Her independence is a huge achievement for someone from the working class

“Her independence is a huge achievement for someone from the working class. A middle-class woman in her position would have known how to drive: she could have escaped. And she’d have access to money, she’d have gone to see a bank manager. The last time Paula saw the inside of a bank, she was probably cleaning it.”Paddy Clarke play-acts killing his brother, but panics when he thinks he might actually have harmed him. The elimination of Charlo distressed Doyle because he has a justified conviction that his characters exist outside his books, and that their lives continue after he stops writing about them.

His readers repay the compliment, gratefully recognising the characters as extensions of themselves. “If we could give Paula flesh, then the real Paula and all her neighbours would probably be reading me! I love the thought that they sell my books in supermarkets and newsagents.”The films of his novels – Alan Parker’s Commitments, Frears’s Van – confirm this faith, as actors literally lend their own flesh to Doyle’s words. So he has promised Paula a sequel: “I want to write another book about her – not the next one, that’s about a 94-year-old man who claims to have been bang in the middle of most of the 20th century’s great events Of course he’s a monumental liar He’s probably not even as old as he says he is. I had trouble with him at first: it was still Paula talking, not this old fart She wouldn’t let go. She’s more or less my age, and I want to come back to her when we’re both older. To see how she’s getting on – to see how we’re both doing.”I might have thought Doyle too good a man for our wretched times if I hadn’t, on the way back to London, been treated to a double dose of the Irish comic spirit, cheerily battling against a tragic history There was a road-block near the airport. While police with machine guns questioned drivers, youths who shivered in the drizzle pressed pamphlets against the windscreens of stalled cars.”It’s the unemployed,” explained my taxi driver.

“They’re selling bukes.”A book in Dublin is a buke, or anything which the irrepressible local dialect contrives to rhyme with it: Doyle’s home-made edition of The Commitments was published under the imprint King Farouk. The buke on sale at the road- block, scratchily stencilled on someone’s kitchen table, was a collection of jokes. Its title? The Smiler, even though the men with the machine guns were glowering.Later an old woman, hobbling onto the plane ahead of me, poked the brass- buttoned chest of the steward at the door. “Now this isn’t going to crash,” she said, “Is it?”"Oo now,” he replied, with another of those beatific smiles, “I guarantee you that for sure. No, it certainly won’t do what you’re asking!”And, fortuitously, it didn’t Holy Ireland has not quite used up its store of miracles. Against all the odds it can persuade you, as Doyle’s fiction does, that life might merit a happy ending.! ‘The Woman Who Walked Into Doors’ is published this week by Jonathan Cape at pounds 14.99. BERTRAND RUSSELL is not much liked He attracts copious and confident moral condemnation.