The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 8 July 2008
by Roddy Doyle
Each successive generation has something to feel nostalgic for in its childhood. It changes from one generation to the next. Nowadays, there's a kind of ironic nostalgia for the 1970s. Maybe the 1980s. None of that sounds very long ago to this reader. This is how it goes. Still, there are certain constants. We can read a book about one person's childhood and there will be common themes, common experiences. Even if that person lived in a different time and place, we may yet sympathize strongly. How else to explain the endurance of Tom Sawyer after more than a century? This novel, a bouncing trip through an Irish childhood in the late 1960s, has the elements it needs to endure. The basic structure of childhood, the competitiveness, the mystery, and the everlasting puzzle of the behavior of grownups, all of these come together in this stirring tale. Patrick Clarke is a ten-year-old boy growing up in a suburban Irish community where fields are still being built over by new housing. The landscape of fields and ditches, old farms and building sites, is the world in which Paddy and his friends live. There, they play their games, from noisy soccer matches to sometimes cruel rituals. There, too, they try to unravel the mysterious ways in which their lives interact with the adults around them, from Ma and Da, to the mysterious cruelty of Henno, the schoolteacher. Paddy has a little brother, too, who is at the mercy of Paddy's cruelties. He also has two sisters, who are barely entities at all, living behind the veils of girlhood. Paddy's parents are tough, good-hearted people. His father is engaged in Paddy's upbringing, but there are storms brewing. Ma and Da engage in frequent whispering arguments that sometimes spill over to shouting and slamming doors. Their troubles don't make much sense to the kids, but the instability profoundly marks their world. Doyle's depiction of childhood, from Paddy's point of view, is immediate. There is vivid boyishness to the prose, its arbitrariness, chaos and random references. It reads like the first-person account of a little boy. There are many references that would be most familiar to someone who grew up in Ireland at the time, but there is that common thread, though, that holds the book together, and keeps the reader's attention. It's a book that looks likely to be read for many years to come.
(For this book, Doyle was awarded the Booker Prize in 1993.)