Roddy Doyle frequently returns in his novels to a childhood in the 1960s and 1970s on a housing estate in north Dublin: an unexceptionally dangerous place. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, which won the Booker Prize in 1993, unsentimentally presented the innocence and savagery of ten-year-old boys who communicate through violence with both enemies and friends, and collapse these categories: “They were our friends because we hated them; it was good to have them around.”
It’s a world where men show their love for each other through crackling verbal jousting – “slaggin’” – which can be a way of making light of widespread cruelty learned from adults at home and in school. In Paddy Clarke and The Woman Who Walked into Doors, we come across corrupt teachers who can easily set a child on a path to a ruined adulthood.
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