Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

Rating:
Summary: An incredible revisit to our childhood mind
Review: Paddy Clarke is 9 years old, the older brother of a whinylittle boy, and is on the brink of growing up. In PaddyClarke Ha Ha Ha, we are able to take a breathtakingly honest and personal glimpse into the mind of a normal 9 year old. Because he is normal, he is extraordinary. I recommend this book to everyone. It is truly incredible.

Rating:
Summary: A magical journey back to childhood
Review: By far one of the best books I have ever read, Roddy Doyle really takes you into the mind of Paddy Clarke, a young boy growing up in Barrytown in the 1960s. As we get older, we often forget how the world looks to young people, and Doyle has taken us back to relive it. All the doubts, fears, fun and games are there -- and the result of Doyle's prose and heartfelt descriptions of life for a ten-year-old whose world is falling apart is nothing short of magic. I highly recommend this book to anyone and everyone

Rating:
Summary: Irish childhood recorded!
Review: In "Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha", Roddy Doyle captures the Irish upbringing effortlessly. Having grown up in Ireland myself, the mischeivious little boys in the playground are images far too familiar for me, and Roddy Doyle manages to transmit the memories of most Irish people into text.

This novel is fantastic. Even without an Irish upbringing, the adventure and playfulness of childhood is resurrected for the audience. Roddy Doyle seems effortless in transforming his mindset into that of a 10 year old boys, and this is what makes the book so delightful. Roddy Doyle could even be called the Sue Townsend of the 1990s - though Paddy Clarkes experiences aren't recorded in diary form, the relationship between Paddy and the reader is equally as intimate as it was with Adrian Mole......this book is an adult version of Adrian Mole!

To Irish readers, or to readers of Irish decent, this book is a must-have as there are so many incidences to which the Irish reader can relate. However, the story is delightful, and though at times not a particularly easy read, Roddy Dolye keeps his audience captivated throughout and helps us remember just what a big wide world it is out there.......especially to a 10 year old boy!

Rating:
Summary: "childhood lived, not just recalled..."
Review: Roddy Doyle, whose novel, "The Commitments" was made into the famous hit movie in 1991, is one of those writers whose dialogue and observations put you in the protagonist's mind. In Paddy Clarke, that mind is one of a ten year old working class Irish boy. The winner of the Booker Prize, this little novel is sometimes wildly funny, poignant, and sometimes hard and frustrating at the same time. The author puts us into Paddy's head and we are given a better understanding of the thrill of the harmless pranks, the concern of the need to "fit in" with the bigger boys, the frustrations of trying to understand why your parents no longer get along, and the gradual awareness of both self and others. Many of the reviews of this book repeat the theme of a "childhood lived, not just recalled", and this is very accurate. This is not a book about an adult remembering the days, but an adult who has captured the voice of the child as he is experiencing his life every day. 

Rating:
Summary: Poor young Paddy Clarke
Review: Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is used as part of the GCSE curriculum in my school. I felt that, although this book is well written, it is over-appreciated, if you will.
The book lacks storyline, and, although it is written exactly for that, it does get tedious towards the hundred and fiftieth page where there is still no plot.
On the other hand, the book is incredibly nostalgic. It really is fantastic to read and then suddenly remeber similar childhood antics.
Also, the book is driven by the emotions felt by Paddy as his world changes, which is marvellous to find as this is the only factor that kept me reading all the way through.

Rating:
Summary: Edgy and funny
Review: When his novel "The Commitments" became a smash hit movie, Irish writer Roddy Doyle acquired a vast new American audience for that book and the two others (The Snapper; The Van) in his gritty and hilarious trilogy of Dublin working - or rather workless-class life.

Tragedy lies just the other side of wildest laughter in Doyle's first three novels. Each is characterized by lots of colorful, streetwise dialogue, fearlessly resourceful characters and loads of ironic wit.

This novel, winner of London's prestigious 1993 Booker Prize, is different.

Paddy Clarke is ten in 1968 and the narrative explores what that means in an almost stream-of-consciousness fashion. Paddy and his friends stage a Viking funeral for a dead rat, run the Grand National over the neighbors' hedged gardens, set fires at building sites, rob ladies' magazines (because they were the easiest) from shops, and torment each other, forming fluid alliances and watching for weaknesses. They are funny and frightening and unaware of both.

