Just finished reading: 'Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha' by Roddy Doyle

I read an interview with Roddy Doyle while I was reading 'Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha' where he said that he wanted people to come away from reading the novel with an emotional feeling of what the book was about rather than being able to precisely recall the exact events described. If that's true, it certainly worked on me. This novel has no plot, in the traditional sense, but is rather a string of loosely related events from the ten-year-old narrator's young life, which he recalls in a rather higglety-pigglety manner. This was a very brave way to write a novel and you have to credit Doyle with full marks for innovation. He also finds this child's voice very skilfully and there are times when you can almost believe that this book was written by a ten-year-old. The only thing that lets this book down, and it's only slightly, is that it becomes too jumbled in places and loses all sense of cohesion. I couldn't help but feel that the author was trying too hard in his quest for narrative disassociation at times, leaving the novel feeling a little bit frayed around the edges. This is a great shame, because it reduces the impact of the events that are unfolding, even for somebody like myself who also went through a parental break-up at a similar age to the protagonist of this novel. That's a reasonably minor quibble, however, and I'd certainly read more of Doyle's work in the future.