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A review by gilmoreguide
A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle
4.0
(4.5 stars)
There may be a lot about the reality of historical Ireland that I don’t like (being a woman and all), but fictionally, male Irish authors are some of the most lyrically gifted I’ve ever read. My longtime favorite was William Trevor (The Story of Lucy Gault, Death in Summer) and then this fall I added John Boyne (The Heart’s Invisible Furies, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas) and now, there is Roddy Doyle. The energy in his novel, A Star Called Henry, bursts off the page much in the way the main protagonist, Henry, races, dodges, crashes, roars, and charges through life.
Henry is a handsome one—so beautiful when he was born that his illiterate grandmother could suddenly read. By the time he was thirteen he was over six feet tall with eyes of a blue that made women swoon. His looks and surging life-force are the best of Henry’s life. Otherwise, he’s a mongrel whelp with a part-time father who is a bouncer and enforcer for a Dublin brothel and only has one leg, with the other being a wooden one that can beat a man to death. He disappears when Henry is still a little boy and his mother and the rest of his siblings are gone not long after, having been forced out of the hovel they were living in at the time and disappearing into Dublin’s slums. Henry is left to himself and lives on the streets, grifting and stealing whatever he can to stay alive. It’s the early 1900s and much like Henry, Ireland is infused with the desire to burn down the status quo and rule itself. He’s fourteen when he meets James Connolly and Michael Collins and takes part in the Easter Rising in Dublin, and once the fighting and mayhem are done he finds
...for the first time in days—a lifetime—I felt alive again. I felt the blood running through me:
I’d wrecked the place, brought it to its knees…I wanted to celebrate and cry.
A boy, who has been acted upon his entire young life is now able to act. It is a heady time for Henry as he becomes a captain in the new Irish Republican Army and a member of Sinn Féin. Suddenly, the skills that have kept him alive now have a purpose, getting the British out of Ireland at any cost.
The rest of this review is at The Gilmore Guide to Books: https://wp.me/p2B7gG-2xp
There may be a lot about the reality of historical Ireland that I don’t like (being a woman and all), but fictionally, male Irish authors are some of the most lyrically gifted I’ve ever read. My longtime favorite was William Trevor (The Story of Lucy Gault, Death in Summer) and then this fall I added John Boyne (The Heart’s Invisible Furies, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas) and now, there is Roddy Doyle. The energy in his novel, A Star Called Henry, bursts off the page much in the way the main protagonist, Henry, races, dodges, crashes, roars, and charges through life.
Henry is a handsome one—so beautiful when he was born that his illiterate grandmother could suddenly read. By the time he was thirteen he was over six feet tall with eyes of a blue that made women swoon. His looks and surging life-force are the best of Henry’s life. Otherwise, he’s a mongrel whelp with a part-time father who is a bouncer and enforcer for a Dublin brothel and only has one leg, with the other being a wooden one that can beat a man to death. He disappears when Henry is still a little boy and his mother and the rest of his siblings are gone not long after, having been forced out of the hovel they were living in at the time and disappearing into Dublin’s slums. Henry is left to himself and lives on the streets, grifting and stealing whatever he can to stay alive. It’s the early 1900s and much like Henry, Ireland is infused with the desire to burn down the status quo and rule itself. He’s fourteen when he meets James Connolly and Michael Collins and takes part in the Easter Rising in Dublin, and once the fighting and mayhem are done he finds
...for the first time in days—a lifetime—I felt alive again. I felt the blood running through me:
I’d wrecked the place, brought it to its knees…I wanted to celebrate and cry.
A boy, who has been acted upon his entire young life is now able to act. It is a heady time for Henry as he becomes a captain in the new Irish Republican Army and a member of Sinn Féin. Suddenly, the skills that have kept him alive now have a purpose, getting the British out of Ireland at any cost.
The rest of this review is at The Gilmore Guide to Books: https://wp.me/p2B7gG-2xp