SOURCE: O'Hagan, Andrew. “Eating Jesus.” London Review of Books 15, no. 13 (8 July 1993): 17.

In the following review, O'Hagan reflects on the parallels between his own childhood and the fictitious childhood of Paddy Clarke in Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, complimenting Doyle's ability to realistically narrate the novel from a ten-year-old's perspective.

When I made my First Communion, a famously bitter Catholic aunt of mine took me into a side-chapel of our church. She wrapped me up in her arms, right in the middle of all her perfumery, straightened my red sash, and told me I was ‘blessed, blessed, blessed’. Then out of her bag she handed me a wooden crucifix with a luminous lime-green Christ glued onto it. ‘It's from The Grotto,’ she whispered. ‘Keep it beside you.’

I always did keep it beside me, as it turned out. It glowed for years on my bedroom wall between the Communion...