amusements and humor. Here, in his Barrytown novels, Doyle shows the vibrancy of life in one blighted area and celebrates the small successes and the love which give meaning to their lives. Mary Whipple
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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Roddy Doyle writes what he observes....., 5 May 2001
By A Customer
Never before has an Irish author written a set of books that capture the Working class feelings of a time when Ireland was only scraping the barrel and keeping it's head above the water. It follows the Rabbite family through it's hard times, of pregnancy and unemployment, and one of it's members short lived venture into the music business. Each book centres around a character, the first book " The Commitments " details Jimmy's hope of bringing Dublin soul to the working class. " The Snapper " potrays the hard nine months of a single mother, in the rabbite family and finally " The Van " captures Ireland before and after world cup fever took Ireland hold and at a time when Jimmy Snr can't find work. Roddy Doyle writes what he observes at the time of writing. I own all the trilogy seperately and also in one volume and I can tell you that these books are a most for any modern day fiction fan.
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