A Star Called Henry

Rating:
Summary: Passionate Revolution
Review: "Brawling and lyrical...In everychapter Doyle mixes high, historical romance with low, earthy humor...Doyle vividly portrays the wild passions of an Irish Everyman...[and] the birth of the modern Irish nation." This review from Time magazine sums up what an incredible book this is.
It will keep you at the edge of your seat. Keeping you interested, and the amazingly describes in such fine detail. The war comes alive in your mind while you read, and Henry Smart shows how hard it is to be key role in the revolution which brought Ireland to wear it is today.
...Henry is the type of guy your mother warns you about, he is the stunning, witty, handsome boy next door, that all the girls are in love with, the motorcylce rebel outside your school, he speaks of his passion for sex, adventure, intimacy, women and killing.
If you love ecstacy, excitement, adventure, and intimacy in you books you will love :A Star Called Henry".

Rating:
Summary: Life In The Stars * *
Review: "Doyle vividly portrays the wild passions of an Irish everyman, and the birth of the modern Irish nation"- Time Magazine. "A Star Called Henry" captures the essence of Ireland as stated by Time Magazine. Although Henry Smart's character never existed the book really portrayed a hauntingly realistic and clever vision of an Irishman in the midst of revolution. The book had me enthralled and deeply passionate about the cause and the people up until the very end.
"'Do you love Ireland lads?' They got no answer. We didn't understand the question. Ireland was something in songs that drunken old men wept about as they held on to the railings at three in the morning and we homed in to rob them; that was all. I loved Victor and my memories. That was all i knew of love" Henry is a character that you will never forget, and the book brought Ireland to life.

Rating:
Summary: So Far So Good!
Review: I'm only on page 10 and I can already tell I am going to just LOVE this book for the creative was it's being told. There is feeling so far in almost every sentence. From page one: "There were others, and early others sent to Limbo; they came and went before they could be named. God took them all. He needed them all up there to light the night. He left her plenty, though. The ugly ones, the noisy ones, the ones He didn't want- the ones that would never stay fed."

Rating:
Summary: did not enjoy
Review: Personnaly I did not like this novel. I found myself wishing it would end just so I could say I read it (still never finished). It was hard for me to read it. But, I got this recomendation from a cousin of mine who was raving about it. I think I am one of the few people who did not enjoy it.

Rating:
Summary: Near Flawless Novel by Ireland's great Roddy Doyle
Review: Roddy Doyle, Ireland's great author of such works as "The Commitments" and "Paddy Clarke, HA HA HA!" has written a truly astonishing work. At once a personal narrative, a great adventure story, a horrific epic, and a comment on history itself, "A Star Called Henry" is a great read, a fun book, and a literary near-masterpiece.

Set in Dublin and surrounding areas in Ireland from 1897-1920, it cronicles the first twenty years in the life of Henry Smart, a beautiful, intelligent warrior in the fight for Irish independnace. He becomes a member of the resistance at age 14, and through his eyes we see the fight to regain Ireland.

Doyle's protagonist is searingly honest about himself and history. He knows that he is a cog in a great machine, but knows that he can do nothing about it. He realizes that he is at once a major part of the resistance and a totally expendable man. He is constantly reminding us how he should be in the history books, but he knows he never will be. He is our witness, but the narrative he brings is not one born out of great battles, but instead individual triumphs and failures.

Roddy Doyle is not trying to synopsize history. If one wanted that, they could read any one of the many sources he lists in the back of the book. Doyle is instead personalizing history. Showing us an uncommon commoner caught up in history's tide, incapable of swimming back to shore no matter how hard he tries.

Even if you have no interest in Ireland whatsoever, read this book. Hell, even if you're an Ulster Unionist read this book. It's written so compellingly and so unflinchingly that I dare you to take longer than a week to finish it.

Rating:
Summary: Visceral Irish History
Review: The first salvo in Doyle's fictional chronicle of 20th century Irish history lands only slightly off the bullseye.

Consistently funny, unrelentingly grim, populated by sharp characters speaking pitch-perfect dialogue, A Star Called Henry begins with a bang. The first chapters, detailing the grinding poverty of the Dublin slums, are so arresting the tale that follows can't help but suffer somewhat in comparison.

Henry Smart's journey from homeless orphan to folk hero, from troublemaker to terrorist, and finally to an understanding of this journey, plays like myth and documentary intertwined. Though this combination is unusual and powerful, the book flags around the two-thirds mark as the violence becomes repetitive and the characters seem to recede into their more simplistic, folk-hero silhouettes.

