SOURCE: Shone, Tom. “What It's Like to Be Ten—Brilliant.” Spectator 270, no. 8605 (12 June 1993): 48-9.

In the following review, Shone compliments Doyle's economy of detail and the balance of humor and humanity in Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.

Have you heard the one about the Irish novelist who was so good for a laugh nobody could take him seriously? He wrote a novel which covered the holocaust, the second world war, heaven, hell and the struggle for Irish independence—and all that by page 30. I'm sorry, bad joke. All these subjects are not the themes of Roddy Doyle's new novel, rather, they're the homework (‘eccer’) of its ten-year-old narrator—which says a lot about Doyle's attitude to the sort of thematic lumber which bolsters your average Booker winner.

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha plunges the reader into the life of young Dubliner Paddy Clarke—born in 1958, as was Doyle...