A Star Called Henry

...And here, as in his earlier books, his omission of these seems to make a point about Ireland and Irish writing...

...Where was his leg...

...We became man and wife without me hearing her first name...

...no church, and no cramp of religion, but no folk religion of Ireland and the Irish, either...

...After all, A Star Called Henry is the first book in a trilogy...

...There was no silence, exile, or cunning here...

...A Star Called Henry takes place during the founding of the Irish Republic, the time of the Great War and afterward, and its characters cross paths with James Connolly and Michael Collins (but not, it is worth noting, with any of the literary figures of the period...

...Before long—Henry's stated indifference to Ireland notwithstanding—the two of them are caught up in the war for Irish independence: lovers, revolutionaries, and finally husband and wife, father and mother...

...And yet The Commitments, about some Irish kids in the sixties who formed an after-school soul band, had the elusive quality the band and its mates craved—it had soul...

...As it turns out, the young Henry knows his father hardly better than his dead brother when the father, caught in the middle in a bit of underworld double-crossing, disappears...

...The protagonist, a young man named Henry Smart—for this is a coming-of-age story—is his family's third Henry...

...The story from there must be one of the cheeriest war stories ever written...

...His novels are easily read, easily enjoyed, and, once finished, easily forgotten...

...I know nothing real about my father...

...And so it is for Doyle's protagonist here: Although he is a war hero and the hero of his own exploits—and his own sexual exploits— Henry Smart is not interesting enough to be the hero of a novel...

...The family trees of the poor don't grow to any height...

...Who was he and where did he come from...

...Do you love Ireland, lads...

...We await his, and Henry Smart's, further adventures...

...He left a trail of Henry Smarts before he finally disappeared...

...Here was a street-level, come-as-you-are account of contemporary Ireland, a place made new and surprising to its people by their sudden lack of interest in their past and their identity—an interest, it seemed, that had been exported to the United States...

...Henry grows up to be astonishingly handsome, a fact he is too fond of telling the reader, and seduces the boys' young teacher, a flouter of convention named Miss O'Shea...

...line for line, the prose is vivid, sensual, original, gripping—yet it points up the one real weakness of Roddy Doyle's writing, one that is perhaps more obvious in a historical novel about the Irish revolution than in an offhand comic sketch about an Irish soul band...

...And so is his light touch...

...They are characters on the margins, which allows Doyle to write a historical novel without bringing in large tracts of history, facts and figures, peCommonweal 57 November 19,1999 riod costumes and furniture, or old-time diction and slang...

...The title page says the novel is the first book of The Last Roundup, another trilogy, and the two books to follow will presumably bring the story up to the time where Doyle started his career, the sixties Dublin of The Commitments...

...The novel begins, though, with a sepia prehistory set in Victorian Dublin...

...Little survives the reading but their charm...

...Roddy Doyle is a star himself now...

...Her husband, too, is Henry, an amputee ne'er-do-well who tramps around in an overcoat that hasn't been washed in generations, and sometimes works as the doorman at a Dublin brothel, where he wields his wooden leg like a club...

...Paul Elle_________________ T he early novels of Roddy Doyle were recognizable simply by the way they were laid out in type: long kite-strings of dialogue running down the pages, one- and two-word tags of speech set off by dashes and surrounded by gales of white space...

...He'd killed sixteen Zulus with the freshly severed limb...

...no lace-curtain lyricism, no author striving to transcend his origins or educate his reader...

...Victor dies soon afterward...

...His trademark single-word exchanges are here, too...

...As Henry comes of age—a "street arab" traipsing around London with his younger brother, Victor—their desperate circumstances are depicted as comic adventures: grasping rats barehanded before crowds to earn spare change, sneaking into school only to be thrown out again for being too poor...

...Henry and Miss O'Shea pass from one historical point to the next—now losing, now finding each other...

...Perhaps it was inevitable that Doyle would get around to writing a historical novel...

...That passage is a good example of Doyle's herky-jerky street poetry, which he has retrofitted in this book for the nineteenth century, mixing in legend, maxim, and on-the-spot fictionalizing with the narrator's frank first-person talk...

...His mother, called Melody, likes to sit him down on the front step in the evening and look up at the sky and point out the star that is her first son Henry, whom God took to heaven...

...We didn't understand the question...

...The books were so slim, so light, so casually done, so effortlessly enjoyable, that at first it was hard to believe a big international publisher had troubled to print and bind them and pay smartly dressed graduates of fancy American colleges to write letters and make phone calls on their behalf...

...I loved Victor and my memories of other people...

...South Africa, Glasnevin, under the sea...

...I don't even know if his name was real....He made up his life as he went along...

...A soldier, a sailor, a butler—the first one-legged butler to serve the Queen...

...She heard enough stories to bury ten legs...

...The two novels that followed the Barrytown books {Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and The Woman Who Walked into Doors) were more conventionally prosy and well-rounded, and the Booker Prize given to Paddy Clarke in 1993 established their author as legitimately literary, but Doyle's writing still seemed to me most distinctive for what was left out of it...

...Ireland was something in songs that drunken old men wept about as they held on to the railings at three in the morning and we homed in to rob them: that was all...

...He invented himself, and reinvented...

...And when it was put together with two other little books and dubbed the Bam/town Trilogy, suddenly Roddy Doyle himself—he was a public school teacher outside Dublin, but now he had quit his job and was writing full time—seemed a kind of authentic Irish soul man...

...War, an infection, the fairies, a train...

...I never knew her name...

...She was and stayed my Miss O'Shea...

...Paul Elie, a frequent contributor, is the editor o/Tremor of Bliss: Contemporary Writers on the Saints (Riverhead...

...Not yet, anyway...

...That was all I understood about love...

...Their story is exuberantly told...

...whether he is a great novelist is another matter...