Book review: The Dead Republic, by Roddy Doyle

Published on Sunday 21 March 2010 13:13

THE DEAD REPUBLIC Roddy Doyle Jonathan Cape, £17.99

This much anticipated final volume in the Henry Smart trilogy finds our man where he was left in 1951 – in a desert, having crawled there to die alone. Unable to trace his wife and children, who fell from his life by way of a moving boxcar, he's revived from the dead when Henry Fonda, filming there with John Ford, accidentally urinates on him.

With the first chapter providing the "previously on Henry Smart" element, this book can stand on its own wooden foot, simultaneously more than the sum of its preceding parts and a compendious memorial to what has gone before. When "Pappy" Ford enlists Henry as his "IRA consultant" for his pet film project, The Quiet Man, Henry's reluctant journey back to the motherland is facilitated. After 29 years in America, he settles into a quiet existence as caretaker for the boys school. However, having re-entered the land of "they haven't gone away you know", his picaresque adventures, and the series of events that led him back, become more knotty and convoluted as the mob catch up with him.

The narrative follows a more or less chronological trajectory, riffing sideways and backwards for Henry to remember the Henrys he's been and the magical realist scrapes he's seen. His exploits, and there are plenty more in this instalment, have taken their toll. Memory plays tricks of confabulation. He finds "most of the days accounted for, in the proper order", but his own story often comes back in fits and starts, bursts of names and noise and smell.

There is also another generous cast of folk, from John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara to Bobby Sands and Margaret Thatcher, a place where the tangible meets the fictive. The pace is dictated by Doyle's staccato dialogue: "nope"; "aye"; "grand", like a shower of gunfire and, as ever, "safe in the words" at evoking a sense of a place and its folk with readable grace.

Though there's much of a muchness in the many whispered, urgent conversations, heists over the border in nicked vans, public fronts, it lends the book the grinding authenticity of the repetition and conflict so painful in Ireland's history. Henry thought Ford's The Quiet Man invented "… a place where the Irish could be at rest. Where fists didn't hurt, where drink did no damage, where there was no real pain to hide. A monstrous f***in' lie, but a nice one."

Perhaps Henry's statement best sums up his own story, one of Ireland's tattered past, which enjoyably negotiates the delicate slalom between bloody monstrousness and her winsome 40 shades of green.

This article was first published in Scotland On Sunday on March 21, 2010