Oct 09, 2016 07:26 PM
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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.
