The Woman Who Walked Into Doors (1997) - Plot & Excerpts
Roddy Doyle - The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. “Broken nose. Loose teeth. Cracked ribs. Broken finger. Black eyes. I don’t know how many; I once had two at the same time, one fading, the other new. Shoulders, elbows, knees, wrists. Stitches in my mouth. Stitches on my chin. A ruptured eardrum. Burns. Cigarettes on my arms and legs. Thumped me, kicked me, pushed me, burned me. He butted me with his head. He held me still and butted me; I couldn’t believe it. He dragged me around the house by my clothes and by my hair. He kicked me up and he kicked me down the stairs. Bruised me, scalded me, threatened me. For seventeen years […]”The Woman Who Walked Into Doors van Roddy Doyle is geen lachertje. Dat in tegenstelling tot de Barrytown-trilogie waar hij een jaar of vijftien geleden naam mee maakte. Ik leerde ‘m, net als zoveel andere mensen, kennen via The Commitments. Ik was destijds (in 1992?) behoorlijk wild van de film (en een jaar geleden vond ik ‘m nog steeds uitstekend), en heb me dan het boek aangeschaft, zo’n kleine gele Rainbow-pocket. Een vertaling dus. Wist ik veel dat het nu ook niet zo veel moeite kost om het origineel te lezen. Doyle schreef over gewone mensen met grootse plannen, beschikte over tonnen humor, maar vooral: hij wist als geen ander dialogen te schrijven. Erna ook deel twee (The Van) en drie (The Snapper) aangeschaft, en opnieuw weg van dat sappige Ierse Engels, de verhalen over allerhande losers uit een arbeidersmilieu, en hun pogingen om er het beste van te maken. In dat opzicht vertoonde z’n boeken overeenkomsten met zowel de sociaal-realistische films van volk als Ken Loach en Mike Leigh, als een serie die ik de voorbije jaren enorm graag heb gekeken: Shameless. Het is makkelijk om met dat soort “volkse” literatuur te gaan zitten schrijven op een dierentuin-toontje (”ziet ze lopen, ziet ze zuipen, ziet ze marginaal wezen met hun afgeprijsde en/of nagemaakte merkkledij en hun zelfgerolde sigaretten”), maar Doyle schreef duidelijk over een wereld die hij kende, in- en uitademde. Na de Barrytown-trilogie heb ik me nog Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993) aangeschaft, een boek dat zo mogelijk nog beter was dan de trilogie: serieuzer, maar ook gedurfder, en Doyle slaagde moeiteloos erin om te blijven boeien met een boek geschreven vanuit het perspectief van een tienjarige die de wereld rond hem probeert te begrijpen. Daarna ben ik Doyle (en zeker zijn boeken) een beetje uit het oog verloren, tot ik laatst een weekje doorbracht aan de andere kant van de Noordzee, en in een plaatselijke boekhandel The Woman Who Walked Into Doors (1996) in handen kreeg. Ik wist al dat de humor-factor in dit boek nog wat lager lag, niet verwonderlijk gezien het onderwerp (huiselijk geweld, zoals de titel al suggereert), maar ik had geen mokerslag van dit kaliber verwacht. Deze keer schrijft Doyle vanuit het perspectief van Paula Spencer, een negenendertigjarige kuisvrouw met vier kinderen en een drankprobleem, die op een ochtend te horen krijgt dat haar vent Charlo, die ze een jaar eerder het huis uitgooide, omgekomen is bij een misdaad. Tweehonderdtwintig pagina’s lang is zij aan het woord, en vertelt ze, verward, hortend en stotend, haar levensverhaal, en dan vooral haar huwelijk met Charlo, dat zo idyllisch begon als maar kon in hun lagere klasse-milieu, maar voor haar al snel uitdraaide op een nachtmerrie van zeventien jaar. Jaja, ook ik dacht dat dit eigenlijk even goed de “literaire” tegenhanger had kunnen zijn van het soort weekendfilm dat één vroeger (toen het nog BRT 1 heette) programmeerde op zaterdagavond (moeders ter lande joegen de mouchoirkes er met de dozen door), maar niets van dat. The Woman Who Walked Into Doors is een pure taalexplosie, een rauw-emotionele ontlading die hier en daar wat heeft van Chris Cleave’s Incendiary, maar veel beter gedoseerd is. Het maakt niet uit dat het Engels van Spencer vaak slordig is, dat ze zichzelf constant herhaalt, dat ze zo goed is in chaos. Het lijkt alsof het ritme en het register zich door het hele boek aanpast aan de gemoedstoestand, of de al dan niet nuchtere buien van de vrouw. Sommige hoofdstukken zijn rommelig en kort, andere zijn lucide en gestructureerd, en geven een inzicht op de tastbare en emotionele leefwereld van een vrouw wiens tanden en gevoel