A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle

A best-selling, Booker Prize-winning author offers a portrait of an adventuresome Irishman named Henry Smart, an IRA assassin and 1916 Easter Rebellion fighter, from his Dublin birth to his adulthood, when he becomes the father of a young rebel. 65,000 first prnting. Tour. Editorial Reviews Amazon.com Review Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood. The quote is from Frank McCourt's memoir of growing up impoverished in Limerick, circa World War II. But the sentiment might just as easily have come from the fictional lips of Henry Smart, the hero of Roddy Doyle's remarkable novel of Dublin in the teens, A Star Called Henry. The son of a one-legged hit man, young Henry is the third child born but the first to live through infancy. He is also the second Henry--the first having died, and become a star in the mind of his mother. She held me but she looked up at her twinkling boy. Poor me beside her, pale and red-eyed, held together by rashes and sores. A stomach crying to be filled, bare feet aching like an old, old man's. Me, a shocking substitute for the little Henry who'd been too good for this world, the Henry God had wanted for himself. Poor me. Soon, his father has all but abandoned the growing family, and at 9 Henry is on his own, running wild in the streets, thieving to stay alive. Depressing as all this sounds, Doyle has invested his narrator with such an appetite for life, and rendered him so resolutely unsorry for himself, that it seems almost insulting to pity him. By the time he is 14, Henry has become a soldier in the new Irish Republican Army and in one long and harrowing chapter, we view the events of the Easter Rising of 1916 from his position in the thick of it. It's not a pretty sight by any means, as the populace is divided in its support and various factions within the Republican Army threaten to splinter and annihilate one another before the British even get there. When the shooting starts, Henry aims not at the British but at the store windows across the street. I shot and killed all that I had been denied, all the commerce and snobbery that had been mocking me and other hundreds of thousands behind glass and locks, all the injustice, unfairness and shoes--while the lads took chunks out of the military. Though the uprising is eventually crushed and the leaders executed, Henry escapes to live--and fight--another day. In previous books such as The Barrytown Trilogy, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, and The Woman Who Walked into Doors, Doyle has established himself as one of the premiere chroniclers of modern Irish life. With A Star Called Henry, he works his singular magic on the past. What's more, this is only volume one of the Last Roundup, so it looks like we haven't seen the last of Henry Smart. And that's a very good thing, indeed. --Alix Wilber From Publishers Weekly Doyle just gets better and better. After the touching hijinks of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and the poignantly powerful The Woman Who Walked into Walls, he has embarked on nothing less than a trilogy that aims to tell the story of 20th-century Ireland through the life of one man. He is Henry Smart, product of the unlikely union of a teenage buttonmaker and a one-legged murderer, and from the opening lines Doyle has given him an unforgettable voice, fiercely poetic and utterly aware: She held me but she looked up at her twinkling boy. Poor me beside her, pale and red-eyed, held together by rashes and sores... a shocking substitute for the little Henry who'd been too good for this world, the Henry God had wanted for himself. Poor me. Henry grows into a handsome, healthy, fearless youth, ever mindful of the fearful poverty in which he makes his way, and of his father's dark reputation as a brothel bouncer, killer for hire and scourge of the Dublin police. Only natural, then, that the born rebel should join the fledgling IRA as a teenager and take part in its earliest battles. (The account of the 1916 Easter Rising, the occupation of the GPO and the bloodshed that follows must be one of the boldest and most vivid descriptions of civil strife in a familiar city ever penned.) After that, it's on to higher things for Henry: as a trainer of rebel soldiers, a young man high in the IRA councils, an avid lover of womenAbut also as one who begins to find the ideals of the revolution slipping away into arid opportunism and who, in the closing pages, turns his face toward America. This is history evoked on an intimate and yet earth-shaking scale, with a huge dash of the blarney, some mythical embellishments and a driving narrative that never falters. Names like Padraic Pearse, Michael Collins, Eamon de Valera, come and go, not like walk-ons in a pageant but as hideously fallible humans caught in the web of history. Maybe the Great American Novel remains to be written, but on the evidence of its first installment, this is the epic Irish one, created at a high pitch of eloquence. 12-city author tour. Penguin audio. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Publishers Weekly Doyle just gets better and better. After the touching hijinks of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and the poignantly powerful The Woman Who Walked into Walls, he has embarked on nothing less than a trilogy that aims to tell the story of 20th-century Ireland through the life of one man. He is Henry Smart, product of the unlikely union of a teenage buttonmaker and a one-legged murderer, and from the opening lines Doyle has given him an unforgettable voice, fiercely poetic and utterly aware: She held me but she looked up at her twinkling boy. Poor me beside her, pale and red-eyed, held together by rashes and sores... a shocking substitute for the little Henry who'd been too good for this world, the Henry God had wanted for himself. Poor me. Henry grows into a handsome, healthy, fearless youth, ever mindful of the fearful poverty in which he makes his way, and of his father's dark reputation as a brothel bouncer, killer for hire and scourge of the Dublin police. Only natural, then, that the born rebel should join the fledgling IRA as a teenager and take part in its earliest battles. (The account of the 1916 Easter Rising, the occupation of the GPO and the bloodshed that follows must be one of the boldest and most vivid descriptions of civil strife in a familiar city ever penned.) After that, it's on to higher things for Henry: as a trainer of rebel soldiers, a young man high in the IRA councils, an avid lover of womenAbut also as one who begins to find the ideals of the revolution slipping away into arid opportunism and who, in the closing pages, turns his face toward America. This is history evoked on an intimate and yet earth-shaking scale, with a huge dash of the blarney, some mythical embellishments and a driving narrative that never falters. Names like Padraic Pearse, Michael Collins, Eamon de Valera, come and go, not like walk-ons in a pageant but as hideously fallible humans caught in the web of history. Maybe the Great American Novel remains to be written, but on the evidence of its first installment, this is the epic Irish one, created at a high pitch of eloquence. 