There was total silence, nothing but Fuck floating down. This is how 'the best word' makes its first appearance, exceptionally for a Doyle novel, as late as page 132 - 'I was Fuck' - before going on to enjoy another magical incarnation in the classroom: 'Fuck was always too loud, too late to stop it, it burst in the air above your head. In one, the boys each have to become a swear-word for the week. Other games give vent to Paddy's verbal curiosity. Paddy's account may be inefficient, incoherent and chronologically incapable, but there is never a glimpse of the author at his shoulder, directing operations or forcing him to dwell on portentous moments. There are no chapter divisions, and the fragments assemble themselves in apparently unruly sequence, though a second look reveals a trail of unconscious associations. The novel's boldest feature is its infantile style of narrative. But whether we have pure prodigious memory to thank, or some even rarer gift, this must be one of the truest and funniest presentations of juvenile experience in any recent literature. Roddy Doyle was himself that age in 1968, and his small hero's name has the shape of his own. SET, like Roddy Doyle's previous novels, in the fictional north Dublin suburb of Barrytown, this new one is a boy's own account of his doings there in 1968, when he was 10 told, not with hindsight, but as if he were still 10, and (until the last few pages) as if he would always be 10.
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