Doyle’s melting pot is a colorful Irish stew

In some language somewhere, there may be a more likable serious writer than Roddy Doyle, but you’d have to prove it to me.

Since 1987, when he published “The Commitments” -- the first volume in his so-called Barrytown Trilogy -- the 49-year-old former schoolteacher from hardscrabble north-of-the-Liffey Dublin has written seven more novels, a work of nonfiction, three plays, screenplays and a trio of superb children’s books. His 1993 novel, “Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha,” remains the most commercially successful Man Booker Prize winner ever.

“The Deportees and Other Stories” is his first collection of short fiction. While there are some rough moments here -- owing mainly to the unusual way in which these stories were composed -- the book confirms Doyle’s standing as a rare genius of socially conscious literary comedy and a master of exposition through dialogue.

Doyle, who has lived and worked all his life on Dublin’s tough north side, is also a keen observer of the new Ireland, and that’s what these stories are all about -- or at least one aspect of it, immigration. As recently as the 1980s, Ireland’s real exports to the world were its writing and its people. Today, the writing competes in an increasingly crowded field, and the country itself relies increasingly on immigrant labor to feed the appetite of an economy so robust it’s been called “the Celtic Tiger.”

Ireland, where the characters in Doyle’s early novels scratched for any sort of work, has enjoyed better-than-full employment for years now. The Irish growth rate, even though it has recently slowed, is Europe’s envy. Intel is the country’s biggest employer, and Microsoft, Dell and Apple are major presences, along with all the leading international biotech companies. (One Irish facility is the world’s leading producer of Viagra, which led writer and critic John Banville to remark to me not long ago that the country “now exports software and hardware.”)

A record number of Irish people are working, a stunning percentage of them in high-paying fields, like information and financial services and biotech. Legal immigration allows more than 11,000 foreign workers from Eastern Europe, Spain, Portugal and Asia to enter the country annually and, according to the government, nearly all find work. Illegal immigration is a growing issue, particularly on Dublin’s north side, where disadvantaged newcomers tend to cluster. Go onto a construction site and the language you’ll hear is likely to be Spanish or Polish. The fellows working the back-bars in Dublin’s historic pubs, like McDaid’s, Neary’s or the Long Bar, are likely to be Chinese.

It isn’t just a Dublin phenomenon, though. Not long ago, after dropping someone off at Cork Airport, I found myself driving west along Ireland’s southern coast, to the house where my family spends holidays. There’s a supermarket right alongside the main road in the West Cork village of Clonakilty -- Michael Collins’ hometown -- and I stopped to pick up a few things. At the checkout counter, the clerk spoke to me in an unfamiliar accent, and I asked where she was from. “Lithuania,” she replied. “We’re all from Lithuania,” she said gesturing to the six or so checkout clerks, “except Irina. She’s from Ukraine.”

According to Ireland’s most recent census data, immigrants now are 10% of the population, and the city of Limerick would have lost population had it not been for an influx of Eastern Europeans.

The eight stories in Doyle’s new collection begin with a similar conceit: What happens when a particular Irish person meets one of these newcomers? As Doyle writes in his introduction:

“Maybe it was ‘Riverdance.’ A bootleg video did the rounds of the rooms and shanties of Lagos and, moved to froth by the sight of that long, straight line of Irish and Irish-American legs -- tap-tap-tap, tappy-tap -- thousands of Nigerians packed the bags and came to Ireland. Please. Teach us how to do to that.

“I suspect it was more complicated. It was about jobs and the E.U., and infrastructure and wise decisions, and accident. It was about education and energy, and words like ‘tax’ and ‘incentive,’ and what happens when they are put beside each other. It was also about music and dancing and literature and football. It happened, I think, some time in the mid-90s. I went to bed in one country and woke up in a different one.”

When he did wake up, he discovered that two immigrant Nigerian journalists had started publishing a paper called Metro Eireann -- then a monthly, now a weekly. Doyle met them, offered his services and began contributing an 800-word installment of fiction to each issue. The stories collected in “Deportees” are the result. The first, “Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner,” is the story of Larry Linnane, who “liked having daughters,” which was good because, at 50, he had four of them -- “fine, big, good-looking women and in no hurry to leave home, and that suited Larry just fine. Because they spoilt him crooked. . . .

-- Would you like a biscuit with that cuppa, Da?

-- Lovely.

-- There’s only plain ones left.

-- Not to worry, said Larry. -- I’ll manage. Give us two, though, love. To make up for the chocolate.”

So it went, “until Stephanie brought home the black fella.” Much misunderstanding, a good bit of it heartful, some of it moving, ensues as the story goes to a conclusion both believable and satisfying in Doyle’s hands.

In the title story, Doyle revives an old familiar character, Jimmy Rabbitte, the young band manager and music promoter who was the protagonist in “The Commitments” and whose poor and wildly comedic dysfunctional family fleshed out the Barrytown Trilogy. Now middle-aged and with a sprawling brood of his own, Jimmy -- to the horror of his loving but perennially pregnant wife, Aoife -- decides to reenter the music business by putting together a band comprised entirely of nonwhite immigrants who hate the Corrs. The name the Deportees comes from the famous Woody Guthrie ballad, and Jimmy plans to have the group perform covers of the activist American folk singer’s work. As can be expected, much that is unprintably profane -- at least here -- and very funny ensues.

“The Pram” is something new for Doyle, a story that reminds us that Bram Stoker and Sheridan Le Fanu spawned the gothic novel in Dublin. In this case, Alina, a lonely and unhappy Polish nanny who loves the infant for whom she cares, tries to control the baby’s unpleasant sisters with scary stories, then responds to her mistreatment by the parents with a terrible revenge.

In another darkly comedic piece, “57% Irish,” a civil servant is commissioned to devise a test that measures immigrants’ assimilation by gauging their response to Irish pop cultural icons -- such as Robbie Keane’s last-minute goal against Germany in the 2002 World Cup and the singing of, God help us, “Danny Boy.”

Doyle’s mastery of ordinary Dubliners’ speech informs all these stories and lends them an urgent credibility. As our own electoral debate over immigration seems to gain force, it’s worth noting that, at the end of the day, these stories seem to find in the lives of their very real protagonists as much friendship and reconciliation as pain.

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com