"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 Publishers Weekly
Doyle just gets better and better. After the touching hijinks of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and the poignantly powerful The Woman Who Walked into Walls, he has embarked on nothing less than a trilogy that aims to tell the story of 20th-century Ireland through the life of one man. He is Henry Smart, product of the unlikely union of a teenage buttonmaker and a one-legged murderer, and from the opening lines Doyle has given him an unforgettable voice, fiercely poetic and utterly aware: "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 shocking substitute for the little Henry who'd been too good for this world, the Henry God had wanted for himself. Poor me." Henry grows into a handsome, healthy, fearless youth, ever mindful of the fearful poverty in which he makes his way, and of his father's dark reputation as a brothel bouncer, killer for hire and scourge of the Dublin police. Only natural, then, that the born rebel should join the fledgling IRA as a teenager and take part in its earliest battles. (The account of the 1916 Easter Rising, the occupation of the GPO and the bloodshed that follows must be one of the boldest and most vivid descriptions of civil strife in a familiar city ever penned.) After that, it's on to higher things for Henry: as a trainer of rebel soldiers, a young man high in the IRA councils, an avid lover of womenAbut also as one who begins to find the ideals of the revolution slipping away into arid opportunism and who, in the closing pages, turns his face toward America. This is history evoked on an intimate and yet earth-shaking scale, with a huge dash of the blarney, some mythical embellishments and a driving narrative that never falters. Names like Padraic Pearse, Michael Collins, Eamon de Valera, come and go, not like walk-ons in a pageant but as hideously fallible humans caught in the web of history. Maybe the Great American Novel remains to be written, but on the evidence of its first installment, this is the epic Irish one, created at a high pitch of eloquence. 12-city author tour. Penguin audio. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In 1901, most Dublin babies died from consumption before they learned to spell their names, but Henry Smart was born to burn more brightly than the Milky Way. Here Doyle has created a mythic breed of boy whom Paddy Clarke would idolizeAa super-trooper-orphan who carries his father's wooden leg as a weapon in the Irish Citizens and Irish Republican armies. His supporting roles in the Easter Rising of 1916 and the War of Independence are swashbuckling and cinematicAhe suggests the children's rights clause in the Proclamation of Independence and runs guns for Michael Collins. When the Irish Civil War breaks out, however, he realizes that he isn't writing history as much as it is erasing his future. Although some of Henry's violent actions seem forced, Doyle's dialog and water and sexual imagery are sublime. Readers will feel closest to Henry when he is swimming Dublin's underground rivers. Highly recommended.AHeather McCormack, "Library Journal" Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Richard Eder
A Star Called Henry is the most ambitious and wide-ranging work yet by the author of the remarkable Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, The Woman Who Walked into Doors, The Commitments and others.


The Washington Post
Stunning...not only Doyle's best novel yet; it is a masterpiece, an extraordinarily entertaining epic.


From AudioFile
Roddy Doyle's signature style combines brusque realism with the touching humor of everyday life. Set in the grubby poverty of turn-of-the-century Dublin, this tale of a poor Irish boy's rise to fame is a bittersweet homage to family life. With his animated performance, Doyle does an excellent job of bringing his own unique characters to life. An urgency in his voice shines through his light brogue and colors the painfully detailed text in all the right places. Overall, it is the accessibility of Doyle's delivery that keeps listeners enrapt. R.A.P. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
From the author of the internationally acclaimed Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993) comes an exuberant novel depicting Ireland's struggle for independence in the early years of this century. The story is told in the voice of Henry Smart, born into harsh poverty in 1901 in Dublin. By age five, Henry was on his own, living in the streets of the city with his younger brother Victor in tow. By luck, Henry was smart and strong enough to survive. Fearless, more man than boy at 14, Henry was among the Irish rebels at the 1916 Easter Rising, pitching his own personal rage into the onset of Ireland's long and bloody battle for independence. Haunted by memories of a mother ravaged by poverty and repeated childbirths and by the fate of young Victor and his other siblings, Henry throws himself into the fight for the Republic, becoming a gunman and trainer of young countrymen, taking his orders from Michael Collins and other top leadership. Traveling with not much more than his wits and his passion for life and women, Henry carries with him the hope of locating the one woman he truly loves, known to him only as "Miss O'Shea," a woman who is his equal in courage and spirit. Doyle expertly weaves his well-known wit into even the most violent and most tender passages of the tale. This is an immense story, and it's only the beginning: this is the first book of a trilogy, giving readers a lot to look forward to. Grace Fill


