Roddy Doyle's special talent is for speech which reveals the soul in a way that normal talk never does. Schoolboys (Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha), battered wives (The Woman Who Walked Into Doors) and soul music fans (The Commitments) are all more or less contemporary figures baring their all. In his latest novel we have something new: a figure from the past. Henry Smart, in his street voice, tells us his story.
Henry, the son of a one-legged brothel bouncer-cum-hitman, was born in a Dublin slum at the start of the century. He grows up a garrulous and infinitely resourceful individual. Think of Orson Welles in The Third Man, add devastating good looks, and you will begin to have his measure.
Henry is befriended by James Connolly, who teaches him to read. (Like Doctorov's fiction, this novel is dotted with real people.) Come Easter 1916, Henry is in the General Post Office (GPO) in the uniform of the Citizen's Army. And in the middle of all the excitement (interestingly described, incidentally, which is saying something, given the familiarity of the terrain) Henry has an epiphany. The first of many.
The Volunteers, Henry realises, are catholic, mother-fixated, Anglophobic, stupid and petit bourgeois. They abhor the looters out on Sackville street and they scorn the shawlies who beat a path to the GPO door in search of the pensions of their men folk who are on the western front. The Volunteers, who cannot understand how poverty affects behaviour, see these women and their men as pro-British traitors. But then they would, wouldn't they, given that the Uprising is for themselves-the catholic rural middle class-not the poor. This is what Henry understands.
After the surrender in the GPO, Henry miraculously escapes the Brits, goes underground and becomes a docker (one of the best parts of the book). He resurfaces in 1917 and, despite what he has understood, he allows Michael Collins's charm to work its magic; he becomes embroiled again. He is sworn into the Irish Republican Brotherhood. He trains IRA volunteers. He is made one of the "Twelve Apostles" and stiffs dozens of spies for Collins (none of them "spies," as it turns out, just men with minds of their own, whom the movement couldn't tolerate). He marries a Republican woman of psychotic tendencies. When he can suspend thought (which he mostly manages to do) Henry is the classic amoral maniac on which all revolutions depend. He does the business, he doesn't ask questions and when he kills there is no ideology involved.
The trouble is that Henry cannot suspend his thinking all the time. Now and again, his brain clicks in (more and more, as he matures) and when this happens, he is truly subversive. According to Henry, the peelers and soldiers, the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries, were never the monsters of Republican lore. They were just hard-nosed bastards who did a job. They were also good at their job. According to Henry, the Irish didn't win and never could. On the contrary, the struggle consisted of unheroic horrible acts (for example, one girl is forced to wear pigs' nose rings as earrings because her lover is a peeler). These deeds are calculated to provoke the enemy into doing horrible things back-such as burning creameries or nailing Sinn Feiners to trees. This in turn is depicted as Saxon brutality, and galvanises the population behind Sinn Fein.
The Irish struggle, in other words, was a gigantic confidence trick. Our founding fathers had no commitment to improving our lot. Far from being a noble anti-colonial battle, the fight for Irish freedom was a squalid putsch carried out by a small group of ruthless, well-armed, ideologically arrogant men and women who finessed the withdrawal of the British and their own ascension to power. Ireland post-truce was no different from the Anglo-Ireland which had existed before, except that the new clique got to run it for their own benefit. The Free State and what followed may even have been worse than Anglo-Ireland. In concrete terms, our glorious Uprising, with its hundreds of dead people, achieved nothing more than the transfer of power to a repellent group of men who founded parties with Gaelic names which have milked us like aphids for the past 80 years. No wonder, then, that Henry flees to Liverpool on the last page of the book.
Both in its sweep and in the rigour of its diagnosis of everything wrong with modern Ireland's sense of itself, this novel is the equal of Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum and Celine's Journey to the End of the Night. Like these books, Roddy Doyle's novel is a brilliant and breathtaking act of apostasy. It exposes the ideological underpinnings on which the Irish state rests, and then demolishes them one by one.
Confrontation with the truth is how a nation matures, but this will not be to everyone's taste. In other, less forgiving climes (the Soviet Union, say), Roddy Doyle would be put on a cattle truck and sent away. For ever. There is no higher praise, I believe, than to say that a book is that dangerous. I can also say that here, for once, that most overused of terms is applicable: this book really is a masterpiece.
l This review first appeared in the Irish Times
A star called henry
Roddy Doyle
Jonathan Cape, ?16.99
