A Star Called Henry (Signed First Edition)

Roddy Doyle

ISBN 10: 1568958188 / ISBN 13: 9781568958187

Published by Viking, New York, 1999

About this Item

New York: Viking, 1999. First edition, first printing, with full number line including the 1. Hardcover. As new in an as-new dust jacket. Publisher s original price intact on jacket flap. Comes with archival-quality mylar dust jacket protector. A pristine, unread copy. Octavo, 342 pages. Signed by Roddy Doyle on the title page (his name only). Review copy with promotional materials laid in. The first volume in Doyle's "Last Roundup" trilogy, followed by "Oh, Play That Thing" and "The Dead Republic." A fierce, lyrical reimagining of modern Irish history, the novel follows Henry Smart from the slums of Dublin into the heart of the Irish War of Independence. Named one of The New York Times Book Review s five best works of fiction for 1999.

Seller Inventory # 5400

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Star Called Henry (Signed First Edition)
• Publisher: Viking, New York
• Publication Date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1568958188
• ISBN 13: 9781568958187
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: As New
• Dust Jacket Condition: As New
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Irish Literature

About this title

Synopsis

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.

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