From Kirkus Reviews
The much-loved Irish author (The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, 1996, etc.) breaks impressive new ground with this masterly portrayal of the making of an IRA terroristthe first volume of a projected trilogy entitled The Last Roundup. In the vigorous colloquial voice that has become Doyle's trademark, Henry Smart (b. 1901) narrates the fractious events of his first 20 years, beginning with the unlikely courtship of his teenaged mother, (the ironically named) Melody Nash, by Henry's father and namesake, a one-legged boozer who works as a bouncer (and hired killer) for Dublin madam Dolly Oblong and unseen criminal impresario Alfie Gandon. In a lustily detailed story of want and woe that easily outdistances Angela's Ashes, Henry Sr. is betrayed to the police, Melody lapses into premature senility, and five-year-old Henry, accompanied by younger brother Victor, becomes a resourceful ``street arab.'' A handsome, strapping lad who learns quickly and adapts easily to violently shifting circumstances, Henry survives and, in a way, prospersas a member of the ragtag ``Irish Citizen Army'' (during the vividly described Easter Monday 1916 cataclysm), a dockworker, the precocious lover of many women (including his teacher, later his wife, the fiery nationalist he will know only as ``Miss O'Shea''), and IRA gunman and murderer and a trusted protg of Michael Collins, andin the stunning climactic pageshis father's avenger. Throughout, Doyle manages the virtually impossible feat of mingling Ireland's dark and bloody early modern history with his brilliantly imagined protagonist's own amazing story: never for a moment do we feel we're being given a history lesson, nor does Henry's forthright amorality relax its firm hold on us. Absolutely extraordinary. Readers who thought Doyle had outdone himself with the deftly juxtaposed comedy and drama in his recent fiction will be amazed and delighted all over again. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
September 1999

Roddy Doyle's ambitious new novel is the story of Henry Smart, born in 1901 with "enough meat on him to make triplets." In a swaggering, often hilarious voice, Henry documents his first 20 years, in which he rises from the slums of Dublin to the front ranks of the IRA and beyond. The result, A Star Called Henry, provides a wildly provocative view of a country, and a person, from the inside out.

Henry must constantly strive to overcome his upbringing. His mother, her sanity undone by poverty and serial miscarriages, disappears early. His father, a peg-legged giant, works as a bouncer at a brothel ("In one neat hop he'd have the leg off and their heads open and the leg back on before they hit the ground"); when he is promoted, it is to serve as a contract killer for the mysterious Alfie Gandon. In time, Henry's father, too, is lost, and he's left with only his Granny Nash, a "witch" who exists somewhere between insanity and omniscience. She provides information about his past (and that of others), but only if he steals books for her to read.

Fortunately, as Henry says, "I loved the street, from the second I landed on it. The action, the noise, the smells — I gobbled them all up, I was striving for more." He and his younger brother, Victor, survive by collecting rats for dogfights and rustling catt

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Born in the slums of Dublin in 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, begging, often cold, always hungry, but a prince of the streets. At fourteen, already six foot two, Henry's in the General Post Office on Easter Monday 1916, a soldier in the Irish Citizen Army, fighting for freedom. A year later he's ready to die for Ireland again, a rebel, a Fenian and soon, 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.

FROM THE CRITICS

John Freeman - Time Out New York

A Star Called Henry is Doyle at his most Joycean...ribald and gritty, marvelously in tune with his characters' voices and, most of all, unwaveringly dedicated to Ireland. It is a magnificent novel, and if Doyle follows through on his promise to continue the story as a trilogy, there is cause for celebration.

Boston Phoenix

Full of casual brutality, tough-minded resistance to ideology, and a richness of expressionistic language that can only be called Joycean. The language flows in descriptive torrents, turning history in a blur, an indecipherable blend of news and rumor and legend ... it is a huge leap, a vision of the tyranny of history that stays true to its subject's violence by refusing either to soften the protagonist into a hero or redeem him for a higher purpose.

