The speaker here is Jimmy Rabbitte - the same Jimmy Rabbitte who was the young entrepreneurial manager in “The Commitments.” In the recession-clobbered Ireland of 2011, Jimmy is still in the music business, running a nostalgia-with-an-attitude website called. And no one captured its blunt poetry better than Doyle.Ī quarter of a century and many successful books later, Doyle still has an ear that many of the musicians he loves to write about would give their left lobe for: “She was wearin’ big mittens, on her hands, like, and these wine cooler yokes, padded tubes. “The Commitments” was part of a new wave in Irish fiction: For the first time, to use poet Harry Clifton’s term, the “urban voice” was making itself heard. The new musical version of “The Commitments” currently playing in London’s West End should be a reminder not only of Alan Parker’s 1991 soulful little-movie-that-could, but also of the significant source material for both those entertainments: Roddy Doyle’s debut novel, published in 1987.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |