The opening story in This Is the Ritual, the second book by the Dublin-born writer Rob Doyle, is a comic slaying of a herd of sacred cows. The narrator, also named Rob, finds himself on the ferry from Holyhead to Dublin with John-Paul Finnegan, a man he used to live with in London. Throughout the journey Finnegan outlines his problems with the world, with literature, with his native land. “When I think of Ireland,” he says in the first line of the story, “I think of a limitless ignorance.” The outlook gets no brighter as the ferry approaches Dublin Port. It’s a riotous story, full of snort-inducing phrases that cannot be reproduced in a family-friendly newspaper, but a serious undercurrent...
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