Penelope Mesic

It￯﾿ﾽs turn-of-the-century backstreet Dublin, heavy with stench and hardship, every poor infant is a long shot for survival. Yet young Henry Smart, sitting on the lap of his exhausted mother, is miraculously strong and well, fat-legged and alert despite the grip of hunger and pinch of cold. His mother points to a star. That￯﾿ﾽs her first Henry, now with God, and much resented by the living Henry, who knows himself to be scrappier, tougher and heartier than the frail, deceased predecessor for whom he was named.

In A Star Called Henry, the latest from Roddy Doyle, the surviving Henry narrates his own story from his poverty-stricken beginnings to his stint as an Irish Republican Army hero. Even at the beginning, Doyle￯﾿ﾽs hero is utterly irresistible, as is his novel, which so often reaches that burning point when emotions can no longer be sorted out, when anger and sorrow, desperation and joy combine in the keenest sense of life.

In his early youth, Henry is raw and gullible, badly fed and badly clothed. He￯﾿ﾽs had one haphazard day of schooling and years of living by thievery on the streets. His childhood is nothing that deserves the name. His mother￯﾿ﾽwho works in Mitchell￯﾿ﾽs sweatshop making rosary beads out of cow￯﾿ﾽs horns, ￯﾿ﾽsix days a week, sweating, going blind for God and Mitchell. Putting the holes in the beads for Jesus￯﾿ﾽ￯﾿ﾽis soon carried off by tuberculosis.

Henry￯﾿ﾽs father is largely absent, due to a furtive, bloody and ill-paying career of terrorizing and eliminating his boss￯﾿ﾽs business rivals. He could accurately be described as a thug, yet young Henry and the reader both feel considerable affection for him. To see such a big man ground down and outmaneuvered by sly, slight double-dealers is like watching the bull at a bullfight, its strength and crude innocence betrayed. Thus by the age of ten, Henry and his younger brother Victor, with his soft, tubercular cough, are alone and homeless. Like the youth of Sparta, who practiced for warfare by stealing cattle, they waylay farmers taking beasts to the slaughterhouse and divert cows down Dublin￯﾿ﾽs alleyways to sell to a dishonest butcher. Every day they search out a way to live.

￯﾿ﾽWe robbed and helped, invented and begged. We were small, so hard to grab. We blew the ice cream seller￯﾿ﾽs bugle after his own lips rotted on him; we brought him customers but we never tasted ice cream.￯﾿ﾽ Little Victor could ￯﾿ﾽempty an inside pocket without touching it.￯﾿ﾽ Henry relies on charm and a certain latent sexuality that confuses the women he begs from.

But Victor eventually perishes from the hardships Henry thrives on. Alone and blazing with anger, Henry grows up even more quickly. More than six feet tall by his mid-teens, he joins the fledgling IRA just in time to take part in the Easter Rebellion of 1916 and the siege of the General Post Office. Barricaded in the GPO and issued a weapon, Henry happily shoots out the windows of the stores opposite. ￯﾿ﾽI shot and killed all I had been denied, all the commerce and snobbery that had been mocking me and other hundreds and thousands behind glass and locks, all the injustice and unfairness and shoes￯﾿ﾽwhile the lads took chunks out of the military.￯﾿ﾽ

Doyle￯﾿ﾽs style, honed to a realistic sharpness in a string of wonderful comic novels set in present-day working-class Ireland￯﾿ﾽThe Commitments, The Snapper, Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha￯﾿ﾽbecomes fiercer and more lyrical here in his handling of historical events. Yet there is no sacrifice of immediacy, pungency, urgency or humor. We have the sweep of an eventful period combined with the sharpness of one man￯﾿ﾽs experience, conveyed in a stream of talk as slangy and casual as if young Henry were catching you by the sleeve on the street. And if Henry has been kept ignorant of schooling and values, religion and social niceties, it means that like Huck Finn, he is also ignorant of the lies that obscure the way things work.

