The Dead Republic

Starred review from February 8, 2010
Doyle digs into the modern history of Ireland in the concluding volume to the life story of Henry Smart, a teenage Sinn Fein triggerman first encountered in A Star Called Henry
. Here, an aging Henry must preserve his own legend, which is taken away from him first for a film, and then by the IRA. In the mid-1940s, film director John Ford plans to make a movie based on Henry’s life, but Henry eventually realizes the film that Ford has planned will reduce his story to sentimental pap. Upon returning to Ireland with Ford, Henry plans on killing the director, but his callousness has faded, and he drifts into the Dublin suburbs, where he meets a respectable widow who may be his long-disappeared wife. Henry ages in obscurity until the ’70s, when the IRA uses a distorted version of Henry’s story as a PR ploy; as the IRA man who runs Henry explains, “we hold the copyright” to the Irish story. Doyle is a stellar storyteller, though not a faultless one—characters tend to editorialize at the drop of a hat; yet Doyle exhibits a peerless ear for cynicism as he grapples with the violence and farce of Irish history.

Gerard Doyle has a marvelous way with the old-man voice of Henry Smart in the final part of Doyle's trilogy. It's like those moments when you look at an old man and see the boy he once was. This last installment of Henry's life is perhaps not the place to meet him, as big parts of his story are missing, and it's not instantly clear that they've simply been told elsewhere rather than forgotten due to some amnesiac part of the plot. What is told here, though, is moving and winning as old Henry becomes the living symbol of historic events that in ironic truth he wasn't present for. Doyle's vocal portrait is deft, lyrical, and often funny, and adds palpably to all that makes Henry so utterly charming throughout this trilogy. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine