Boyhood

Reading a novel you know you are going to teach is always a slightly odd experience. As well as having part of yourself respond to the text there's another irritating bit of you thinking and what exactly am I going to do about this, say about this, ignore about this? And reading Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha over the last three weeks I've found yet another bit of me reacting very strongly to the text in another way. I suppose the novel comes closest of any text I've ever taught to the circumstances of my own boyhood. The time period is an almost exact match - I'd be two years senior to Patrick. The social and cultural backgrounds are, again, an almost exact match, if you were to switch Dublin with Manchester (and as far as Catholic Manchester is concerned that would not be so terribly difficult.) So I've found myself pushed into remembering a lot of stuff that went on in my life in those boyhood years, at the same time wondering if Doyle has really got it right.

I think, for the most part, he has, especially the awful innocence of those years. Paddy strikes me as trying a bit too hard to be 'hard' - I didn't feel the pressures of needing to be so in quite such an intense fashion, but there was never a question of my parents getting a divorce and there are constant suggestions in the novel that much of our hero's behaviour is connected with the conflict between his ma and da. I also suspect the power of a Catholic upbringing for most kids is a greater moderating factor on 'bad' behaviour than Doyle lets onto, but when he gets it right (which he does most of the time in the book) it's spectacularly true to the texture of things. Most of all I think he's spot on about just how intimately connected with matters of violence a childhood of that period, in those circumstances, was. I wonder if the same is true today when kids seem so protected somehow?

And onto other matters entirely: I neglected to mention in my comments yesterday on the SSO concert that they played Kelly Tang's Apocalypso, a modern piece written by a local composer. So it was a touch unfair to complain of conservative programming. But only a touch - you only need to look at the repertoire to be covered in forthcoming concerts to see what I mean. Such a pity - the SSO did a great job with the Tang piece, dramatic and cinematic as it was. Surely the local audience could be excited by music of this nature?