Book Review: A STAR CALLED HENRY, Roddy Doyle

dublin | rights, freedoms and repression | opinion/analysis Friday May 18, 2007 21:10 by R - Non-mar4ket socialist richardmontague at btinternet dot com Apartment 2, 4 Landsdowne Road, Belfast BT15 4DA 028 90371070

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Review of first volume of Roddy Doyle trilogy. Political Fiction dealing with Dublin in the early part of the Twentieth century and depicting in the Doyle style the events leading to the Easter Rising and the subsequent 'Tan' war.

AN INCREDIBLE STAR

A Star called Henry by Roddy Doyle. VINTAGE paperback. £6.99 pp 344. This is the first volume in a trilogy called The Last Roundup.

All the blurbs rated it; a sobering introduction: ‘Exhilarating’, ‘Masterpiece’, ‘a breathtaking act of apostasy’. Phew! With such credentials from eminent sources, this reviewer approached the first of the book’s four parts with some trepidation.

The novel’s principal character, Henry Smart, is born into the torturous misery of Dublin’s slumdom in 1902. Doyle paints a tangible word picture of the sheer awfulness of life for the poor in Ireland’s capital city as it emerges into twentieth century capitalism. It is a well-delineated background for the characters and events which are the basis of Doyle’s plot.

However his treatment of those characters and events strain credulity. Henry’s Da, from whom he inherited his name - and presumably his skill as an escapologist! - is a contract killer, a mass murderer who’s favoured weapon is his wooden leg. The younger Henry, at fourteen years old is in the General Post Office (GPO) lighting the insurrectionary touch-paper that will blossom into a nasty guerrilla war against British rule. The sex angle is provided by Henry taking time out to shag a rebel girl - and future mass killer - in the basement.

Doyle accurately, if somewhat enigmatically makes the discovery that socialists made at that time: that the squalid victory of Irish nationalism bequeathed to the working class only a change in the hand that held the whip. The pangs of hunger, the ignominy of poverty, could now be legitimately expressed in the Irish language but if a book or play identified the source of Ireland’s miseries - in Irish or English - or exposed the malignant Catholic agencies designated to ‘educate’ Ireland’s children, what passed for democracy in the new Ireland promptly had it banned.

Doyle, in the person of Henry Smart, has pretend conversations in the GPO during the Easter Week Rising with the erstwhile socialist James Connolly, newly become Commandant Connolly in the Irish Citizen Army (ICA). He (Connolly) stands pure in Doyle’s prose. The Irish dramatist, Sean O’Casey, who as secretary to the ICA was closer to Connolly, took a contrary view: he saw Connolly as renouncing the cause of the international proletariat for what was effectively the armed wing of an aspiring native capitalism.

For those who enjoy the raucous writing of Roddy Doyle there will be enjoyment in this book but unlike novels like Plunkett’s Strumpet City, it will bring little enlightenment. There were, of course, the laudatory blurbs, there in unanimous eminence, but this reviewer failed utterly to see the King’s Suit.