SOURCE: Hutchings, William. Review of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, by Roddy Doyle. World Literature Today 68, no. 4 (autumn 1994): 810-11.

In the following review, Hutchings praises Doyle's ability to invoke the narrative voice of a ten-year-old boy in Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and contends that Doyle skillfully renders Paddy's poverty-stricken childhood in Ireland.

“The past is a foreign country,” L. P. Hartley wrote in the opening line of The Go-Between (1953); “they do things differently there.” This observation applies not only to the collective or societal past but to the individual and psychological past as well: childhood remains—to a remarkable degree—an unexplored territory whose inhabitants have a culture comprising intricate customs and codes that are uniquely its own, seldom recorded or analyzed, usually forgotten in adulthood. Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, winner of the 1993 Booker Prize, is a child's-eye view of working-class life in Ireland...