CBR #9 - A Star Called Henry

Henry Smart has had a hell of a time. This is the first book in a trilogy (of which I read the third first) by Roddy Doyle. It follows the life of Henry Smart from his earliest years in Dublin during the Troubles to his retirement from the IRA. Henry is the first child to survive, in a family that would have been immense, born to impovershed parents in Dublin. His father is a bouncer at the local whore house and sometimes heavy man for the local gangster. His mother is aging five years for every one at home with the ghosts of her children who didn't survive.

Little Henry first hits the streets at age 3 and is already mean. He grows up on the streets, leaving home with his little brother in tow by the time he is 8. His Mother is incapable of caring for them and his father has run off, or died, either way it's two little boys on the streets. At first, being a middle class American born in the late twentieth century this seems hard to believe, but Doyle's writing is so convincing that even I can picture it painful as it is.

Henry eventually gets off the streets and into hiding as an early soldier in the IRA, he has what Cusack called "a certain moral flexibility" and it gains him position in the burgeoning army. Henry works hard, falls in love, commits murders, runs and runs and runs. All the while he maintains a sense of humor and loyalty to his cause. Until he can't anymore. And then he just absolutely cannot. The plot description doesn't do this book justice.

I don't know much about the troubles or the IRA honestly, although I'm enamored by it. This novel hints at the strategies of the IRA and how they were successful in ways that require that I do some research and see if they're true (I love that in a novel). Did the IRA really draw the English intentionally into peaceful neighborhoods and trick them into wreaking havoc, murdering citizens, in order that public opinion turn against them? Did the IRA knowingly sacrifice their own when it suited them, or defend their own for crimes equal to any British peeler?

Whether intentional or not, this novel manages to maintain the romance, on some level, of the Irish Independence movement; however, at the same time it is a gripping narrative about the use and abuse of those that served. Men like Henry with nothing to lose carry a revolution on their backs until slowly one by one they are betrayed, disillusioned, or killed. As Henry goes about his work, he slowly comes to realize that he is little more than a beast of burden for a movement whose intentions may have been true, but whose execution, in the end, is wanting.

The narrative voice is so strong and so compelling that the story comes across much more intensely and ferociously than this review would suggest. It has moments of bone crushing sadness and pure elation. Henry is a brute, but you love him, as you're suppose to, even when you know he is wrong.