Roddy Doyle: A Star Called Henry

Vintage $24.95

Review: by John Connor*

A G-man from Dublin Castle in 1920 can't expect to live very long. Michael Collins knows who you are, where you live and every move you make. It's only a matter of time before one of his men, pedalling by on a bicycle, stops to blow your brains out.

In the fight to drive the English from Ireland Collins needs men capable of carrying out such cold-blooded executions.

Henry Smart, the hero of A Star Called Henry is such a man. A child of the Dublin slums, Henry is on the streets and fending for himself at the age of 5. His father helps when he can but he's a busy man. When he's not working as a bouncer at Dolly Oblong's brothel he's bashing people to death with his wooden leg on the orders of Alfie Gandon, underworld king.

Henry grows up big and quick, so big and quick that at the age of 14 he's in the Irish Citizen Army, shooting out shop fronts and soldiers from the windows of the Dublin post office. After the failure of the Easter Rising the ruthless and pragmatic genius of Collins takes over the fighting. No more glorious defeats for him; he knows what has to be done and needs men who won't flinch from doing it.

Henry Smart hasn't flinched for years. Like his father before him he becomes a hitman but a hitman for Ireland.

Roddy Doyle tells Henry's story in language so spirited, lively and adventurous that at times it threatens to gallop off and leave him behind. Occasionally that's almost what happens. The pages of high-speed straight dialogue, for example, give the impression that although Doyle is in the saddle his feet are out of the stirrups and he's lost the reins. This criticism aside, Doyle's mastery as a novelist is evident on nearly every page. When the old woman drops a skinned rabbit into the stew and tells it, "Mind you don't eat all the carrots now," we smell the stew and see her toothless grin. When Henry's father finishes off another victim with a cut-throat razor we feel the warm, sticky blood on our fingers.

A Star Called Henry is packed with wonderfully vivid and sensual imagery but its power lies in its uncompromisingly honest portrayal of Ireland's fight for freedom. Yeats' "terrible beauty" born on Easter Monday 1916 is revealed for its terrible ugliness. The poets might sing of gallant lads and heroes but there is nothing gallant or heroic about Henry Smart blasting someone all over the bedroom wall on the orders of Collins. There is no denying the brutal truth of how Ireland, or most of it, threw off the English yoke. Doyle knows this truth and tells it brilliantly.

* John Connor is an Auckland lecturer and writer.