Once you start it, you won't be able to switch it off!
How does it compare to similar audio books?
Excellent
How does it compare to audio works by the same author?
Excellent
Advantages:
Insightful, educational and exciting .
Disadvantages:
None .
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
In his depiction of working class poverty, Roddy Doyle is fast becoming Ireland’s George Orwell. Charles Dickens’ portrayal of slum London was written over a hundred years ago, and descriptive as it is, it has lost some of its power by being too far removed from our own lives. Only Orwell and, perhaps, Alan Sillitoe have managed more recently to show the sheer banality of deprivation.
Now we have Doyle, winner of the Booker Prize in 1993, for his humorous work, ‘Paddy Clark Ha, Ha, Ha; showing a much harder edge to his fiction.
‘A Star Called Henry’ is a brutal story of poverty, violence, betrayal and oppression. Henry Smart is born in the slums of turn of the century Dublin. His father is a one-legged bouncer at a brothel who turns to paid murder, and disappears one night to be presumed dead. His mother, a naïve country girl, never recovers from the death of her first-born and descends into depression and madness.
The book follows the first twenty years of Henry’s life, surviving disease and disaster and the neglect of his absent father and alcoholic mother. During his adolescence he becomes embroiled in the 1916 Easter Rebellion, not through political ideal, (he admits he doesn’t give a shite for Ireland), but as a means of getting food and respect in equal measure. He meets all the famous figures of the time. Pearce, Devalera and Michael Collins, and shows them all an equal amount of disdain. After imprisonment by the British, he follows in his fathers footsteps by becoming one of Michael Collins’ paid assassins. The book ends with the establishment of the Irish Republic, and is the first of a series (Doyle himself is not sure how many there will be) to document the fortunes of Henry Smart.
Roddy Doyle is an intelligent and brave writer; never satisfied with a core audience he is always happy to explore new avenues. His greatest strengths are in his powerful, descriptive writing, and his creation of darkly complex characters.
The filthy hovels of Dublin could equally be the industrial north of England of the thirties or a third world city such as San Paulo or Delhi today. His characters are never simple; all are multi-layered with idealism, ambition, greed and human frailty warring within them. Henry’s father, who sees murder as an acceptable way to feed his family; his grandmother with her bitter rejection of the present and obsessive preoccupation with books, and Henry himself, proclaiming not to care for man nor nation yet unable to stifle a feeling of pride when the Republican flag is raised.
Yet within all the murder and despair are plenty of moments of Doyle humour; such as when, during the siege of the Post Office, he makes love (I use the term loosely) to his old school teacher. I’ll certainly never be able to lick a stamp again.
If your idea of Ireland is green fields, shamrocks and leprechauns, you need to read this. It doesn’t pretend to have any answers, but it may give you an insight into the history and development of the present ‘Troubles’. And if it doesn’t, it is still a finely written, powerful novel.
A nation that loves and cossets its artistic sons, like an old woman with her china ornaments, has produced another Goliath of literature.
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Irish War of Independence, like his father before him, kills to order and kills in cold blood. Where his father was simply the one-legged bouncer at a brothel, wh...
Irish War of Independence, like his father before him, kills to order and kills in cold blood. Where his father was simply the one-legged bouncer at a brothel, wh...
