Paddy Clarke... Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle

 

Our Rating 3.5⭐s

289 Pages

First Published 1993

You can buy Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha...Here

You Can find out more about Roddy Doyle Here

• The Blurb...

Paddy Clarke is ten years old.

Paddy Clarke lights fires. Paddy Clarke's name is written in wet cement all over Barrytown. Paddy Clarke's heroes are Father Damien (and the lepers), Geronimo and George Best. Paddy Clarke knows the exact moment to knock a dead scab from his knee. Paddy Clarke hates his brother Francis because that’s the rule. Paddy Clarke loves his Ma and Da, but it seems like they don't love each other, and Paddy wants to understand, but can't.

• Our Review...

First of all what a great title. Unusual and sticks in the memory

Roddy Doyle was the author of the Commitments, the film about a rag-tag group of working class/unemployed youngsters who form a soul band. A wonderful film full of comedy and tragedy. This 1993 booker prize winning novel is again based in Dublin but I feel it didn't quite hit the heights of The Commitments.

The tale is told through the eyes of ten year old Paddy, and the author does an excellent job of putting on a ten year old's goggles and seeing the world through his lens. 

The novel is basically in two parts. The first part is Paddy's happy go lucky childhood in a pre PC world schoolyard friendships and escapades. I grew up in the seventies and can identify with the semi feral nature of growing up in that era, although Paddy's childhood may have even been more wild than mine. I never forced my brother to take a bite out of a burning lighter fluid-soaked twig, which burned his tongue and mouth, or hold a boy down and basically water board him with washing powder. There are a lot of anecdotes like these and they constantly jump to a new one and back to old ones. Often I couldn't tell where one ended and where the next began. It was jarring, like trying to read a kaleidoscope. 

The second half of the book improved greatly although the subject matter was a tough read on occasion. We see the collapse of his mother and fathers marriage, which descends into domestic abuse. through paddy's eyes and we feel the collapse of his world alongside. Quite heartbreaking in parts.

• Selected Quotes...

He used his belt. He didn’t wear a belt. He kept it just for this. The back of my legs. The outside of my hand that was trying to cover my legs. The arm that he held onto was sore for days after.

I still loved her smell. But she wasn’t cuddling us; she was hanging on to us.

David Geraghty was the fella with the polio. That was why there’d been no one sitting beside him. You had to help him with his school bag and there was a smell of medicine off him.

I saw a squashed rat. The marks of the tyre were on it. We tried to light it but it wouldn’t go.

The jellyfish was still floating there, like a runny umbrella.

.

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This Must Be The Place by Maggie O Farrell

 

Our Rating 3⭐s

401 pages 

Published 2016

You can find out more about Maggie O'Farrell here

• The Blurb...

A reclusive former film star living in the wilds of Ireland, Claudette Wells thinks nothing of firing a gun if strangers get too close to her house. Why is she so fiercely protective of her family, and what made her walk out on her career at the height of her fame?

Her husband Daniel, reeling from a discovery about a woman he last saw twenty years ago, is about to make an exit of his own. It is a journey that will send him off-course, far from home. Will his love for Claudette be enough to bring him back?

This Must Be The Place crosses continents and time zones, creating a portrait of an extraordinary marriage, the forces that hold it together and the pressures that drive it apart.

• Our Review...

Full disclosure, this was a buddy read with my daughter who loved Hamnet. 

The characters are all fully developed and all have a hinterland that drives them. This book is about love and death and loyalty and missed chances. All life is here. It is a complex novel in that there are numerous characters and zigg-zagging timelines for most of the main ones. 

I must admit I am not a fan of literary fiction. It feels to me like reading a tv soap opera. I just dont get the point. Describing someones life is, well just a bit....boring. I love a murder, a denuemont, and arrest and an end point. That said this a fine example of writing. The ups downs of Daniel and Claudettes love life tug on the heartstrings and there are moments of comedy. Maggie O Farrell does have a wonderful way of writing about real life. She has depth and warmth and a wonderful turn of phrase as can been by our selected quotes.  But I think that's my problem. I dont want to read about real life. I read to escape real life. Its not that the author or book is not for me I think the issue is that the genre is not for me. I love to read about The Godfather, or Emporer Claudius or George Smiley. I have seen numerous reviews that gave this book 5 stars and my daughter loved the book. Its just not my jam. 

• Selected Quotes...

Here is what my brother smells of: paper, computers, cotton, emollient, toast, soap substitute, herbal tea, windowless rooms. My brother smells of hard work. My brother smells of intelligence, of all-nighters, of education, of dedication and sometimes, I think, loneliness.

On the surface I am one thing but underneath I am riddled with holes and caverns, like a limestone landscape.

The groom will rarely look at the photographs and, when he does, will be struck most by how many of the guests – considered, at the time, to be crucial presences in his life – he no longer

Spry’ is the word used for people of her age, isn’t it? Horrible word, Rosalind reflects, like a mixture of ‘spray’ and ‘why’.

When Todd and Suki heard that an American exchange student was being billeted in the vacant room in the eaves of their graduate flat, they were not pleased. They pictured a toothy type with trainers and V-necks and white socks. They pictured someone who might, of all things, attend church. Americans were religious, weren’t they? He would have hotdog-scented breath, a penchant for soft rock and a backpack full of college sweatshirts. He would want to join fraternities.

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