Home and dry

In the opening chapter of The Dead Republic, the last novel in The Final Roundup trilogy, the narrator, Henry Smart, gives us a handy summary of the story so far. With it comes a sharp reminder of just how improbable much of the plotting has been. ‘I found my wife again in Chicago,’ recalls Henry, ‘when I broke into a house with Louis Armstrong . . . I crawled into the desert to die. I died. I came back from the dead when Henry Fonda pissed on me.’

Roddy Doyle, of course, once specialised in more straightforward tales of working-class Dubliners, whether comic (The Van), tragic (The Woman Who Walked into Doors) or a bit of both (Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha). Then, in 1999, he suddenly struck out in a new direction. A Star Called Henry, the first volume of The Final Roundup, did retain his resolutely non-fancy writing style. Yet it also seemed ambitiously intent on being the Irish equivalent of Midnight’s Children, complete with a heavy dollop of magic realism and a main character whose history neatly mirrored that of his country.

Born in the Dublin slums in 1901, Henry Smart was in the GPO during the 1916 Uprising, and spent the War of Independence hanging out with Michael Collins. He also had a lot more sex than you might expect for someone living in early 20th-century Ireland. Doyle was clearly smitten with his own narrator, but just about managed to avoid what Henry characteristically called ‘sentimental shite’, through the vigour of the writing and, above all, through a gleefully systematic demolition of Republican myths. The book ended with Henry having outlived his usefulness to the self-interested architects of free Ireland, a leaving his new wifeand fleeing to America.