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“The Curfew”
by Roddy Doyle
from the December 2, 2019 issue of The New Yorker
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[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]R[/fusion_dropcap]oddy Doyle won the Man Booker Prize in 1993 for his novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. I remains one of the few winners from that time period that I have not read. I have read some of Doyle’s stories and my kids have read one or two of his children’s books. Alas, as I’m ignorant I’m also not particularly excited to read “The Curfew.” His stories that I’ve read have all tended to be very of the moment, meaning he uses news articles and current events to write timely pieces of fiction. That’s not usually what I want, though. This one appears to be similar. Here is the opening paragraph:
He was walking back up the street from the seafront when he looked up and saw the woman coming at him. He’d been watching the leaves. Ex-Hurricane Ophelia was heading toward Dublin and the leaves were blowing the wrong way. They were passing him, dashing by him, rolling up the hill. The curfew would be starting in half an hour. He’d been giving out about it earlier, before his wife left for work. Do they think there’s a civil war? It’s only a bit of weather. But, actually, he liked the drama of it. Even now, walking home—striding, he was striding, a man on a mission—he felt involved, ready, ahead of the coming catastrophe. It was doing him good. He was carrying drugs in a paper bag, but he felt like a man who didn’t need them. He’d already folded the garden chairs and put them away, he’d tucked the wheelie bins well in under the hedge. He’d put candles around the house, just in case. He’d done other stuff, too. He was all set.
That’s not bad by any means, but it’s not what I’m looking for right now. Perhaps I’m being cranky, so please don’t take my reticence as any indication on Doyle’s work. In fact, I’d love it if you’d let me know I’m missing something fantastic.
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A nice little story. The narrator encounters a curfew in his life. He’s become like his father. Like the weather, the curfew is not dramatic, but it’s there — potentially dangerous. It makes his sad — and afraid.
I hope someone can decipher the oddness of this story in their next comment. I am not sure. But to me, “The Curfew” is sort of a fractured fable that starts out maintaining that if one sensibly plans ahead against adversity in life, that one will survive. But there are slightly surrealisticly skewed images in one, the stuffed bear carried in a baby sling by a woman who doesn’t look like she could be a mother and two, the dead whale showing up on the beach ahead of a not entirely spent hurricane. It’s a slight story with hard to guess thematic nonconnections or ones that aren’t easily visible or understandable. My favorite lines are “She didn’t look like a mother” and “She didn’t look like my mother.” There is a chatty garrulous quality about trivial things as the man sorts through the fragments of his existence (which is nicely rendered). There is the threat of danger and somewhat of a promise, that if it is sensibly taken care of, one will be out of harm’s way. So the protagonist is a careful sensible guy who’s nervous about a lessening hurricane wreaking havoc on him. What he says doesn’t quite connect so that he seems an unreliable narrator whose natter chatter never really explains explains anything except maybe partially in how the story ends. A possible modernistic warping of this may be that you can take pills to curb cholesterol and lower blood pressure but silent heart disease can drop you dead at any moment like the whale dead on it’s back or flat on it’s stomach. Whales are huge mammals compared to us so do not ask who the dead whale tolls for, it tolls for thee, protagonist. And when he sees the dead whale, he thinks one of his daughters is dead but supposedly she is still alive. The irony is that the over time, one is born, raises four kids and then maybe loses the struggle to keep his life going. Dealing with the details of whatever comes along after the kids leave and the wife is there but all still seems to be unraveling. His is sort of an agitated mind, trying to deal with a not very helpful doctor who tells him not to worry though he is a quarter of a clogged artery away from certain sudden death. Usually unfeeling doctors are portrayed as male though maybe the modern woman is being helpful in a professionally detached antiseptic sort of way. So the not quite spent hurricane is besides the point. It is ironically sort of funny in an odd way how the epitome of rational thought contained in Medicine at times has no control over whether a person can survive or not despite its reputation. The protagonist we only see through his state of mind, which is pretty much the action of the story. The details are well observed but it is all a little strange. So it lacks impact. Some bad states of mind don’t resonate unless examined in novel or at least novella or longer short story length. But the simplicity of dialogue and detail give this story a brutal quaintness as though everything can very quickly go wrong arising out of somewhere from where it was least expected.
Wow, Larry, you’ve made the story seem more interesting and quirky than I found it. I’m more with William–this was pleasant, brief, and nicely done. I wouldn’t call it trivial–it deals with awareness of mortality, with parenting–but it’s sort of (in my mind) glanced over the way we skip around things in our mind, juxtaposing times/ideas/feelings as we go through our day. In some profound sense, this is perhaps life and how we live it. We worry a bit, recall things, have a humorous thought or two and sort of muddle through. At the end, though, this seemed almost a celebration of the quotidiian as his wife’s back and calm presence reassures the hero. I’d hardly call it “strange.”