Star Called Henry (Last Roundup) - Softcover

Roddy Doyle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099284480 ISBN 13: 9780099284482

Publisher: Random House, 2000

Synopsis

Born in the Dublin slums of 1901, his father a one-legged whorehouse bouncer and settler of scores, Henry Smart has to grow up fast. By the time he can walk he's out robbing and begging, often cold and always hungry, but a prince of the streets. By Easter Monday, 1916, he's fourteen years old and already six-foot-two, a soldier in the Irish Citizen Army. A year later he's ready to die for Ireland again, a rebel, a Fenian and a killer. With his father's wooden leg as his weapon, Henry becomes a Republican legend - one of Michael Collins' boys, a cop killer, an assassin on a stolen bike.

About this title

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 the Back Cover

"Like all great comic writers, Roddy Doyle has become an explorer of the deepest places of the heart, of love and pain and loss." - Irish Times

"Doyle's brilliant use of dialogue--ranks him as one of the best Irish writers of his time." -- London Free Press

"Doyle [is] a master of voice and place."-- The Toronto Star

"Doyle has a magnificent gift for taking the ordinary and giving it life." -- Calgary Herald

"Doyle's stories of difficult, messy working-class life--have struck a chord with readers around the world.-- Wretched things happen, people make foolish mistakes again and again, but the stories close at the point where characters have achieved some level of dignity."-The Globe and Mail

The Commitments:

"An imaginative and hilarious comedy that makes sense of the absurd behaviour of a collection of youth trying to form a rock band." -- London Free Press

The Snapper:

"An uproarious dissertation on teenage

pregnancy." -- The Edmonton Journal

The Van:

"A novel which is often hilarious, always enthralling and -- this is really the case -- unputdownable." -- Sunday Times

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha:

1993 Booker Prize Winner

"[Doyle's] triumph in this novel is to replenish our sense of how children think and speak and explain the adult world to themselves." -- London Review of Books

The Woman Who Walked into Doors:

"Paula Spencer, scars and all, ranks as one of his finest creations." -- The Toronto Star

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0099284480
• ISBN 13: 9780099284482
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352