voor eigenwaarde er jaar na jaar uit werden geklopt. Ook geen all is well that ends well-verhaaltje dus, omdat Spencer, net als haar collega-slachtoffers, terechtkomt in een positie waar amper uit te ontsnappen valt, en het gewicht van het schuldgevoel constant met zich meedraagt: “He beat me brainless and I felt guilty. He left me without money and I was guilty. I wouldn’t let the kids in the kitchen after teatime, I couldn’t let them near the cornflakes – and I was to blame. They went wild, they went hungry and It was my fault. I couldn’t think. I could invent a family meal with an egg and four slices of stale bread but I couldn’t think properly. I couldn’t put a shape on anything. I kept falling apart.” Uiteindelijk slaagt ze er toch in om de geweldenaar het huis uit te krijgen, maar ook dat gebeurt natuurlijk niet zonder slag of stoot. Het boek had ondraaglijk hard en wrang kunnen zijn, maar dat was buiten de intelligentie van Doyle gerekend, die ook hier de nodige humor aanwendt om de lezer toch even het geweld te besparen. Het is een beetje een lullig, kapotgebruikt en hol woord geworden, maar The Woman Who Walked Into Doors is een aangrijpende roman geworden, menselijk en ontroerend, vol spijt, woede en onmacht, maar vooral ook de drang tot beterschap. Machtig. (****1/2)
I came to this book reluctantly. Another book club choice I hadn't made; didn't want to read about domestic violence in general or an abused woman in particular.But Roddy Doyle hooked me from the unexpected start, 'I was told by a Guard who came to the door. He wasn't one I'd seen before, one of the usual ones....I knew before he spoke. It clicked inside me when I opened the door. (For years opening that door scared the life out of me. I hated it; it terrified me)'.And straight away we are into the chaos of Paula Spencer's life, the news that her violent husband Charlo is dead, wild kids, fear. Then a flash to when Paula and Charlo meet, and their immediate intense sexual attraction to each other. Another flash to Paula on the floor, Charlo standing over her. '"You fell, he said"'. No she hadn't. He had knocked her down. Then a rapid fire introduction to Paula's family, the O'Leary's. Most sections are very short. Like flashes of memory. Some incidents just a picture, sometimes whole conversations recalled in detail as Paula and her sisters talk together. Gradually something like a full story emerges from the pieces Paula remembers as she tries to piece her life together again, a year after she finally threw the by-now monstrous Charlo out of the house. She tries to recreate a good life, but there was no good life with Charlo, not after the first exhilaration had passed. First excitement. then excitement and fear together. Then just terror. The acts of violence don't occupy much space in the book and Paula doesn't face up to the fundamental questions until near the end. These come down to: 1) Why didn't anybody in the hospitals she went to so many times ask her the questions that would have allowed her to tell the truth - she hadn't dislocated her arm or broken her jaw by falling down the stairs (again) or had a black eye because she walked into a door. The husband who accompanied her to hospital had done it. But nobody ever did.The doctors she saw never looked at her properly. They never looked her in the eye, never saw the whole of her. They smelt drink on her breath and that was that. 2 'Why did he do it? He loved me and he beat me. I loved him and i took it. ... You can't love someone one minute, then beat them, and then love them again once the blood has been washed off. I can't separate the two things, the love and the beatings. ... I can't make two Charlos . I can't separate him into the good and the bad. I take the good and the bad comes too'. Doyle has created a believable battered woman, driven to alcohol as a means of survival, grappling to understand her life. Somehow she remains strong, despite the black despair she lived in for so long.He has managed to speak in her voice throughout the book - difficult enough for a woman who has not known these desperate places herself, but quite extraordinary for a man. One of the reviewers quoted not eh back cover of the book clearly did not understand the hideous world of abuse and terror that Paula inhabited with Charlo. He (I presume it was a he) talked about 'the vulnerability and courage of