Fiction review: 'Dead Republic,' Roddy Doyle
The Dead Republic
By Roddy Doyle
(Viking; 329 pages; $26.95)
"The Dead Republic" completes Irish novelist Roddy Doyle's trilogy about Henry Smart, a youthful participant in Irish republicanism's seminal event, the Easter Rebellion of 1916. After telling in "A Star Called Henry" of his role in those years of Ireland's successful struggle to be free of English rule, Doyle went on to chronicle Henry's American years in "Oh, Play That Thing."
Across the Atlantic, Henry lived the Jazz Age life, lost a leg in a railway accident saving his son's life and got to know figures like Louis Armstrong and John Ford, who were as iconic in his adopted land as were the 1916 rebels and men like Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera, who had been his comrades-in-arms back in the old sod.
When "The Dead Republic" opens, it is 1951 and Henry has returned to Ireland in John Ford's entourage, sans the wife and children he had lost along with that limb but with a U.S. passport and, he kids himself, a new identity.
Past is present
But his past is crucial to his new role, which is technically a consultant to the great director as he makes his epic "The Quiet Man," a classic story of Ireland's fight for independence. But there's a lot more to it than that, as Doyle makes clear at the outset:
"Ford knew me - I didn't know how. He knew all about me. He knew my scars and how I got them. He looked across the darkness, straight at me.
"-You're the story, he'd said.
"He was going to make the film of my life. That was why I was there now, in Ireland, sitting against the stone wall. I remembered it like quick pain, like the anger that was my real blood. I remembered the decision: I'd go home. I'd go home and tell my story. I was an old man - the bullets and grief had caught up with me - but I felt bright and new."
Coming down the steps of the airplane at Shannon Airport and living in a castle in the southwest of Ireland, Henry is full of hope. But things soon sour between him and Ford, and after a violent confrontation, vividly described, Henry is thrust out of the make-believe Ireland of Hollywood into what the great Irish poet Yeats once described as the "desolation of reality." Although he describes himself as an old man, Henry is a mere 51 when the novel opens: By the time it ends, he has lived nearly six decades in an Ireland that changes a great deal in that time, but, it is safe to say, is never the Hollywood version of Ireland.
Henry attempts to live quietly and anonymously, working as a gardener and eventually as a handyman at a school. He is no longer interested in his history, political or personal, but in the chilling words of Leon Trotsky, history is interested in him. And so he finds that he cannot escape his past, ending up in bed (by a coincidence that stretches credulity just a bit) with none other than his long-lost wife left behind in America and finding that neither the IRA Provisionals nor the Irish police will let him put his past behind him.
A guide to history
All this makes for a good story, and Henry is a valuable guide to the strange evolution of Ireland into a society so different on the surface from its revolutionary beginnings. But it is and it isn't so different: The political divide of the 1920s still defines the party structure of late 20th and early 21st century Ireland, a specter that continues to haunt. Doyle is a sophisticated observer of Irish society and its politics and this raises the importance of what he is doing in his fiction way beyond entertainment, although he provides plenty of that along the way.
I don't use the word importance lightly, because what is clearly behind Doyle's enterprise in this novel is a passionate determination to differentiate between the political myths of Ireland and the reality. And perhaps even more to debunk the facile view of Irish history and politics so prevalent in the United States among Irish Americans - and beyond.
That is, of course, where Ford comes in, encapsulating the sentimental and fundamentally false view of Irish history propagated in "The Quiet Man." And so Henry's murderous rage toward the director is rooted in his own passionate feelings, buried deep under his denial of the past.