He’s very familiar with how his body forms and then drops away scabs, and he’s wedded that to bits of knowledge he’s picked up about blood.

They made the scabs to stop you from bleeding to death.Ĭlearly, here, as in other places in the novel, Paddy’s comments are colored by something he’s read and retained, at least for the moment. There were thirty-five billion corpuscles in your blood. Scabs were made by things in your blood called corpuscles. It came off neat and tidy and there was no blood underneath, just a red mark that was the knee being fixed. I waited until I was sure it was hollow, sure that the crust had lifted off my knee. I was good at waiting for the scab to be ready.

“The crust”įor instance, near the middle of the novel, Paddy, out of the blue, starts talking about scabs, revealing his fascination with the stuff that happens to his body: He is constantly trying to figure things out, trying to understand how things fit together, trying to plumb all the mysterious knowledge that adults clearly have. He is innocent and violent in the way of children, but also has a child’s awareness of important and incompletely understood events happening at the edges. The oldest of four children, he is the book’s narrator, describing life as he lives it and as he finds it from a perspective that is, at once, childish and knowing. Paddy Clarke is a nine-year-old, lower middle-class, small-town Irish boy who turns ten somewhere during the course of Roddy Doyle’s hilarious, revelatory and achingly tender 1993 novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.

Roddy doyle ha ha ha