BECAUSE of its first-person narration, Roddy Doyle found the writing of his new novel, The Woman Who Walked into Doors, particularly difficult.
"Paddy Clarke was the first book I wrote in the first person," he says in the latest issue of The Bookseller. "It was a big problem finding a rhythm, feeling at home with the character. It took me a year and a half to write that book, if I remember correctly, and probably about half that time I wasn't really writing all that much: I was just exploring the limits of this kid's vocabulary and interests."
The problem with the new book, which takes up the story of Paula from his television series, Family, was "much bigger. At least I used to be a ten-year-old boy, but I've never been a 39-year-old woman, never had first-hand experience of violence in the home, and I'm not an alcoholic. All these things left me at a certain distance from her."
The novel, due out from Cape on April 11th, took him two years to write, "and it was well into the second year before something clicked and I realised that there was definitely a book there - I could write a page without wondering if this was the way this woman would speak."
He didn't do any research for the television series: "I just allowed my guts to decide what seemed to be right. But I read a lot of case studies as I was writing the novel, to surround myself with information. And I've always read a lot of women's fiction, which was a big help."
He embarked on the novel because when he was finishing the television series he realised that the wife "was a good deal more interesting than her husband and that there was a lot more she could say". He wanted to convey "the impression of Paula's isolation . . . She's completely addled, because her sense of her worth and of her entire being have been beaten out of her."
One of the criticisms of Family, he says, was "that it implied that only the working classes have problems with drink and violence. That's an easy accusation to shake off. I find the criticism I get quite amusing at times. I've done two plays here in Dublin - the first was torn apart by a reviewer, and the second was torn apart by the same reviewer, who began by saying After the hilarity of Brown Bread, this is a major disappointment.' So these things don't preoccupy me too much."
JAMES HAWES spent the early years of his life in Gloucestershire. Edinburgh and Shropshire, and graduated from Oxford in 1982 before finally taking up a post as lecturer in German at Maynooth. That was in 1989, and in the earlier years of that decade he had variously been unemployed, an English teacher in Spain, a busker, a computer salesman, an archaeologist and a temp.
It was while he was "drifting in the shadowlands of temping hell" in London that he thought up a brilliant way of making a million pounds. This involved recruiting a bunch of slackers, procuring a couple of cap guns, utilising a particular telephone number and then stealing the money from a bank. All quite illegal, of course, not to mention risky, which is perhaps why he decided to write about it instead.
The result is his first novel, A White Merc with Fins (Cape), which he has been promoting in Dublin this week. He's hoping (that it will make him almost as much money as his robbery wheeze, and certainly the omens are good - already this comic caper has been sold to ten countries, and the film rights are currently under auction.
The 35-year-old now lives in Swansea with his Welsh wife and teaches German at the university there, but he has vivid memories of his time in Ireland - not least of being in a Kildare pub during the 1990 World Cup and finding that the only people cheering the England team were himself and a Sinn Fein activist whose sister was married to an English policeman. He's also proud of having picked up from his Irish friends the fine art of begrudgery, but hopes that no-one will begrudge him his wish for literary and commercial success.
HAWES has a little way to go, though, before he achieves the dizzying success of Maeve Binchy. Her novel The Glass Lake was published in paperback last June and between then and the end of December, according to a list released by the book trade in Britain, 979,405 copies of it were bought, resulting in gross sales of 5,866,636.
This made the Irish book the second biggest-selling paperback of 1995, beaten only by John Grisham's The Chamber, which had sales of 1,130,533 for a gross of 6,771,893. However, Grisham's higher sales can be accounted for by the fact that his book was published in April, giving it an extra couple of months in the shops.
Anyway, even if technically pipped by Grisham, Maeve's sales outstripped those of the other writers in the Top Ten, who are (in descending order) Frederick Forsyth, Tom Clancy, Catherine Cookson, Patricia Cornwell, Dick Francis, Sidney Sheldon, Stephen King and Danielle Steel.
Oh, I almost forgot the Irish writer also makes it to 66th place in the Top 100 with Circle of Friends. However, as this sold a mere 148,186 copies (resulting in a paltry gross of 887,634) it probably isn't worth mentioning.