Critics have widely praised Roddy Doyle’s sixth novel, “A Star Called Henry,” but they can’t quite decide what sort of book it is.
Since Viking published “Star” in mid-September, the novel has been called picaresque and Homeric. It has been described, often in the same review, as mournful, witty, prodigal, maddening, soulful and breathtaking. One critic characterized the book as “intimate and yet earth-shaking.” Another mentioned its magic realism. A third called it a tall tale.
All of which has pleased Doyle to no end.
“People are seeing different books there,” he says. “It’s very gratifying. I didn’t want it to be one thing or the other.”
“Star” is the story of Henry Smart. Actually, it’s the beginning of the story of Henry Smart, taking him from his birth in a Dublin slum on Oct. 8, 1901, until the age of 20.
Henry, whose life will be further chronicled in future Doyle novels, is fated, it seems, to live to 100. That’s what Viking publicity materials promise, and it’s what Doyle, himself a Dublin native, has promised in public comments in the past.
But now, as he sits in a quiet corner of the elegant lobby of the Whitehall Hotel, the 41-year-old Doyle is being cagey. “Henry stays alive until I’m finished with him,” he says.
It’s like the question of how many books Doyle will write about Henry. Viking says it will be three. Doyle says, “It’ll be three books — more or less.”
He doesn’t want to lock himself into anything.
“I wanted to write an old-fashioned book like Dickens about a really long and eventful life,” Doyle explains. Once embarked on the work, he quickly realized the story he had to tell was so large it couldn’t be contained in a single volume. “What I want is the freedom to keep the story alive as long as it seems worthwhile,” he says.
If that means two books or four — or seven — so be it.
In many ways, “A Star Called Henry” does bring to mind Dickens. There’s the sweep of the story, of course. “Star,” told in Henry’s voice, begins before he is born and takes him through a childhood spent on the streets of Dublin, participation in the 1916 Irish uprising against the British, service as an IRA hitman and an attempt on his own life. As the book comes to its end, he is about to leave for America.
The Dublin described by Doyle has the same sort of gloom, grind and oppressiveness as Dickens’ London. And, like Dickens, Doyle populates his story with wonderfully eccentric, exaggerated characters, including Granny Nash, who parcels out tantalizing tidbits of family history to Henry in return for books by female authors; Henry’s father, the first Henry Smart, who uses his wooden leg as a murderous club and falls into unrequited love with a brothel madam; Piano Annie, who plays imaginary keys along Henry’s naked back while singing American songs; and Henry’s running partner in the war for independence, a female terrorist known as Our Lady of the Machine Gun.
But Henry is no Oliver Twist.
Fairly bland and aimless, Oliver is tossed here and there by the swing of chance (and his creator’s imagination). He is innocent, wide-eyed. Life happens to him.
Not so Henry. He attacks life with a gusto that Oliver couldn’t conceive. Consider Henry’s description of his own birth:
“Melody pushed and I —
“me —
“Henry Smart the Second or Third came charging into the world on a river of water and blood. . . . Melody fell back on the mattress. Missis Drake held me up by the legs. She dangled me for all to see, like an almighty salmon she couldn’t believe she’d caught. . . .
“Where were the three wise men? Where were the sheep and the shepherds? They missed it, the (expletive) eejits. They were following the wrong star. They missed the birth of Henry Smart, Henry S. Smart, the one and only me.”
(Though Doyle laces Henry’s speech with the occasional obscenities of the Dublin lower class at the last turn of the century, the swearing occurs far less often than in his earlier novels about the present-day city. The speech patterns in “Star” are more formal as well, more correct. One of the few exceptions is “eejits,” Doyle’s way of showing the Irish pronunciation of “idiots.”)
A week or so after the baby’s birth, the parents argue over what to call him. The father decides unilaterally to give the boy his own name. The mother is aghast. An earlier child who had died in infancy — and, to her mind, is now a star in the night sky — was called Henry.
Their romance sours, and no one calls the new baby by his name or by any name.
Henry’s response is rage: “What about meeeee!”
He tells the reader: “I grew. I grew and stretched and raged around the room, filled the place with my fists and feet. I got my knees off the floor and walked. I hit the walls and clawed them. I broke through the clothes that were put on me. I wailed and cursed, hard words that came through the open window to me. I only stopped to swallow snot and any food that got in my way.”
He begins roaming the streets at the age of 3. And, at 5, he leaves home for good, taking his 9-month-old brother with him.
And Henry is on his way.
Doyle, on the other hand, took a good long while to get on his own way.
Born on May 8, 1958, he was the second of four children of Rory and Ita Doyle, a government printer and a housewife, who lived in Kilbarrack on the outskirts of Dublin. He was named Roderick.
“I was slow to start reading,” Doyle says. “My mother taught me. And, once I learned how, I’ve never stopped since.”
