Review of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

                                           

Some months back, I reviewed James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, and in this post, I wish to review Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. The reason I am comparing these two novels is that I believe that despite the latter’s criticism of Joyce’s being vastly overrated, Doyle himself has been influenced by the master in no less a technique than that of stream of consciousness which he uses in such a skilled way as to bring us into the thoughts, feelings and observations of a young boy.  Paddy Clarke, our protagonist, is a boy who just turns ten years of age during this short novel.  He is not just telling us his story; he is the story.  Narrator and text are wonderfully intertwined here.

In other books like Portofino (1992) by Frank Schaeffer, Here, Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.D. Salinger, Here and The Kite Runner (2003) by Khalid Hosseini, Here all of which I have reviewed in these posts, the protagonists are adolescents or at least on the cusp of the teenage years.  Doyle wishes to capture the mind of a ten-year-old who just is not as full of angst as the adolescent protagonists, but his more objective descriptions of his life reveal an underlying anxiety of which he is becoming more and more aware as the novel progresses. Paddy Clarke is not telling us his story with hindsight, but rather as it is evolving – very Joycean indeed. Therefore, it is an amazing achievement on the part of Roddy Doyle to be able to describe things from the viewpoint of a ten-year-old without overplaying the young boy’s insight into his own thoughts and feelings, which the author allows to gradually dawn on the protagonist.  The novel is set in the fictional north Dublin suburb of Barrytown.

The start of A Portrait goes as follows:

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo …

These are the cooing baby-talk words Stephen Dedalus apparently remembers his father saying to him through the glass of an incubator when he was sick in hospital.  Compare this to the opening of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha:

We were coming down our road. Kevin stopped at the gate and bashed it with a stick. It was Missis Quigley's gate; she was always looking out of her window, but she never did anything. (p. 1)

It is clear that we are in the presence of children from the very beginning, and the boy-narrator tells us that “it would be brilliant, wouldn’t it?” to have a dead mother like their friends Liam and Aidan.  The novel progresses along these lines, again in stream-of-consciousness format, as we become witnesses to the actions, bad behaviour, thoughts and feelings of a wild ten-year-old boy.  Doyle sets the novel in 1968, giving 1958 as Paddy Clarke’s birth year, the same as that of Roddy Doyle and of the present writer of these thoughts.  

The author has stressed that this novel is in no way autobiographical.  However, Doyle has rigorously researched this era, as well as being blessed with a good memory. I recall eating all the sweets (candy) mentioned in the book myself when I was 10 years old. His favourite biscuits are broken biscuits, which he buys by weight in a brown paper bag.  The currency in 1968 was the Irish version of Sterling, pounds, shillings and pence, and the coins associated with it are mentioned from time to time.   Paddy and his friends play on building sites, and most especially, they can clamber into huge concrete sewage pipes that lie on those sites.  Those pipes provide a mysterious and secret world for the young boys to play in.  At school, too, things can get rough enough as corporal punishment was still allowed in those days: “She gave me three on each hand” was one punishment Paddy received for lying to the teacher (p. 22 – 23). He generally does not eat all his lunch, and he pushes the remains that are wrapped in silver paper into the compartment under the top of his desk daily. He tells us that when the smell becomes too nasty, he dumps them into the classroom bin at break time. In general, society is changing and progressing as new housing estates are ballooning in the still relatively poor Dublin of the late 1960s.  Things are also unexpectedly but noticeably changing in the young life of Paddy Clarke.

The boys get up to every trick from physically clowning around with each other: “We had a fight, just pushing.  Liam missed my shoulder and punched my ear and it stung, so he had to let me hit him in the ear back.  He put his hands in his pockets so he wouldn’t try to stop me.” (p. 8) These often-violent games with his friends also feature dead legs and Chinese burns.  Furthermore, Paddy torments, pushes and pulls his smaller brother Sinbad relentlessly.  Theirs is a love-hate relationship as is common among growing siblings.   The following quotation sums up at once this equally balanced love-hate, respect-envy relationship vividly:

