After working on an enormous, never-published political satire entitled "Your Granny's a Hunger Striker" throughout the early 1980s, the native Dubliner decided to take on a shorter subject. Doyle and a friend formed a company called King Farouk and published
The Commitments privately in 1986. The book sold a mere one thousand copies until William Heinemann publishers expressed an interest in the text; as a result of this interest, Doyle's visibility increased substantially. The British publication led to a release in the United States, where Peggy Kaganoff of
Publishers Weekly hailed
The Commitments as a "cheeky first novel."
The Commitments also marked the beginning of Doyle's earthy, rough-and-tumble "Barrytown" trilogy, which focused on blue-collar life in contemporary Ireland. Barrytown--whose name the author once claimed to have borrowed from a Steely Dan song--is a fictional setting that bears a striking resemblance to Doyle's neighborhood in the suburbs of north Dublin. The Commitments tells the story of Jimmy Rabbitte who, smitten with the Motown sound, decides to form a soul band in Dublin. Reasoning that the Irish are the African-Americans of Europe, Rabbitte is hardly surprised when he is swamped with responses to his ad for band members.
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