The Best of the Boyos

By Walter Kirn

The luck of the Irish has always been their misery, at least where Ireland's writers have been concerned. Suffering makes for better stories than comfort does. Pain turns pages. And the best happy endings follow unhappy beginnings. (Although not always; see following review.)

A Star Called Henry (Viking; 343 pages; $24.95), Roddy Doyle's new novel about the birth of the modern Irish nation, begins with the vivid miseries of its hero, young Henry Smart, who is named for a dead brother whom his grieving mother can't forget. The time is the turn of the century, a dreary hiatus between a past of colonial starvation and a future of war and revolution. Henry's father, a one-legged Dublin bully-boy who free-lances as the doorman at a brothel, can't support the family, so Henry runs wild, stealing from shopkeepers, sleeping under boxes and generally surviving on schemes and scams. He's a prodigy, strong and cunning and passionate, but as mired in misfortune as his native land, whose history soon becomes mixed up with his own. Henry and Ireland, Ireland and Henry--for Doyle they're the same big, bloody mess.

Identifying a character and a country Yankee Doodle Dandy style is an old, but difficult, device. Doyle may as well have invented it, however, given his skill in putting it to work. In a style both brawling and lyrical, blunt and acute, he sets his hero adrift on a swirling current of love and politics. By age 14, Henry is fighting in the streets with martyrs of the Easter Rising, lashing out against the English enemy with an anarchic, adolescent recklessness that barely knows what it's fighting for or why. Instead of self-awareness, Henry has guts; instead of purpose, passion. Taking time out from a battle, he loses his virginity, then leaps to his feet for more shooting--a gushing life force barely in control of its own flow.

Doyle, however, is always in control. His sentences lunge but never break the leash, animated by wild but wise high spirits. "God waited for no baby in the slums. He took them back as soon as He'd given them, but He threw them away if their souls were still stained. He delivered them soiled but expected them back spotless." Even better than Doyle's epigrams, though, are his lengthy battle scenes, which are both chaotic and precise, capturing the fog of war as well as the warrior's uncanny clarity. Sneaking through the darkened countryside, holing up in safe houses and hedges, escaping on bicycle from spies and sentries, Henry grows from a rebel on a lark into a savvy I.R.A. assassin.

In every chapter Doyle mixes high, historical romance with low, earthy humor. At times Henry is a bit too much the Irish Everyman, modeling so many Celtic vices and virtues that he seems legendary instead of human. What saves Henry from becoming a mere myth, though, is Doyle's attention to detail, his warty realism. For all the great events he plays a part in--the battles, elections, conspiracies and crackdowns--Henry never dissolves into the scenery but stands out against it in painful, proud relief.

--By Walter Kirn