Roddy Doyle on writing and revisiting Jimmy Rabbitte
The
man behind The Commitments,
Jimmy Rabbitte, is back. He’s 47 years old, a husband, a father of four, and
the founder of KelticPunk, an online business that locates old celtic bands
and re-energises, digitises and flogs their (often awful) back catalogues.
And as the title of Roddy Doyle’s forthcoming The Guts blackly alludes to, Jimmy also has
bowel cancer. The Irish author “didn’t want it to be a sequel, or anything
like that”, reasoning that “it would be pretty awful, I think, to bring [The
Commitments] all together”. Not that fans of Doyle’s 1986 novel will have
much to complain about: Rabbitte encounters two of the band’s number, Outspan
and Imelda, in The Guts; in Jimmy Jazz, an e-book short
released to coincide with the novel’s publication, Jimmy and Outspan attend a
Keith Jarrett concert with comic consequences; and in October, London’s
Palace Theatre will premiere a stage adaptation of The Commitments,
adapted by Doyle himself.
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