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Doyle, Roddy A Star Called Henry
New York, N.Y. Viking Adult 1-Sep-99 670887579 N Hardcover
Amazon.com&newline;&doublequote;Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood.&doublequote; 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. &newline;&newline;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. &doublequote;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.&doublequote; Though the uprising is eventually crushed and the leaders executed, Henry escapes to live--and fight--another day. &newline;&newline;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 &newline;&newline;From Publishers Weekly&newline;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: &doublequote;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.&doublequote; 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
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Doyle, Roddy Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha
Minerva 1997 749397357 N Paperback
Amazon.com&newline;In Roddy Doyle's Booker Prize-winning novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, an Irish lad named Paddy rampages through the streets of Barrytown with a pack of like-minded hooligans, playing cowboys and Indians, etching their names in wet concrete, and setting fires. Roddy Doyle has captured the sensations and speech patterns of preadolescents with consummate skill, and managed to do so without resorting to sentimentality. Paddy Clarke and his friends are not bad boys; they're just a little bit restless. They're always taking sides, bullying each other, and secretly wishing they didn't have to. All they want is for something--anything--to happen. &newline;&newline;Throughout the novel, Paddy teeters on the nervous verge of adolescence. In one scene, Paddy tries to make his little brother's hot water bottle explode, but gives up after stomping on it just one time: &doublequote;I jumped on Sinbad's bottle. Nothing happened. I didn't do it again. Sometimes when nothing happened it was really getting ready to happen.&doublequote; Paddy Clarke senses that his world is about to change forever--and not necessarily for the better. When he realizes that his parents' marriage is falling apart, Paddy stays up all night listening, half-believing that his vigil will ward off further fighting. It doesn't work, but it is sweet and sad that he believes it might. Paddy's logic may be fuzzy, but his heart is in the right place. --Jill Marquis --This text refers to the Paperback edition. &newline;&newline;From Publishers Weekly&newline;Winning the 1993 Booker Prize propelled Doyle's fourth novel from its original spring publication to a December issue date. While retaining the candid pictures of family life, the swift, energetic prose, the ear-perfect vernacular dialogue and the slap-dash humor that distinguished The Van , The Snapper and The Commitments , this narrative has more poignance and resonance . Set in the working-class environment of an Irish town in the late 1960s, the story is related by bright, sensitive 10-year-old Paddy Clarke, who, when we first meet him, is merely concerned with being as tough as his peers. Paddy and his best friend Kevin are part of a neighborhood gang that sets fires in vacant buildings, routinely teases and abuses younger kids and plays in forbidden places. In episodic fashion, Doyle conveys the activities, taboos and ceremonies, the daring glee and often distorted sense of the world of boys verging on adolescence. As Paddy becomes aware that his parents' marriage is disintegrating, Doyle's control of his protagonist's voice remains unerring, and the gradual transition of Paddy's thoughts from the hurly-burly of play and pranks to a growing fear and misery about his father's alcoholic and abusive behavior is masterfully realized. While some topical references may bewilder readers unfamiliar with life in Ireland, other background details--the portrayal of small-town society, of the strict teacher who shows sudden empathy for Paddy--have universal interest. Most notable, however, is the emotional fidelity with which Doyle conveys Paddy's anguished reaction to the breakup of his family. &newline;Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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