Ren Duka is a fictional writer and the narrator of the fictional Ren Duka novels, an autofictive cycle recounting Duka’s adventures in, among other locales, the Islamic State caliphate, the Führerbunker, the Dublin literary scene, and communist China. Henry K Dillon is Duka’s fictional creation, a taxi driver and former writer, who cruises the streets of Dublin, dreaming of phantom lovers and pondering the creative act. (Parisian tour guide and shagger “Dirty Philippe” is another of Duka’s fictional creations.) Duka himself is the creation of “the author”, an anonymous writer based in Ireland. Dina Tatangelo is a fan of the Duka cycle, and the author of her own autofictive series about Zoe Zabarino, lover of heroin and occasional necrophiliac. Tommy Rhys Cunningham is the actor who played Ren Duka in the first three film adaptations, and who has been left a broken man after his life was destroyed by #MeToo allegations.
Rob Doyle (note the initials) is the creator and author of all the above. And with its bevy of narrators, its busload of personalities, his new novel sounds more confusing than it is. Cameo is, to attempt a tricky summary, the account of a publishing phenomenon, the story of the Ren Duka novels. In the manner of an academic study, the book proceeds as a summary and critique of each Ren Duka novel, listing the title and publication date, and summarising its composition, plot and themes. Doyle has a lot of fun with his competing European and US titles: Ren Duka’s Adolescence vs Duka Hardcore; Ren Duka in China vs Duka: Sino the Times. But it is a genuinely ingenious and, as far as I know, original format, allowing Doyle to flit through satires, parodies, burlesques and fancies, all while making space for something approaching “real” fiction.
It also allows him to live out the fantasy of being a world-famous writer. An important aspect of the Duka chronicle is extra-literary – the first Duka book, Ren Duka’s Seen a Few Things, is an unexpected literary hit, and after its publication, Duka assumes a cultural position somewhere between Karl Ove Knausgård and JK Rowling. Though there are a few duds – Ren Duka Gets Remaindered is, ironically, remaindered – the publication of a Duka novel becomes a public and political event. Over his career, Duka is adored by incels, feted by the Chinese Communist Party (they need his help to achieve hegemony in the fields of “fractal autobiography” and “quantum realism”) and intervenes in the climate debate, engaging with ecological accelerationism. There is a particularly topical section in which Duka dives into the culture wars, after discovering that he has distant Algerian ancestry (“‘I’m a fucking raghead,’ he exclaims in front of his laptop”). He attempts to use this to claim culture war clout (his “Hidden Brownness”) and is viciously cancelled, ending up, for a time, as a columnist for the anti-woke online magazine Pugilist.
If there is an extended Ren Duka universe, there is also a Rob Doyle one. The preoccupations of his other books – drugs, travel, a lust for the transcendental – are all back, as well as an indulgence for the kind of literary pornography that would make most contemporary authors queasy. I also recognised in the autobiography of “the author” many details from the autobiography in Doyle’s Autobibliography (again, it sounds more confusing than it is), and some of Doyle’s literary heroes bleed allusively into this text too. Ren Duka’s Honeymoon, set in Paris, abruptly breaks off into a Houellebecqian extended essay on sexual mores since the Sixties. And when he faces a critical backlash, Duka tells an interviewer from the Shanghai Daily, “Anyone who could hold a pen took a stab at me” (“Anyone who could hold a pen was having a go,” Martin Amis told the Guardian in 2010).
All of Doyle’s skills and virtues as a writer are on display here: his self-exposure, his interest in plumbing human depths, his instinct for a kind of comic-philosophical fiction, as comfortable with meditative aphorisms as it is with jagged riffs. But in this novel he’s also done something else: simultaneously surmounting and retiring a genre. The original intent of autofiction was to create a sense of “authenticity”, to reduce the artifice between writer and reader. By swamping this book with selves, Rob Doyle achieves something like the opposite, a suspension of belief, which allows the fiction to play even more freely.
Cameo
Rob Doyle
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 279pp, £20
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[Further reading: Julian Barnes departs on his own terms]
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This article appears in the 04 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Mandelson affair
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