a woman trapped in a loveless marriage'. Loveless marriage????? Come on. This was vicious, repeated criminal violence, carried out by a brutal man on the woman he professed to love, and she kept on loving him. Let's be honest and say a violent marriage.Doyle wrote this book about twenty years ago (first published 1996). The violence he wrote about then still exists, in all classes of society. Once can only hope that more women get the help they need than Paula and other beaten women did then, that more doctors and nurses see the whole person, and the police become more capable of dealing with domestic violence as criminal assault. I want to read more Doyle to see what else he has to say about desperate lives, and to read about him so I can understand more about what drives him as a writer. 'Paula Spencer' is a more recent sequel, set ten years later, when Paula has survived and has begun to stop drinking. I will read this. I won't however, go back to find the tv series of the Spencer Family which preceded 'The Woman who Walked into Doors'. The Spencers are so appalling, it is hard enough to confront them on the page when you can look away, go and do something else, not have to visualise too closely.
What do You think about The Woman Who Walked Into Doors (1997)?
This novel was a quick two-gulp read, as I “listened” to Paula Spencer nee O’Leary tell how she became a beaten wife and how she managed, somehow, to escape. Roddy Doyle has done a splendid job of creating speech that can be heard in one’s mind, and he makes Paula’s false starts, repetitions, digressions, profanities, and recollected conversations work together to produce what seems an honest, long series of confessions and confidences to herself, a friend, and a social worker/psychiatrist.There is little narrative thrust in a traditional sense, but as a reader I felt compelled to learn more and more about what had happened to Paula and how it came to be, and how she finally was able to get free. The novel begins with a Dublin policeman telling Paula that her estranged husband, with whom she has not lived for over a year, is dead. Her ability to absorb this is limited, as the news evokes memories that come flooding back, preventing her from asking more about the death itself. She later has to call the police station to find out the circumstances of her husband Charlo’s death, and then there are the news reports on the telly and in the paper.Again the memories come to fore, and Paula describes her boisterous, lovingly contentious family, her upbringing as a positive grammar schooler turned foul-mouthed upper schooler, the innocence of boy-girl activities, then her head-over-heels love for Charlo. The feeling is powerful and positive, enough to warrant alienating her da, who thereafter never speaks to her. These moments of reverie are broken by recalled recent conversations with her sisters, Denise and Carmel, the latter the eldest of the three, and the most negative about her recollections of what their upbringing had entailed. Paula wants to retain some positive glow about those early years, and she fears that Carmel does not, that she sometimes mis-remembers to bolster her negative vision. Paula little counts the possibility that she might be working the other side of the street. It is Carmel that eventually began to extricate Paula from Charlo’s influence, though only after more than 15 years of abuse...Paula recalls the positive first days of dating, of marriage, of family, then she recalls the first instant when she was hit, an echo of the same moment that is alluded to at the beginning of the book. There are many such echoes and reverberations, and they powerfully fulfill the need of the reader to see just how jumbled and chaotic the emotions and memories are, how powerfully they collided and colluded to muddle and confine Paula to Charlo. There’s the good and the bad, and the two become inseparable, and then, finally at the end of her tether, just before she explodes, there is nothing but a ceaseless repetitious constant muddle, the only thing keeping her from simply going under are her four children. She becomes an alcoholic during these bad years, and she knows that doctors and others excuse the injuries, scars, and bruises as being self-inflicted, self-earned, and she begins to hold onto this notion herself. There is a strong shame and guilt associated