“Whoi am Oi to be reiding the Nadoine Doirries noivel?” I asked me mammy when the commission came through. “Is is because Oi have disploised the Hoily Foither in some woi?” “No darling, don’t be silly, it’s because you’re a journalist,” said my mother. “And stop talking like that, you’re no more a Plain Person of Ireland than the MP for Mid Bedfordshire is.” Fortunately, the MP for Mid Bedfordshire has at least a dim and remote grasp of her limitations, because she doesn’t try to write the whole of The Four Streets – her debut novel, and may it long remain blessed in its singularity – in the tongue of her poor-but-honest, devout-yet-practical, low-but-proud cast of net-curtain bleaching Irish Catholic housewives and their Guinness drinking docker husbands in 1950s Liverpool.
There are lines of luminous green dialogue, of course. Lines like: “Jaysus, would yer so believe it not?” and, “That’ll be grand for the boxty bread.” But happily, Dorries generally restricts herself to telling rather than showing what her characters are thinking and doing, so we are spared too much of the shamrockese. For example, when the villainess of the piece, “haughty stuck up Protestant bitch” Alice, first appears, she is smiling secretly to herself over a funeral. This is because she is evil.
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