At its best, Henry￯﾿ﾽs narrative is absolutely convincing. Consider the wonderful passage in which Henry describes a trip into the countryside to train farm lads as rebel soldiers, although, as he says, these country lads, skilled poachers all, ￯﾿ﾽalready knew how to move and hide in black darkness better by far than I did.￯﾿ﾽ It￯﾿ﾽs a dark night, and as a confidence-builder, he wants to drill the men on the estate of the local landowner, slipping in right through the main gates. ￯﾿ﾽI cycled at the pace I￯﾿ﾽd have taken through Stokestown at noon, and they followed me. It was a noise you never caught in the city, the whirr of bike chains in action together. It was one of the great noises of the war.￯﾿ﾽ This is a brilliant detail, unexpected and precise.

It￯﾿ﾽs the sort of thing you￯﾿ﾽd swear would only be noticed by someone who really lived through it, and it￯﾿ﾽs given depth beyond the moment by Henry￯﾿ﾽs comparing it with other experiences as a rebel￯﾿ﾽ￯﾿ﾽone of the great sounds of the war.￯﾿ﾽ

This is a narrative like a hearty meal, and what nourishes the reader is Henry￯﾿ﾽs huge capacity for experience. His wholeness and soundness, strength and health, make him ready for anything. He can sleep on the ground and ￯﾿ﾽrise with the frost on him,￯﾿ﾽ and he can savor the first decent meal he￯﾿ﾽs had in months and its taste of hot cabbage. He thrills to writing his name for the first time and takes comfort from the harsh blood-and-dust scent of his father￯﾿ﾽs coat. He even savors the desperate plunge into the cold, filthy waters of Dublin￯﾿ﾽs rivers and sewers with a kind of gladness in the shock of their identifying smells.

But there is suspense and a kind of melancholy here, too; because as fast as Henry learns, as fast as he grows up, it isn￯﾿ﾽt quite fast enough. He catches on to the crookedness of the comrades he trusts a bit too late. His innocence, like his dad￯﾿ﾽs, undoes the awesome power of his bravery and strength. Possessing the peculiarly Irish talent of boasting about himself without giving offense, big and strongly built, blue eyes blazing and quick-witted, Henry is impossible to resist. From the moment Henry, seeing his brother￯﾿ﾽs star, yells ￯﾿ﾽMy name is Henry Smart, the one and only Henry Smart!￯﾿ﾽ Doyle￯﾿ﾽs book, too, takes on a rage to live.

Charles Taylor - Salon

One of the strongest moments in the pop music of the last few years was the Cranberries' "Zombie." A refusal of the claims of history that winds up emphasizing the weight of those claims, the song is the Irish band's answer to expectations that Irish artists make a statement on "the troubles." But unlike U2, who first reached a large audience with their song "Sunday Bloody Sunday," the Cranberries weren't having any of it. "It's the same old theme/Since 1916," sang Dolores O'Riordan, and her tone told you that she didn't care who started what fight or who did what to whose great-uncle, and that she wasn't interested in sorting out the streams of spilled blood that ran together in some gutter long ago. She'd heard all the arguments and she was sick of them. The music told another story: the impossibility of escaping those grudges. Mike Hogan's bass, as it lurched along under his brother Noel's distorted guitar, sounded like the souls of the revolution's dead trudging toward their graves -- or attempting to rise from them. Over it all, the -- and I'm afraid the cliche fits -- wordless banshee wail of O'Riordan's vocals was like an ancient incantation, desperately invoked to send the walking dead back to their rest.

"Zombie" is a horrifying song. And its bitterness, its vision of history reaching forward to make a dead end of the present, is palpable in Roddy Doyle's new novel, A Star Called Henry, as well, rising over the course of the book until it's overwhelming. The cover shows a smiling boy on a Dublin street and prepares you for Doyle's special gift for depicting rude, unsentimental cheer amid privation. Look closer at the background and you'll see a youngster walking along the street with a rifle over his shoulder. In Doyle's novel -- set in the years 1900 to 1920, encompassing the 1916 Easter Rebellion and Ireland's eventual emergence as a republic -- brutality is casual, simply part of the territory.

