The Barrytown Trilogy

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Jimmy Rabbitte, just a tick out of school, gets a brilliant idea: to put a soul band together in Barrytown, his slum home in north Dublin. It was a great reading to me because it shows Dublin and its people as they are, their culture, language, problems and difficulties as well. When he is nice and thoughtful, you as the reader feel like you've been treated to the Choc-Ice yourself (Or one of those Tina Turner drinks, wha' are they? is the real hero of these novels - Doyle gives him a tough exterior but it is clear almost immediately that Jimmy Sr.

A few remarkable and lovable characters in there, but I felt like I was reading a 150 pages long short story. The Snapper looks at the events surrounding 20 year old Sharon's pregnancy and the resulting effect on her family. The adaptation was originally planned as a television film, as an episode of the British television anthology drama series Screen Two, before Frears suggested that it be transferred to film.The film also stars Ger Ryan, Rúaidhrí Conroy, Brendan O'Carroll, Stuart Dunne, Marie Mullen, and Jon Kenny. The focus of these two is on the Rabbitte family as a whole, whereas The Commitments only featured Jimmy Jr. When Jimmy Jr hands him a fiver he is both delighted and appalled, he wants to hug him and bury him. They also were just challenging enough to make the reader have to think about how the characters ended up where they were. I was recommended this by an Irish friend and I think you have to have be or have an Irish streak to really enjoy it.

I also loved the touching, and generally very funny, scenes between Jimmy and his sons which we hadn't really got to see in the other books. In the third novel, he has moved out of home and is living with his girlfriend, Aoife but still makes frequent visits home. I stumbled on this trilogy by accident and, unlike the film, it was though I came in at the beginning. Especially The Snapper which took on Sharon's encounter with the father of the sanpper as rape, which was and still is today it seems, seen by many as her own fault for being too drunk to say no.Each character is recognizable and endearing in their own right, even in questionable decision making. And his friend Bimbo after they are made redundant and they set up a chip van during the madness that was Italia 90 (the high point in Irish football). To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. has for his family, along with the warmth of his interactions, was a bright light in an otherwise subdued narrative.