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343 PAGES

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By Charles Taylor

Sept. 7, 1999 | One of the strongest moments in the pop music of the last few years was the Cranberries' "Zombie." A refusal of the claims of history that winds up emphasizing the weight of those claims, the song is the Irish band's answer to expectations that Irish artists make a statement on "the troubles." But unlike U2, who first reached a large audience with their song "Sunday Bloody Sunday," the Cranberries weren't having any of it. "It's the same old theme/Since 1916," sang Dolores O'Riordan, and her tone told you that she didn't care who started what fight or who did what to whose great-uncle, and that she wasn't interested in sorting out the streams of spilled blood that ran together in some gutter long ago. She'd heard all the arguments and she was sick of them. The music told another story: the impossibility of escaping those grudges. Mike Hogan's bass, as it lurched along under his brother Noel's distorted guitar, sounded like the souls of the revolution's dead trudging toward their graves -- or attempting to rise from them. Over it all, the -- and I'm afraid the cliché fits -- wordless banshee wail of O'Riordan's vocals was like an ancient incantation, desperately invoked to send the walking dead back to their rest.

"Zombie" is a horrifying song. And its bitterness, its vision of history reaching forward to make a dead end of the present, is palpable in Roddy Doyle's new novel, "A Star Called Henry," as well, rising over the course of the book until it's overwhelming. The cover shows a smiling boy on a Dublin street and prepares you for Doyle's special gift for depicting rude, unsentimental cheer amid privation. Look closer at the background and you'll see a youngster walking along the street with a rifle over his shoulder. In Doyle's novel -- set in the years 1900 to 1920, encompassing the 1916 Easter Rebellion and Ireland's eventual emergence as a republic -- brutality is casual, simply part of the territory.

During his years on the run as an IRA gunman, Doyle's protagonist, Henry Smart, makes the acquaintance of Climanis, a Jewish Latvian refugee who provides him with cover and the fleeting refuge of a safe house. The rapport between Henry and Climanis is natural and unforced, but this makes it impossible to trust in an atmosphere where killing has the everyday and personal touch of a neighbor greeting a neighbor. Doyle ends one passage with Climanis offering a toast to Henry and his wife (also a revolutionary) and opens the next section with this sentence: "I was right up against his back when I shot him." It takes nearly a paragraph to realize that Henry's target is not Climanis, but one of the people he has been directed to kill -- efficiently, unquestioningly -- in order to eliminate some perceived threat to the Republican cause, or to send a warning, or merely to stir things up.

It's impossible to underestimate the force of that uncertainty. The constant in Roddy Doyle's novels has always been the author's empathy for his protagonists -- whether it was Jimmie Rabbitte Sr. of "The Barrytown Trilogy," a middle-aged man confronting the question of his own self-worth; or Paddy Clarke thinking he had the power to hold together his parents' crumbling marriage; or the battered wife regaining control of her life in "The Woman Who Walked Into Doors." Like them, Henry Smart struggles. Worse. He is poor, dirt poor, where Doyle's other characters have all been working class but solvent. But where they suffered from cruelty, Henry inflicts it. Violence is mother's milk to him. The coat worn by Henry's father, doorman at a brothel and hit man at the behest of a local crime lord, has absorbed years of killing and dirt and sweat and drink. Picked up by his father, the infant Henry tries to find a nipple in the filthy garment. Henry's father, as fathers tend to do in Irish novels and memoirs, disappears, leaving Henry with no legacy beyond his old man's wooden leg. Talisman and companion, used to crack heads and to cleave to his missing father's spirit, the leg accompanies Henry throughout the novel.

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