The idea of being a writer was something Doyle entertained “vaguely all my life,” but, at Dublin’s University College, he majored in English and geography. Out of school, he went to work teaching those subjects at the Irish equivalent of a high school in Kilbarrack.
Then, shortly after his 24th birthday, Doyle fled the distractions of Dublin for London, where he spent a three-month summer vacation just writing. “I was building up a body of work, and, when I went back in September, I really couldn’t stop.”
His initial effort, a long satiric novel called “Your Granny’s a Hunger Striker,” never quite came together. But his second project, self-published in April 1987, with the help of a bank loan, was a novel about an Irish pickup band, fascinated with American rhythm and blues, called The Commitments.
In 1991, “The Commitments” was turned into a movie of the same name, directed by Alan Parker, that was a British and American hit. Indeed, the film was so successful, Doyle laments, that many Irish have the mistaken notion that The Commitments — or even Doyle himself — wrote “Mustang Sally” and the other R&B songs in the film.
The central character in “The Commitments” was Jimmy Rabbitte, a would-be music impresario, and Doyle’s next two books — “The Van” and “The Snapper” — featured members of Jimmy’s family. Later, the three novels were republished in one volume as “The Barrytown Trilogy” although Doyle says he never thought of them as a trilogy when he was writing. (By contrast, the subtitle of “A Star Called Henry” is “Volume One of `The Last Roundup.’ “)
In his next two books, Doyle went out of his way to stretch himself as an author — writing in the voice of a 10-year-old boy in “Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha” and in the voice of an abused wife in “The Woman Who Walked Into Doors.”
And Doyle’s new book represents another effort to extend his range.
Whereas the five earlier novels were rooted in a gritty realism — so gritty, in fact, that Doyle was slammed by some Irish critics for insulting Dublin’s poor — “A Star Called Henry” is a mix of styles and tones.
There is a thread of realism through the book, and a thread of exaggeration, and a thread of history telling. There are moments of high comedy and of shock and violence and tragedy — often in the same paragraph.
No surprise the critics have a hard time summarizing the book.
In many ways, what Doyle is trying shouldn’t work. There are too many styles and too many tones; Henry does too much, sees too much, feels too much. And, yet, it does work.
Doyle won’t talk details of what Henry will do in the next book or books. He argues that he really doesn’t know until he writes it.
“I tend to read (books for historical background) as I go along, and I double back if there’s something I want to put in. I wouldn’t be able to sit back and do the research for a year. It’s the writing I love,” he says. “I chop and hack away at a novel. Very few parts of the novel are actually finished until the book is finished.”
One thing, though, is for certain: At some point in the second book or in a later one, Henry Smart will visit Chicago.
Midway through “Star,” Henry tells about a photograph taken at his wedding and how, at some later date, it was burned in front of his eyes just before he was shot in a Chicago warehouse.
“Yeah, sure, he’ll be in Chicago,” Doyle says. “I’m committed. How much or how little he’ll be here — I don’t know.”
AN AUTHOR OF AMAZING RANGE
Roddy Doyle has infused his new novel, “A Star Called Henry,” with an amazing range of action and emotion. Here are two excerpts that indicate that range:
Henry Smart as an IRA assassin:
I was right up against his back when I shot him; his coat killed some of the noise. He was falling when I turned away. It was in his voice, the grunt and half-words that fell out of him, he couldn’t understand what was happening. Four gates away from his home, on his own street, long before dark.
Archer passed me, already aiming his Parabellum. I walked on and heard two more bullets going into Smith, felt them in my legs as Smith was nailed to the pavement. It was late afternoon. Not a traditional killing time, but we were out to terrify the police. There were no safe times or sanctuaries. There was no one on the street, although there were kids somewhere near. I heard doors being slammed and windows, as the gunfire echoed and faded very slowly. Archer beside me.
— Seven kids, he said as we walked past Smith’s house. — It’s a hard business.
— He was warned to back off, I said.
— I know, said Archer. — I shot the man, didn’t I?
Then we heard him.
— You cowards!
Smith was standing up. He was huge there. Legs apart and holding on to nothing. There was blood pouring off his coat to his feet and trousers. And he stood up even straighter.
Henry Smart and his daughter:
She was five months old by the time I got to hold her. . . . I pressed her to my chest and felt her quick heart. She kicked her legs and gulped. I hadn’t washed or shaved for the best part of a year but she wasn’t scared of the old tramp holding her. She seemed to know; she’d met her father, and approved. . . . Her little mouth was wet and open and she moved her head, as much as her new neck would allow, searching the cloth in front of her — she was looking for a nipple on my coat. Her lips met months of dust and harder dirt. I held her out before she could suck at its history, and old Missis took her in her hands.