During his years on the run as an IRA gunman, Doyle's protagonist, Henry Smart, makes the acquaintance of Climanis, a Jewish Latvian refugee who provides him with cover and the fleeting refuge of a safe house. The rapport between Henry and Climanis is natural and unforced, but this makes it impossible to trust in an atmosphere where killing has the everyday and personal touch of a neighbor greeting a neighbor. Doyle ends one passage with Climanis offering a toast to Henry and his wife (also a revolutionary) and opens the next section with this sentence: "I was right up against his back when I shot him." It takes nearly a paragraph to realize that Henry's target is not Climanis, but one of the people he has been directed to kill -- efficiently, unquestioningly -- in order to eliminate some perceived threat to the Republican cause, or to send a warning, or merely to stir things up.

It's impossible to underestimate the force of that uncertainty. The constant in Roddy Doyle's novels has always been the author's empathy for his protagonists -- whether it was Jimmie Rabbitte Sr. of "The Barrytown Trilogy," a middle-aged man confronting the question of his own self-worth; or Paddy Clarke thinking he had the power to hold together his parents' crumbling marriage; or the battered wife regaining control of her life in The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. Like them, Henry Smart struggles. Worse. He is poor, dirt poor, where Doyle's other characters have all been working class but solvent. But where they suffered from cruelty, Henry inflicts it. Violence is mother's milk to him. The coat worn by Henry's father, doorman at a brothel and hit man at the behest of a local crime lord, has absorbed years of killing and dirt and sweat and drink. Picked up by his father, the infant Henry tries to find a nipple in the filthy garment. Henry's father, as fathers tend to do in Irish novels and memoirs, disappears, leaving Henry with no legacy beyond his old man's wooden leg. Talisman and companion, used to crack heads and to cleave to his missing father's spirit, the leg accompanies Henry throughout the novel.

Poverty is the motivating force of Henry's life, the thing that sends him scrambling through the streets of Dublin, dirt-caked and barefoot, the thing that later sends him to the rebel cause. Poverty is both an accepted fact of life here -- "And then Victor died" is how Henry informs us that his beloved 5-year-old brother Victor simply doesn't wake up one morning -- and obscenely vital. Here's Henry describing the hovels he and his mother and siblings live in: Decomposing wallpaper, pools of stagnant water, rats on the scent of baby milk. Colonies of flies in the wet, crumbling walls. Typhoid and other death in every breath, on every surface. Banisters that shook when held, floors that creaked and groaned, timber that cried for sparks. Shouts and fights, rage and coughing, coughing -- death creeping nearer. And the rooms behind the steps got smaller and darker and more and more evil. We fell further and further. The walls crumbled and closed in on us. Her children died and joined the stars. Rooms with no windows, floors that bred cockroaches. We cried at the smell of other people's lousy food. We cried at the pain that burned through our sores. We cried for arms to gather and hold us. We cried for heat and for socks, for milk, for light, for an end to the itches that stopped us from sleeping. We cried at the lice that shone and curled and mocked us. We cried for our mother to come and save us. Poor mother. Finally, finally, we crept down to our last room, a basement, as low as we could go, a hole that yawned and swallowed us.

That passage is a set-up. We've read it before, in stories of the Irish, and of blacks and Okies, as an argument for the righteousness of "the cause," and as explanation for why we can look for Tom Joad wherever a cop is beating a guy, wherever a baby cried because he was hungry. And I think Doyle wants us to expect that sort of justification. Because once we do, we are unprepared for what he confronts us with. Poverty is an explanation here, but not for anything heroic. It's an explanation for cunning rather than intelligence, for solitude rather than comradeship, for the violence that is proposed, carried out, countenanced and accepted. Henry doesn't join up out of idealism but out of resentment. Holed up in the post office during the uprising, Henry talks about a Republican banner that proclaims, "We Serve Neither King Nor Kaiser." "If I'd had my way, Or Anyone Else would have been added, instead of But Ireland. I didn't give a shite about Ireland." Yes, Henry feels a thrill at the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. But in the book's grand scheme, that's a moment of surrender to collective sentiment. The truth is that what matters to Henry is the thrill of being a man to be reckoned with, the thumping sound as he and the other volunteers march through the street commanding an attention that none of them would be able to command on his own.