But Doyle's narrative is purposeful, if perhaps overlong, and he eventually draws his story taut, as Henry's hard won understanding of exactly what he's been killing for brings the book to a wise and chilling conclusion.

A Star Called Henry takes some work, but in the end proves well worth the effort.

Rating:
Summary: A Genius Called Roddy Doyle
Review: The man behind 'Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha' and 'The Barrytown Trilogy', Roddy Doyle, is capable of working more magic than we readers can ever imagine, and 'A Star Called Henry' is a testament to his ability as a historian and a storyteller. Never has a miserably poor Irish childhood like Henry Smart's been described in more beautiful prose, replete with imagery of dead siblings reborn as stars. Henry Smart's boyhood in the dirty, crime-infested streets of Dublin is humorous, touching and often sad. Orphaned not by the death of his parents but by poverty and abandonment, Henry leads his younger brother Victor into a life of crime; hunger and desperation being their main motivation for 'fecking' bread and killing cows with blades hidden in caps. The hard life led by the children is tempered with the tenderness the brothers feel for each other. Henry and Victor's attempt at 'getting an education' is seriously funny, but the gaiety does not last long. Victor dies of tuberculosis, and this bitter experience shapes many of Henry's beliefs and ideals as an adult. By the time he is 14, Henry is a handsome young hulk in the Irish Republican Army. In the Army, he finds love, respect, but also betrayal. At once a love story and a history of the Irish Rebellion, 'A Star Called Henry' is a novel that is all substance and no filler.

Rating:
Summary: A Genius Called Roddy Doyle
Review: The man behind `Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha' and `The Barrytown Trilogy', Roddy Doyle, is capable of working more magic than we readers can ever imagine, and `A Star Called Henry' is a testament to his ability as a historian and a storyteller. Never has a miserably poor Irish childhood like Henry Smart's been described in more beautiful prose, replete with imagery of dead siblings reborn as stars. Henry Smart's boyhood in the dirty, crime-infested streets of Dublin is humorous, touching and often sad. Orphaned not by the death of his parents but by poverty and abandonment, Henry leads his younger brother Victor into a life of crime; hunger and desperation being their main motivation for `fecking' bread and killing cows with blades hidden in caps. The hard life led by the children is tempered with the tenderness the brothers feel for each other. Henry and Victor's attempt at `getting an education' is seriously funny, but the gaiety does not last long. Victor dies of tuberculosis, and this bitter experience shapes many of Henry's beliefs and ideals as an adult. By the time he is 14, Henry is a handsome young hulk in the Irish Republican Army. In the Army, he finds love, respect, but also betrayal. At once a love story and a history of the Irish Rebellion, `A Star Called Henry' is a novel that is all substance and no filler.

Rating:
Summary: A breathtaking departure
Review: This book is a breathtaking and ambitious departure for Roddy Doyle - it is an account of Ireland at the time of republican revolution, told through the eyes of one of Dublin's teeming citizens, who rises - literally - from the gutter, to become one of Michael Collins boys - a cop-killer for the IRA.

Not only an account of the birth of the Irish Republic, it is the tale of a one legged whorehouse doorkeeper, and childhood and life of his son, Henry Smart, who finds employment with the IRA not because of burning political ideals but as a means of survival and possible fame.

The sheer depth of the descriptive narrative is impressive. Like Graham Swift's Waterland, it serves as a historical document as well as a work of fiction - this reader came away from the novel entertained and educated, and from a British point of view, shocked at the subjugation of Empire.

Tragically comic, Doyle exhibits much of the pithy, down to earth, humour of human tragedy that served him so well in his earlier work. It would have been easy to write a biased account of the embattled Irish fighting a united war against the evil English - but Doyle concentrates on the experiences of Henry, who finds that all sides have the capacity for double-crossing and murder.

A Star Called Henry marks the maturity of Roddy Doyles' writing, and will doubtless be classed as one of the great works of Irish literature.

Rating:
Summary: A successful marriage of fiction and history
Review: This book is a very successful attempt to portray Irish history in the early part of the century via the experiences and perceptions of a fictional character. You come away from it feeling that you have both read a good, well-written novel and learned something about history.

The subject matter is absorbing, both in the early part of the novel, where one sees how abject the poverty was of Dublin's poorest inhabitants, and later on, where the focus moves to the characters who got the British out of most of Ireland, and the way in which they did it.

Doyle also does some interesting things with language and structure in the book, which moves it past the common herd of novels and give it some interest on the literary level as well.

All in all it's a very satisfying book, and I look forward to reading the rest of the trilogy.