Tony Macaulay

This is a very light memoir - even lighter than the title implies, because while it's set during the Troubles, the protagonist doesn't really "come to terms" with anything but his own emerging adolescence. It's filled with mid-'70s references to Doctor Who, Thunderbirds, Star Trek, and especially the Bay City Rollers - and probably the biggest criticism I can come up with is that it never really gets away from that small boy's perspective. There are hints toward bigger, weightier, scarier things, but it's relayed as a series of mostly comic events happening to a well-meaning but slightly hapless child. It's easy to like him and his story, but that's sort of...it.

In short: Tony Macaulay's Paperboy is a pleasant read, but it's very episodic and doesn't add up to a whole lot. Even subtitling it "One Year in the Life of a Belfast Paperboy" might have given it a little more shape.… (más)

Paperboy: An Enchanting True Story of a Belfast Paperboy Coming to Terms with the Troubles has got to be the funniest book ever written about growing up in Northern Ireland. It also was the first one I've read by a Protestant. I didn't even realize that until I would wonder why he said what he did in certain places at the beginning of the book; even though I knew he was a Protestant, it still didn't sink in for a while; I kept wondering why he said things that made him sound like he wasn't Catholic! Finally, his Protestant nature sank deep into my mind, and I could proceed unconfused with reading an incredibly humorous memoir.… (más)

The Paperboy bills itself as a memoir of a twelve-year old boy who delivers newspapers in Belfast during the times of The Troubles (1970s.) Tony Macauley, an Protestant English boy, lived in the Shankill area of Belfast in the shadow of the peace walls and the commonplace occurrence of pubs being blown up; but despite the violence (both threatened and actualized) that permeated that time and place, Macauley writes a quaint account of being a pacifist paperboy more concerned with The Bay City Rollers, parallels (a type of trousers), and keeping his paper route money hidden from potential muggers. It's an interesting perspective, having been written from the viewpoint of a young teen who had the advantages of being sent to a public school and having encountered others who were not as different as he had been brought up to believe; but the intensity of living on the edge seems blunted by elements of near suburban normalcy. I suspect hearing Macauley tell these stories live is truly engaging, and you can discern a certain echo of his speaking style (e.g. "...so I was," "...so had," and so on); but in many places, there are cut-and paste phrases and repetitive descriptions which break up the over arc of the memoir, and the vernacular of both time and place may need some looking-up as the meaning may not be clear from the context.… (más)