![]() How come Bertie has such a young son? Jimmy asked. "I have yeah Ted, you big gobshite," replies Dougal.) The Guts even starts in the pub that was the setting for much of the Barrytown Trilogy ( The Commitments, The Snapper and The Van), where Jimmy and his dad, Jimmy Sr, are shooting the breeze: ("Have you been reading those Roddy Doyle books again, Dougal?" asks Father Ted when his simple sidekick unexpectedly calls him a "big bollix". It provides everything that, back in the mid-1990s, a Roddy Doyle novel seemed to represent: a big, raucous but loving Northside Dublin family perfectly pitched dialogue well-observed male camaraderie a lot of music and, perhaps most of all, entertaining profanity. Billed as "the return of Jimmy Rabbitte", it takes up again, 20 years on, with the teenage svengali who decided that Dublin needed a white soul band, and named them the Commitments. "N ostalgia's always big in a recession," says a character in Roddy Doyle's new novel – and, in The Guts, Doyle has served up a good-sized helping of it. ![]()
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