Two More Pints by Roddy Doyle review – two men sit in a pub …

If there's one thing Roddy Doyle does brilliantly, it's dialogue. All his novels – from the Man Booker-winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha through the Barrytown Trilogy (which includes The Commitments) to more recent work – have been liberally salted with speech, set out at such breathtaking speed that his characters don't even wait for inverted commas; different speakers are simply indicated by a new line and a dash.

By the time of his most recent novel, The Guts, the dialogue had swelled to take up the bulk of the book. Two More Pints follows the publication of Two Pints in 2011. These dialogues are the logical extended form for his ventriloquising skill. Almost Beckettian, stripped bare of setting and description, they might as well be issuing from two illuminated mouths speaking from a dark stage.

Rather than a stopgap between "proper" novels, the Pints are a different art form. The speakers, discussing the day's news, are male, married with children and grandchildren, and we assume they are sitting in a Dublin pub. Each conversation is dated for context, although subject matter is easily established in the first few lines: "Wha' d'yeh make of the photographs?" "Wha' photographs?" "Kate Middleton."

Wives are shadowy martinets well in the background; the children, and especially the grandchildren, are baffling, distant figures. Occasionally, a potentially interesting offstage character is mentioned – one of the men lives opposite "Continuity Carl", who has only one hand – but the world outside the pub is like the unmapped area in a computer game, only a notional space.

The overall lack of focus has a curious effect, one of hallucinating content. Rather like an optical illusion involving black grids on a white background, where we can't help "seeing" white spots at the intersections, it's hard to read dialogue without at least trying to envisage two separate individuals. Gradually, the impression builds that one speaker might be a kind of wily idiot a la Karl Pilkington, with the other his more sensible foil, but in truth they are interchangeable, or even legion: they could simply be avatars of Dublin itself.

Their topics range from the universal (Barack Obama, Man U, Bono) to the severely parochial (advertisements on Irish TV). One conversation begins, wonderfully: "See the spacer died." Astronomer Patrick Moore's demise spurs a discussion about the differences between the Irish and the English: "… if he'd been Irish, he'd just've said, So wha'? They're only fuckin' stars. There's no way it would've been the longest-runnin' programme in the history o' television if it'd been Irish." Indeed, the men's views on Ireland ("Our attitude is just shite") would not please Gerry Adams and his "Shinners". Thatcher and Adams come out as equally despicable here.

Thatcher apart, women are viewed with firm approval. Nigella is "a great young one"; Kate Middleton "a nice young one" (the Royals are a regular topic). International Women's Day prompts the men to consider women in power: "A woman in any sort of authority and you're fuckin' smitten." One of them still holds a torch for Benazir Bhutto ("gorgeous").

It might come as a surprise that two old men in a pub should be quite so politically correct, and not just where women are concerned, but these are the new young-old: sweary former punks, still with traces of their old ideals and radicalism. Life has made them cynical, occasionally even bitter ("Every fuckin' year I've lived has been crap"). They seem part mouthpiece for Doyle himself, part living social history. You imagine him spending a lot of time in pubs, eavesdropping.

Doyle must write these pieces mostly for his own entertainment: little scraps and sketches, almost diary jottings. It struck me they would make a terrific regular newspaper column, served up fresh, hot and topical. Though the references may have worn thin (who cares about the Middleton topless photos scandal now?), they are savagely funny, occasionally inspired, and almost poetic in their rhythm, speed and economy.

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