"What is a man but his old stories?" Roddy Doyle's Henry Smart trilogy

The other day, I read in The Age one commentator describe the current Irish financial crisis as a betrayal of the men who fought for the Republic. There is very little in Irish history that isn’t.  The cool winds of Ireland are not produced by differences in air pressure over different parts of the earth’s surface but by the untold millions of betrayed men spinning in their graves.

I don’t mean to sound cynical; Ireland’s history to me has always seemed astonishingly sad. The sadness derives from the cyclical nature of the violence and tragedy; men risking their lives left waiting on beaches for promised support that never comes, again and again; children being indoctrinated to share their parents’ hatred; the country finally winning some independence in the Anglo-Irish War then turning on itself in civil war; people imagining that this time, this violence, this shooting, this bomb will change things, that this promise, this assurance, this treaty will bring peace.

Nor do I want to romanticise it. The bombings, the shootings were all too often pointless, petty, motivated not by high ideals but by a lust for money, power or violence for its own sake. At long last, peace may well be coming to Ireland. Bombings still happen, but not nearly with the frequency they once did. (The Irish always maintained a sense of humour: a shop in Belfast that lost its front kept in business and put up a sign ‘More open than usual’.) In the long contest between the bullet and the ballot box, the ballot box has won, as it usually does – but the bullets keep coming.

If you want to read about the Irish experience of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, you could do a lot worse than starting with Roddy Doyle’s wonderful The Last Roundup trilogy: A Star Called Henry (1999), Oh, Play That Thing (2004) and The Dead Republic (2010). The three novels tell the story of Henry Smart from his birth in Dublin in 1901 through to his old age in 2010. Born into a world of poverty and violence, he never entirely escapes it. Even as a child, his eyes have a force than intimidates men and attracts women. In the first book, he survives a miserable Irish childhood to fight the Easter Rebellion, the Anglo-Irish War, the Civil War, and marries before he has to flee the country, just ahead of his former allies.  In the second, he finds England isn’t far enough and runs again to America where he falls foul of a whole new type of gunman. There he also has jazz, bootlegging, American-style evangelism, and the Depression to occupy him before middle-age takes him in the third book back to Ireland where his past and Ireland’s are still waiting for him.

He brushes against some big names - that’s his elbow in the photo of de Valera under arrest.  He works with people such as Michael Collins, John Wayne and in Oh, Play That Thing, he works for a very young Louis Armstrong, before the jazzman even has the nickname Satchmo. James Connolly teaches him to read. Gerry Adams wants to be seen shaking his hand. John Ford wants to make his story and makes The Quiet Man instead. This is not Forrest Gump reassuring us everything is fine. We keep being reminded of what’s going on behind, or underneath, the stories we know, the violence, the money, the ideals, the deals, the sweat, the blood, the dreams, the sex, the whim of chance and the drive of fear. 

These are rich, entertaining, novels, full of humour, great characters, incident, and dialogue. Henry’s wife, Miss O’Shea, could carry a novel herself.  I actually gasped out loud during moments (I’m not much of a one for gasping.) Some characters are created in a dash of words, and can disappear in fewer, yet stay with you, like they stay with Henry. Doyle’s language is a pleasure to read and he is a wonderful storyteller. I found myself reaching for this novel even if I only had five minutes to spare. Then as they drew to a close, I would try to make the remaining pages last as long as I could. This is a subversive look at Irish history, driven by a great love story.

It is also a story about stories. Henry is made and trapped by his own story, even the bits that aren’t true, even the parts he made up.  The stories he knows about other people make him a hero and a target. He and his missing wife (or is he the one missing?) track each other by the stories they tell and hear. He and John Ford fight over how to tell his story to an American audience, through a Hollywood film. The fight for Ireland may well simply be a fight for the story of Ireland, how it is told, and who gets to tell it. And stories are nothing without an audience. This is where you and I come in.

All the strands of Henry Smart’s long life tie together beautifully by the end of the third novel. I could not say if each book stands alone as I read them in order within a few months of each other.  I would urge you to read them in order too, although there's no need to rush – they were published over eleven years. The humour, vitality and sadness of Irish history are here and Henry Smart is a memorable entertaining narrator. His brother Victor will haunt me for a long time.