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Title: Doyle gets under the skin
Review: It might have been easy for Doyle to write Paddy Clarke as he did from the child's point of view, not least because he has been a child. But to write an account of a life from inside a woman's mind is surely no easy task. A hefty leap of the imagination would be required for any man to speak as a woman today within a well defined culture, but to then defy all by embracing the theme of wife battering takes some guts.Doyle handles it well, with his idiosyncratic writing style, and one is left in no doubt that this woman - Paula - is real. The pride and humiliations she experiences are sharply contrasted with the cowardly male - Charlo - in her life. However, Paula is not without her own foibles - she is no angel and is thoroughly human. This is the Doyle triumph, not allowing his characters to become stereotypical, yet robustly typed enough for me, at least, to know someone who might be Paula (and Charlo).
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