Sometimes Da didn’t need reasons he had his mood already. In my mind, the section of the book that is dedicated to this storyline was stronger than the somewhat rambling nature of the rest.īut it took two to tango. At the beginning of the book, Paddy’s little brother, Sinbad, is able to pretend that there’s nothing wrong, but by the end, there’s no pretending anymore. They fight, increasingly often, increasingly loudly. Interspersed amongst Paddy’s adventures and fights is a more serious story line, that of the crumbling marriage of his parents. Paddy’s perspective seems spot on to me, though I’ve never been a small boy. Most of the book is little bits like this, short vignettes about Paddy’s adventures with his friends. If you made a good confession right before you died you didn’t have to go to Purgatory at all you went straight up to heaven. Four million years for Football Monthly, two million for Goal and Football Weekly. Robbing stuff out of shops was worse: magazines were more serious than sweets. Telling lies to your parents, cursing, taking the Lord’s name in vain – they were all a million years. It was about a million years for every venial sin, depending on the sin and if you’d done it before and promised that you wouldn’t do it again. Purgatory was like hell but it didn’t go on forever. Before you got into heaven you usually had to go to Purgatory for a bit, to get rid of the sins on your soul, usually for a few million years. You went to hell if you had a mortal sin on your soul when you died, even if you were on your way to confession when the lorry hit you. We went to heaven, unless we went to hell.

Vikings went to Valhalla when they died or they got killed. When Indians died – Red ones – they went to the happy hunting ground. The book is told in Paddy’s voice, and Roddy Doyle captures the confusion and attempts to make sense of the world that go along with being 10, suppositions and extrapolations that children make. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is the story of a ten-year-old Irish boy in 1968.

Paddy clarke ha ha