Paddy Clarke, Ha-Ha-Ha by Roddy Doyle
"Paddy Clarke, Ha-Ha-Ha" is a novel by Roddy Doyle that explores the life of a ten-year-old boy named Paddy Clarke, growing up in the north-side Dublin suburb of Barrytown. The narrative is rich with Irish colloquialisms and captures the authentic voice of its young protagonist as he navigates the complexities of childhood against the backdrop of a deteriorating family life. The novel has drawn comparisons to classic coming-of-age stories, showcasing Paddy's adventures with his friends and his struggles with the adult issues unfolding within his family, particularly the troubling dynamics between his parents.
Paddy, who takes pride in being the eldest son, demonstrates a mix of bravado and vulnerability as he interacts with his younger siblings and peers. The excitement and danger of their environment—filled with construction sites and urban decay—provide a thrilling yet hazardous playground for Paddy and his friends. As the narrative progresses, Paddy's awareness of his family’s conflicts deepens, leading him to take imaginative and courageous actions in an attempt to restore harmony at home. Unlike other iconic literary figures who seek new horizons, Paddy remains in Barrytown, facing the realities of his life and the impending absence of his father, making his journey both poignant and relatable. This novel resonates with themes of resilience, childhood innocence, and the complexities of growing up in a challenging environment.
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Paddy Clarke, Ha-Ha-Ha by Roddy Doyle
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1993
Type of work: Novel
The Work
Both the attention to the depiction of Irish characters and to contemporary Irish colloquialisms and north-side Dublin dialect are suggested in the title of Doyle’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel Paddy Clarke, Ha-Ha-Ha. The novel has been justifiably and favorably compared to numerous bildungsromans, or coming-of-age novels, including Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914-1915, serial; 1916, book), and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Paddy Clarke, Ha-Ha-Ha indeed shows some of the struggles of the title character as he tries to have fun as a young boy, even as the circumstances of his family and his neighborhood cause him to grapple with some adult-sized issues and problems. Paddy is proud of his status as an oldest son, and he is characteristically condescending to his younger brother, Sinbad, and his two baby sisters.
As lower-middle-class suburban sprawl moves northward from Dublin, new treeless housing subdivisions under construction provide a dangerous but thrilling landscape for Paddy and his hooligan friends, Aidan, Liam, and Kevin. They terrorize the younger kids in the neighborhood, perform acrobatic feats of boyhood heroism on slag piles of discarded cement, and even create mock-Viking funeral rites for dead rats among the construction rubble. Doyle’s narrative voice, channeled through the ten-year-old consciousness of Paddy, is authentic and unsentimental. Given the almost clichéd renderings of Paddy’s existence—poverty, crime, deteriorating family situation, and a lack of positive role models—the novel could have become sentimental or trite, but it does not because Paddy never feels sorry for himself but simply exerts his make-do Irish spirit on his situation.
As the novel proceeds and Paddy becomes aware of the demise of his parents’ relationship in a way that his younger siblings cannot, he exerts his will in a manner that seems especially suited to a headstrong ten-year-old boy. After he has become disturbingly accustomed to the nightly, lengthy arguments between his parents, which he can hear with clarity even though he is two closed doors away, he decides to stay up all night and to repeat, quietly but insistently, the simple whispered word “stop” in order to quell his parents’ arguments and to return the household to some state of repose and assumed peace. Like many of the characters whom Doyle created in the Barrytown trilogy, Paddy Clarke continues in the tradition of the indefatigable picaro, who will seek creative and nonconformist solutions to problems that are likely never to be solved or corrected—which makes young Paddy’s attempt all the more gallant yet still believable.
Unlike Huck Finn, who happily set out for the American frontier at the end of his novel, or young Stephen Daedalus, who in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man chose to leave Ireland for Paris in order to seek his destiny as a writer, Paddy Clarke remains in Barrytown at the end of Doyle’s novel. It is his father, not Paddy, who leaves quietly. Paddy knows instinctively that his father will not return, and the other children in the neighborhood taunt him as the language of the novel’s title is reprised in anonymous dialogue near the end of the text.
Sources for Further Study
Booklist. XC, December 15, 1993, p.722.
Boston Globe. December 19, 1993, p.32.
Chicago Tribune. December 12, 1993, XIV, p.1.
The Christian Science Monitor. February 2, 1994, p.15.
Los Angeles Times. December 31, 1993, p. E4.
New Statesman and Society. VI, June 18, 1993, p.39.
The New York Review of Books. XLI, February 3, 1994, p.3.
The New York Times Book Review. XCIX, January 2, 1994, p.1.
Publishers Weekly. CCXL, November 15, 1993, p.72.
Time. CXLII, December 6, 1993, p.82.
The Times Literary Supplement. June 11, 1993, p.21.
The Washington Post. December 17, 1993, p. C3.