12-city author tour. Penguin audio. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal In 1901, most Dublin babies died from consumption before they learned to spell their names, but Henry Smart was born to burn more brightly than the Milky Way. Here Doyle has created a mythic breed of boy whom Paddy Clarke would idolizeAa super-trooper-orphan who carries his father's wooden leg as a weapon in the Irish Citizens and Irish Republican armies. His supporting roles in the Easter Rising of 1916 and the War of Independence are swashbuckling and cinematicAhe suggests the children's rights clause in the Proclamation of Independence and runs guns for Michael Collins. When the Irish Civil War breaks out, however, he realizes that he isn't writing history as much as it is erasing his future. Although some of Henry's violent actions seem forced, Doyle's dialog and water and sexual imagery are sublime. Readers will feel closest to Henry when he is swimming Dublin's underground rivers. Highly recommended.AHeather McCormack, Library Journal Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist From the author of the internationally acclaimed Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993) comes an exuberant novel depicting Ireland's struggle for independence in the early years of this century. The story is told in the voice of Henry Smart, born into harsh poverty in 1901 in Dublin. By age five, Henry was on his own, living in the streets of the city with his younger brother Victor in tow. By luck, Henry was smart and strong enough to survive. Fearless, more man than boy at 14, Henry was among the Irish rebels at the 1916 Easter Rising, pitching his own personal rage into the onset of Ireland's long and bloody battle for independence. Haunted by memories of a mother ravaged by poverty and repeated childbirths and by the fate of young Victor and his other siblings, Henry throws himself into the fight for the Republic, becoming a gunman and trainer of young countrymen, taking his orders from Michael Collins and other top leadership. Traveling with not much more than his wits and his passion for life and women, Henry carries with him the hope of locating the one woman he truly loves, known to him only as Miss O'Shea, a woman who is his equal in courage and spirit. Doyle expertly weaves his well-known wit into even the most violent and most tender passages of the tale. This is an immense story, and it's only the beginning: this is the first book of a trilogy, giving readers a lot to look forward to. Grace Fill From Kirkus Reviews The much-loved Irish author (The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, 1996, etc.) breaks impressive new ground with this masterly portrayal of the making of an IRA terroristthe first volume of a projected trilogy entitled The Last Roundup. In the vigorous colloquial voice that has become Doyle's trademark, Henry Smart (b. 1901) narrates the fractious events of his first 20 years, beginning with the unlikely courtship of his teenaged mother, (the ironically named) Melody Nash, by Henry's father and namesake, a one-legged boozer who works as a bouncer (and hired killer) for Dublin madam Dolly Oblong and unseen criminal impresario Alfie Gandon. In a lustily detailed story of want and woe that easily outdistances Angela's Ashes, Henry Sr. is betrayed to the police, Melody lapses into premature senility, and five-year-old Henry, accompanied by younger brother Victor, becomes a resourceful street arab.'' A handsome, strapping lad who learns quickly and adapts easily to violently shifting circumstances, Henry survives and, in a way, prospersas a member of the ragtag Irish Citizen Army'' (during the vividly described Easter Monday 1916 cataclysm), a dockworker, the precocious lover of many women (including his teacher, later his wife, the fiery nationalist he will know only as Miss O'Shea''), and IRA gunman and murderer and a trusted protg of Michael Collins, andin the stunning climactic pageshis father's avenger. Throughout, Doyle manages the virtually impossible feat of mingling Ireland's dark and bloody early modern history with his brilliantly imagined protagonist's own amazing story: never for a moment do we feel we're being given a history lesson, nor does Henry's forthright amorality relax its firm hold on us. Absolutely extraordinary. Readers who thought Doyle had outdone himself with the deftly juxtaposed comedy and drama in his recent fiction will be amazed and delighted all over again. -- Copyright 1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Review Full of casual brutality, tough-minded resistance to ideology, and a richness of expressionistic language that can only be called Joycean. The language flows in descriptive torrents, turning history in a blur, an indecipherable blend of news and rumor and legend ... it is a huge leap, a vision of the tyranny of history that stays true to its subject's violence by refusing either to soften the protagonist into a hero or redeem him for a higher purpose. -- Boston Phoenix, December 31, 1999 A Star Called Henry is the most ambitious and wide-ranging work yet by the author of the remarkable Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, The Woman Who Walked into Doors, The Commitments and others. -- The New York Times Book Review, Richard Eder In a style both brawling and lyrical, blunt and acute, he sets his hero adrift on a swirling current of love and politics. -- Time, Walter Kirn About the Author Roddy Doyle is the author of five previous novels, three of which --The Commitments, The Snapper, and The Van--were made into movies. The Van was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1991. Two years later Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (Penguin) won the Booker Prize and was a New York Times bestseller. His most recent novel, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors (Penguin) was a national bestseller. Also a screenwriter, Roddy Doyle lives in Dublin.