I looked at Sinbad. He was just my little brother. I hated him. He never wiped his nose. He cried. He wet the bed. He got away with not eating his dinner. He had to wear specs with one black lens. He ran to get the ball. No one else did that. They all waited for it to come to them. He went through them all, no bother. He was brilliant. He wasn’t selfish like most fellas who could dribble. It was weird looking at him. (p. 35)

The book is a series of narrative fragments, told without context or apparent order, as we are brought into Paddy’s mind, which jumps from one subject to another with no discernible structure, order or pattern. The opening lines of each paragraph begin yet another seemingly unconnected adventure.  However, the dialogue is lively and authentically written to capture the speech of ten-year-olds in Dublin in 1968.  Again, the dialogue is extremely witty most of the time, only occasionally dark. The author is equally good at exploring the random joys of childhood, such as building forts or spinning around until you make yourself sick. Often, Paddy’s more serious and factual musings are expertly and hilariously rendered.

There are no chapters in this book at all, allowing a full range to the ten-year-old Paddy’s thoughts within the ambit of one year.  There is no developing plot as such, just a continuous stream-of-consciousness of the actions, feelings and perspectives of a boy of ten years.  Indeed, the lived experiential life of a ten-year-old would have no overarching structure anyway.  Doyle, in an interview in The Guardian after the book was published, stated: “I had no plot, just Paddy. I began to see things through his eyes. Adult hands were big, wrinkles were fascinating, ladders were great, disgusting was brilliant, grown-ups were often stupid.” However, the intuited plot is that of Paddy’s growing awareness of the breakdown of his mother’s and father’s marriage.  All of his behaviour, thoughts and feelings have been occasioned by this gradual awareness.  Doyle achieves this with consummate skill.  The reader must be attentive to see the gradual breakdown in Paddy’s parents’ relationship.  He gives us gradual hints along the way: a snapped newspaper, muffled shouting, his mother’s tears. Paddy begins to sense change occurring, and his anxiety grows.  At one late stage in the book, Paddy plans to run away, but only to try and draw his parents together again in their shared worry.  However, he never gets the opportunity. Because his little brother Francis, who goes by the moniker Sinbad, is so young, he really suspects nothing awry with his parents' relationship:

Sinbad didn’t notice the way I did.  There had to be shouts and screams and big gaps between them before he knew anything.  When it was quiet, it was fine; that was the way he thought…. I was alone, the only one who knew…. All I could do was listen and wish…. (p. 153 – 154)

Another strategy Paddy employs is staying awake and anxiously listening to his parents’ hushed arguments.  He stays awake for one long, painful and lonely night listening to the hushed, argumentative voices of his parents in the next room.  Sinbad just slept soundly and could not stay awake to ease his brother’s lonely vigil.  The next thing Paddy becomes aware of is waking, having been carried to the principal’s office, where he has slept soundly for several hours on two chairs “front to front to make a bed…. A blanket over me and something else, a coat.” (p. 237) This scene shows the deep understanding of both the class teacher and the headmaster with respect to the home situations of their young charges. 

Paddy’s childish attempts to keep his parents together – to make his mother laugh, to distract his father from anger – are heartbreakingly rendered by Doyle. He expertly captures that tragedy of family breakdown with a clarity and a lack of sentimentality that makes Paddy’s turmoil compelling and painful. He wonders, with tears in his eyes, about his parents’ relationship: “Why didn’t Da like Ma?  She liked him; it was him who didn’t like her.  What was wrong with her?” (p 257)

While this book is by turns funny and sad, light-hearted and painful, it certainly does not fit the category of light entertainment. In essence, it is a slow and painful lament for the death of childhood, albeit with a few funny bits.  At times, the book can be tedious as we are brought through a rather long string of seemingly unrelated memories.  Luckily, the subtle subtextual and gently insinuating plot of marriage breakdown wins the day.  The novel earned the Booker Prize in 1993.  It is a hard but rewarding read, even if it becomes a bit repetitive at times.  He ruefully informs us at the end that he “never got the chance to run away.  I was too late.  He left first.  The way he shut the door; he didn’t slam it.  Something; I just knew he wasn’t coming back.” (p. 280) One cannot fail to fall in love with the resilience shown by the lively but stoic protagonist who is Paddy Clarke.   All in all, a worthwhile and rewarding read.