In one of the less visited corners of the literary landscape are to be found those children's books by writers who have established their reputations with their work for an adult readership. A more spacious corner than might initially be imagined, it accommodates, from the past, such diverse names as Mary Wollstonecraft, John Ruskin, T.S. Eliot and Graham Greene and, from contemporary times, Ted Hughes, Ian McEwen and Salman Rushdie. In Irish writing it is a tradition which embraces, among others, Oliver Goldsmith, Maria Edgeworth, Oscar Wilde, Edith Somerville, Louis MacNeice and Edna O'Brien. To such company must now be added the name of Roddy Doyle, with the appearance of his first novel for the young.
Readers of Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha may recall how at one point Paddy attempts to persuade his father to allow him to have a dog and how one of the objections raised relates to what the father calls the dog's "number twos". It is this same product, now named "poo", which assumes a significant role in The Giggler Treatment, even if early on we are assured that the story is really about the people who place the poo where certain adults will be forced to tread in it. These poo-placers are the elf-like "gigglers" of the title, while the adults in question are those guilty of mean-ness to children.
Since few children can resist the prospect of seeing their adult mentors discomfited, especially when the discomfiture involves a squelchy encounter with dog poo, it is easy to predict that this will be a popular book. But it is not merely a come-uppance story. Its cleverness lies in the fact that Mister Mack, the adult selected for giggler treatment, is not wholly deserving of it: there are mitigating circumstances concerning his alleged misdemeanours.
Accordingly, the narrative becomes an extended tease in which the reader, while watching the Mack shoe come closer to the poo pile, is simultaneously diverted into the world of the Mack family (the mother is Billie Jean Fleetwood Mack) and, most divertingly of all, of Rover, a dog of truly prodigious substance.
Elements of this teasing narrative game are seen also in the manner in which Doyle consciously (perhaps, ultimately, too consciously) involves the reader as active participant in the story. He does this, often with very humorous effect, by interspersing his third-person narrative with a series of imagined questions, answers and general exchanges between narrator and audience. His understanding of how a sceptical child might react to the unfolding events is extremely perceptive and there is much here for young readers to relish, particularly the snappy wit of the dialogue. The same sceptical child, however, might weary eventually of the trick whereby chapter titles are made to draw increasing attention to themselves.
When we reach the final chapter we are mischievously reminded that all good stories have messages and that this one has loads of them. But, as we should have expected, this is merely the prelude to a listing of six (or seven) "messages", which cumulatively subvert the whole notion of didactic intent: this, not least in a children's book, provides a very satisfactory conclusion.
If we insist on finding a "message" in writing such as this, it is simply the reminder that a combination of immediate readability, Pythonesque humour, verbal skill and (mildly) rude content can work wonderfully, particularly for readers in the senior primary age range. It may be, as his narrator somewhere suggests, that Doyle here is "only messing". If so, his book is none the worse for it.
Robert Dunbar lectures in English at the Church of Ireland College of Education, Dublin