While it's be fair to say there are quite a few great books in the world, there isn't an equal number of great characters: narrators, heroes who carry the story rather than acting as a just a part of it. Protagonists who stick with you long after the last page is turned. For every Holden Caulfield there's' well, what was the name of the guy in "Less Than Zero"? And that's why "A Star Called Henry," the latest by Irish novelist Roddy Doyle ("The Commitments," "The Snapper"), is such a rich find. The story follows the first twenty years of Henry Smart, a hard-luck kid in turn-of-the-century Dublin, a practical orphan (abandoned by his one-legged, hit-man father, all but forgotten by a mother sliding into dementia) by age 5 who takes to the streets with his younger brother in tow. And while this sounds like the set-up for the ultimate stereotypical cartoon of early-century hardscrabble Irish life, Doyle colors Henry in shades beyond the miserable alley-cat waif browns -- he is poignant, yes, but also funny and smart and tenacious.
And so it comes as natural evolution that the story of Henry becomes the story of the making of an IRA terrorist; it is easy to swallow the idea that becoming a disciple of Michael Collins isn't even a choice, just meant to be. Joining the burgeoning revolution at 14, Henry is a natural leader/teacher/assassin. Doyle writes in a language that is at once vivid and simple, not bothering to slow for sympathies or pangs of horror.
-- "'Have you said your prayers?'
-- 'Yes,' he said.
-- 'Good man.'
I put the gun to the back of his head and shot him. And another one for good luck."
Rather than just making a tear-stained cameo in Ireland's bloody history, Henry is the seemingly breathing portrait of someone who lived it, a museum archive photo come to warm, frightening life. Seeing the bloody events of Easter Monday 1916, tumbling rapidly like ill-fated dominoes, through his eyes doesn't feel like story device -- or the hindsight-hindered tale of a grandparent -- so much as listening to a rare field recording from the front lines.
Frank McCourt wrote that the only thing "worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood"; Henry Smart (who feels as real as the characters of McCourt's autobiographical work) proves that not only does misery love company, but can be a voyeuristic addiction. Buzz has it that this is only the first volume in a trilogy that tells the story of Henry's life -- we can only hope to get the chance to know him that much more.
(Shelly Ridenour)
"A Star Called Henry"
by Roddy Doyle
Viking, $24.95, 342 pages
copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.