It's that resistance to ideology, that refusal to see the rebellion's guerrilla fallout in grand terms, that characterizes this book. The rebellion, with its holiday gaiety and looting that gradually give way to an inferno in which the decaying bodies of civilians and horses pile up in the street, is an Irish version of the Bosch-meets-Peckinpah delirium of Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" -- minus McCarthy's reductive and simpleminded Guignol.

A Star Called Henry spirals from the rebellion into flight, ambush and revenge, during all of which the question of Ireland comes to seem more and more beside the point. The point is violence, the pleasure of it, of being able to make yourself feared. By the end, Henry, only 20, seems much older, and he is plunged into an existential nightmare similar to that endured by the Lee Marvin character in Point Blank, a wraith of a man who goes on a mission of revenge only to discover that all along he's been acting as the puppet of his betrayer. The climactic pages are like an Irish noir whose meaning could have been taken from Yeats' line about there being no past or future in Ireland, only the present repeating itself, now.

Doyle's work has progressed from pop entertainments to novels in which both the view of his native culture and his use of language have become increasingly dense and daring. With nearly every novel, he has risked losing the audience his previous work has built. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, by detailing the inner life of a character who couldn't rely on the safety net of the family, risked losing the readers hooked by the profane, familial warmth of The Barrytown Trilogy." "The Woman Who Walked Into Doors was received in some quarters of Ireland as a betrayal because of the way it linked the acceptance of domestic abuse to a Catholic culture that preaches the virtues of suffering. For a writer beloved for his odes to the Irish family, Doyle was taking chances by locating a sickness -- violence -- at the heart of it. With A Star Called Henry, he traces that sickness to the core of his country's history.

With each new novel, Doyle's language has become richer. The Barrytown books were nearly all dialogue (no wonder people read them and envisioned movies), and they were marvelous feats of ventriloquism and control; as every character fought to be heard in the ongoing squabble of family life, each voice in the ensuing cacophony remained distinct. Paddy Clarke described childhood's inner life, its smells and textures, and merited that much-overworked appellation "Joycean." The Woman Who Walked Into Doors was a shift, not just to the first person, but to the voice of a woman as well.

A Star Called Henry, also written in the first person, has the richest language of any Doyle novel yet. Paddy Clarke was impressionistic; this book is expressionistic. The language flows in descriptive torrents that carry the reader, as well as Henry, from event to event. History goes by in a blur here, an indecipherable blend of news and rumor and legend, as in Henry's description of the looting and chaos he sees from his perch during the uprising: I couldn't tell where the bullet had come from but, across the street, right in front of me, I saw a man being shot. He stiffened; he dropped slowly to his knees, grabbed a pillar, and stayed there, kneeling. For two days. Further up the street, two drunks were getting sick at the stony feet of Father Matthew and a woman made an armchair for herself out of one of the dead horses; she wrapped herself from the wind and rain in velvet curtains and cuddled up between the horse's legs. There was serious madness going on out there. And, in the middle of it all, Pearse gave us a speech. Dublin, by rising in arms, has redeemed its honour forfeited in 1813 when it failed to support the rebellion of Robert Emmet. I looked out at Dublin rising.

A Star Called Henry is a triumph of craft and intelligence and toughness of mind. Doyle has not sentimentalized the past or capitulated to it. That, for Doyle, is the province of history's hostages and its fools, like Frank McCourt's father in Angela's Ashes, who night after night comes home in his cups and rouses his sons from bed to ask them if they're ready to die for Ireland. But by staying true to his vision of the tyranny of history, by refusing to soften Henry into a hero or redeem him with a higher purpose, Doyle has written his least emotionally involving novel -- though it is by far his riskiest and most fluid, and certainly harsher than anything anyone might have expected from him. Like the Cranberries setting out to bury the past in "Zombie," he finds how hard it is to escape that past. A Star Called Henry is Doyle's "Ireland" novel, his way of dealing with the millstone that threatens to attach itself to the neck of every Irish writer. And in this unsparing, pitiless vision of his country's past he may have slipped its noose. The language of A Star Called Henry is that of a writer with dazzling books in front of him. If only the dead cooperate by staying dead.

Richard Eder - NY Times Book Review