with the injuries: why? how? what did I do to earn these beatings? how can I please you to stop them? Visits to the doctor are shams, as Charlo always comes with her, and they roll out a story of confusion, clumsiness, and mishap. It is later in the marriage that she wishes someone might ask the right question so she can be honest, but no one does, not doctor, nurse, nor what few friends she has. Complicity lies behind the guilt; complicity of those near her—the doctors, friends, family, and even her children—who will not acknowledge that something is wrong, that Paula is in over her head.There is a lyricism even in this pain, and Paula is able to call up the moments when things are good, the moments when things are getting better, even the moments when it all seems to be too much, and she makes it seem an extraordinary thing, a powerful resurgence of life battered by evil. She finds out that her husband had killed a woman in a botched robbery, and that the police killed him when he tried to flee. She visits the site of the killing and robbery, and the imagines how it all might have taken place. It gives her no particular satisfaction, except as a way of further confirming there was something wrong with Charlo, not herself.The moment when Paula is able to take charge is sparked by a realization that Charlo is next going to inflict his hurtful evil on their 17-year-old daughter. She wallops him multiple times with a pan, and she continues to do so until he is forced, stumbling through the door and out past the gate. He never returns, and she is relieved not to have to deal with him, but as she has unfolded her story, we know that Paula’s still having difficulties with alcohol, that she works a peculiar split-day job as house- and office-cleaner, and that her older son didn’t understand the beating she gave Charlo and is now alienated and living on his own. Roddy Doyle’s ventriloquism rings very, very true. I had no difficulty picturing Paula Spencer and her plight, nor did her acquiescence to loving, beaten “enabler” seem a bizarre passage. Just enough specificity to make it real, just enough elision to allow for some empathetic imagination, and Paula Spencer came alive, real and pitiable and admirable all at once.
—Christian Schwoerke
"Mi nombre es Paula Spencer. Tengo treinta y nueve años. La semana pasada fue mi cumpleaños. Soy viuda. Estuve casada durante dieciocho años. Mi marido murió el año pasado... Lo mató la polícia. Hacía un año me había dejado. Yo lo eché de la casa. Su nombre era Charlo Spencer; todo el mundo lo llamaba Charlo." Ese fragmento de la novela puede resumir su contenido pero es lo sucedido en medio lo importante, aunque no existe un medio, no totalmente. Sus memorias se convierten en fragmentos dolorosos, saltan al pasado de su infancia, al pasado de su matrimonio, al presente que sólo la lleva a recordar. No hay pistas de un futuro.Paula no sólo intenta explicar su relación enfermiza con Charlo, sino que trata de justificar su vida, decirnos que hubo un tiempo en que era feliz y en que momento todo se fue al traste, poco a poco como jalada por una marea. Pero la forma de escribir de Doyle es tal que olvidas que es un hombre y te crees ante la biografía de una mujer que hace un recuento de una vida rota por "golpes de puerta".
—Valeria Sosa
“—God--; I’m sorry—" (45). **What a use of the semi-colon!“They laughed at girls fighting even though they were scared; girls fought to maim and kill. Girls didn’t box…Boys pretended; girls didn’t. Boys pretended that girls couldn’t fight and everybody believed them. I was a great fighter. Nobody cared” (49).“I wouldn’t have minded if he had pulled me behind a wall. But he didn’t. He respected me. He’d do that to me later” (53).“Fellas were like easy crosswords; you knew the answers before you finished the questions, and they usually weren’t worth doing” (53).“I watched her buttering the bread. She was the only person I ever knew who could manage butter straight from the fridge” (65).“I’m as well off with my hand and my imagination. Mind you, when you’ve seen what my hand does all day—wiping, scouring, cleaning other people’s bins and toilets—my imagination has its work cut out” (91).“She’s a pot-of-tea-before-I-say-boo-to-you woman. There’s always a pile of warm teabags in the sink when I come down, like what a horse would leave behind” (92).
—Katherine
