Thirty-five years after Henry Smart became one of the heroes of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, the most significant rebellion of the Irish against British rule in over a hundred years, Henry is in Hollywood, where he is an “IRA consultant” to director John Ford, a second-generation Irishman from Maine who plans to make a film about Henry’s life. The making of this film and its aftermath become a major focus of this final novel in the “The Last Round-Up” trilogy by Roddy Doyle, who had intended the trilogy to reflect Ireland’s history from its independence to the present day. This final novel covers eight decades as Henry Stark leaves Hollywood and returns to Ireland, attempting to live a normal life under Irish self-rule. Those who are unfamiliar with the preceding two novels will have a difficult time understanding who the characters are and what their backgrounds entail, and as the action moves back and forth in time, even someone familiar with the trilogy will sometimes be hard pressed to figure out what is happening.
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John Banville, in his first “literary” novel since his Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea, presents a most unusual novel which takes place in Arden, a large family home somewhere in Ireland or England, as the family gathers to pay homage to the dying patriarch, Adam Godley. Godley, who has had a stroke and is thought to be unconscious, is a mathematician renowned for having posited an “exquisite concept, time’s primal particle, the golden egg of Brahma from the broken yolk of which flowed all creation…the infinities.” Hermes, the son of Zeus, is the primary narrator, commenting on what is happening in the house and among the characters, while, at the same time, keeping an eye on his father, the randy Zeus, who is found asleep and sucking his thumb following one amorous encounter. The novel often resembles a farce, but it lacks the spontaneity that makes that genre so much fun. Instead, it feels as if every aspect of the novel has been composed and organized to the nth degree. At times it also feels like a novel of ideas, but those ideas are often murky, and there were times in which I wondered what Banville’s purpose was in writing the book.
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Henry Smart, born at the turn of the century, leads such a miserable childhood that he is on the streets by the age of five and solely responsible for his younger brother Victor by the age of nine. Always cold, hungry, and lacking a warm place to sleep, Henry and Victor are at the mercy of the elements, so concentrated on staying alive from moment to moment that they have no time to think toward the future. By the age of fourteen, Henry has met up with other poor who have some of the same resentments he has toward those who have dominated the land and commerce for so long. In 1916, the Irish Republican Brotherhood takes over the General Post Office on Easter Monday, declares the establishment of a new government, and raises its flag, and Henry is there–not out of a sense of patriotism so much as a sense that he is at home–and is fed–when he is among these people. When the shooting starts, Henry’s first bullets are aimed not at the British or at the police, but at the store window across the street, which he sees mocking him with its shiny new boots, something he has never had.
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Petit’s heart-stopping performance as he walks the tightrope betweent he two World Trade Center towers becomes the pivotal event of this magnificent (and monumental) “New York novel” in which Colum McCann examines many facets of the city’s life in 1974. Focusing first on the down-and-outers—prostitutes, the desperately poor, the drug- and alcohol-addicted homeless, the infirm elderly, gang members, casual thieves, and bright young people with no futures—he recreates the lower depths of New York, a place where its citizens every day walk the fine line between survival and death on a completely different tightrope from that of Philippe Petit. Like Petit, however, all of them are also rejoice in moments of beauty, the only thing that can make their lives worth living—an unexpected kindness, the helpfulness of a friend (who happens to be a monk), and even the bright graffiti that shows up overnight, deep inside the tunnels of the subway. Unfortunately, for some, it also appears at the end of a needle. (My favorite novel of 2009)
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Author and rock journalist Peter Murphy certainly doesn’t do anything by halves, and this novel and the author’s own promotion of it are about as over-the-top as it is possible to get. Murphy has produced a publicity video based on the book (see Notes below), using a gargoyle, the sound of crows (a motif in the book), and the powerful, raspy voice of Blind Willie Johnson, singing “John the Revelator,” a song the R & B singer recorded in 1930. Murphy calls his blog “The Blog of Revelations,” and his MySpace page is “John the Revelator,” filled with information about the book and its reviews. He has been actively campaigning to have his book win the “Not-the-Booker” Prize from the Guardian UK, where it is #6 on the longlist of forty-six books, and he is doing book-signings and interviews everywhere. He is obviously having a ball! The book, an “Irish gothic” novel with dark, religious overtones, is set in rural southeast Ireland, where the author himself grew up.
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