Something of a Hero: An Interview with Roddy Doyle - Interview

Literary Review, Summer, 1999 by Karen Sbrockey

Did you model Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha after your students, or after your own childhood?

I taught in a secondary school, which is the equivalent of high school. Kids from about twelve to eighteen. In fact, the only thing which I took--for want of a better verb--from my teaching experience was the episode where they played this game called Grand National. They have a horse race without horses, up the road, over fences and over walls and from one end of the road to the other. One of the few regrets of my life is that we never played that when I was a kid, and I'm too old now--really, too famous--to do it.

Basically, the inspiration came from my own childhood. Not the story, I'm glad to say. My parents are still happily married, and that's after forty-four years. When my first kid, Rory, was born (to whom the book is dedicated), I started thinking about my own childhood an awful lot. The book was just pure fiction. Father Damien and the lepers--I didn't have a fixation about leprosy. Or about Father Damien, as a kid. The only formal research I did was this book I found in my parents' attic. It was from one of my sister's convent schools. A library book that they never gave back. I took it home and read it, and I thought it was brilliant. Absolutely wonderful. I couldn't get over just how bad it was. I decided that this was Paddy Clarke's favorite book.

Any thoughts for a movie of Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha?

Not immediately, no. Because, barring accident, we're making The Van, my third book, into a film There'd be problems with the plot as well. It's not linear like my other books. It's very meandering. That, strictly speaking, isn't impossible, like Amarcord, my favorite movie, has no plot that I can see, which is one of the reasons why it's my favorite movie. But again, it takes a hell of a lot of writing and there's only one Fellini. And he's now dead, so there's no Fellini.

With Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha you wrote in first person and used a style, a kind of jumping around, the way kids' thoughts go. Was that hard to do?

Yeah, initially that took practice. I wanted a sort of a continuity, but sometimes at a sort of an unconscious level. The plot was to be there, but not too apparent at the beginning. So it took a lot of shuffling, some of it with chapters a bit towards the end that I brought forward, knitting the bits together in a way that adults wouldn't really think of doing, but that children would do. I didn't want the joints to be seen.

You also used first person narration for The Woman Who Walked Into Doors.

I wouldn't do it for every book, but I felt that a book about domestic violence was going to be a more powerful book if told from the point of view of the victim, and if the book could be somehow her exploration of what went wrong and what happened to her. And I just thought it would bring people much closer to the subject than if there was a witness, if there was a third person narrator. Also, in the case of the last two books with Paddy Clarke and Paula Spencer, part of the enjoyment is getting to know the characters as well as I possibly can.