The early part of the book roams from hair-raising adventure to adventure, incorporating casual cruelties and unheeded dangers with equal aplomb. Family intrudes only as a framework, a background of sustenance and tiresome restraints. Sinbad, Paddy's younger brother, is a tag-along nuisance, tolerated primarily as a victim for experimentation, such as forcing a capsule of lighter fluid between his teeth and lighting it.

Paddy is full of life and contradictions; his mind is never still and, while full of wonder, not introspective. His rich fantasy life is more likely to be cruel than kind. He's as typical as any individual can be.

Then the ever-simmering tensions between his parents intensify. The mysterious fights, his mother's tears, his father's black moods, move into Paddy's life and begin to take it over. Not that Paddy abandons pick-up soccor games or schemes against the boys in the corporation houses. But he begins to see his little brother with new eyes - a person who can share the burden of fear and maybe help stop it from happening.

But Sinbad is uncooperative. Too young or too-long tormented by his older brother, he refuses to even listen. Paddy is left to turn the tide by himself. He stays awake all night because if he does it will stop them fighting; he watches them and interposes himself between them, learning how to turn their anger.

The last third of the book is filled with gut-wrenching uncertainty. The sense that anything can happen at any time keeps the reader on tenterhooks, no longer able to laugh but hopeful, like Paddy, that normality will return.

Doyle has created a masterful portrait of a boy - a child who observes so much more than adults expect but whose understanding is skewed by being a child. Paddy Clarke is funny, exuberant, unpredictable, subtle and heartbreaking.

Rating:
Summary: Wow! A modern masterpiece
Review: I had previously read The Commitments and thought I would give this one a go as well. I have to say that it's one of the best novels I've read in a long time, and I tend to be VERY picky. Roddy Doyle masterfully draws the reader in to the 10-year-old child's world. We feel what he feels, see what he sees. As I was reading, I couldn't help thinking that I felt and thought many of the same things that Patrick does when I was that age. The novel is at once heartbreaking and triumphant. A must-read!

Rating:
Summary: A+ for style, C- minus for subject
Review: One can't but help admiring Roddy Doyle's use of dialog and his tight control over the lengths of his passages to control the pace of the story. Doyle also uses no chapter divisions, jumps from anecdote to anecdote without strict regard to chronology, and stays tightly confined to the Dublin neighborhood of the protagonist. The effect is that beneath the childish and what seem to be trivial accounts of Paddy, there is an incredibly dense story with a colossal amount of detail.

However, for a country with as troubled a history and exciting a future as Ireland, I am truly puzzled why so many contemporary Irish writers tend to pick from a set list of, in my mind, soft topics. On the list of safe themes are progress coming to rural towns, the blue collar side of Dublin, changes to the blue collar side of Dublin, coming of age (marital problems are a must for exploiting this subject), or innocence lost. Paddy Clarke has the middle three. Unfortunately, none of these are uniquely Irish themes, and I for one get a little tired of rereading the same stories by different authors set in different places. You can find them even well outside the Anglophone world.

But I have to give Roddy Doyle some credit. These topics seem safe and seem to have an insatiable audience. He definitely won't have to worry about financial security.

Bottom line: This book is worth a read if you like to study what I like to call the architecture of a story. But I was so tired and bored with the subject matter that I found this easy read quite onerous. It's not a stretch to say that even with all the jumping around, the underlying story is pretty predictable. My rating would have been three stars, but I penalized Doyle one for squandering his stylistic originality.

Rating:
Summary: Lovely
Review: Roddy Doyle has created a beautifully lyrical account of a young Irish boy's maturation into adolescence. He manages to capture the inner life of a ten-year-old boy without reverting to sentimentality or allowing his narrative to descend into cuteness. The accuracy with which Doyle conveys Paddy's voice is perhaps the greatest achievement of the novel.

Despite the lovely prose, this is not a book that is easy to get into. It lacks a traditional plot or narrative structure, instead being composed of brief vignettes of Paddy's life at home and out with his friends. These episodes seem random and unconnected at first, but as they accumulate they gain emotional significance. Although I found the first third of the book to be distinctly un-touching, by the time I got to the end it was heartbreaking.

Doyle does a wonderfully subtle job of describing the gradual changes happening around Paddy, both in his home and in the town where he lives, and of describing the effect that these changes have on Paddy himself. He really manages to convey the feelings of confusion and powerlessness that Paddy experiences as he tries to make sense of his changing world and struggles futilely to hold on to the way things used to be.

This book is worth the work that it takes to get into it. I found it a very moving experience, and recommend it highly.