A Star Called Henry

After the last of the rebels are executed, Henry lives with Annie in the home of her supposedly dead husband, and he gets work as a docker. He lives with her until her now one-armed husband returns, although after moving out, he continues a secret affair with Annie. Homeless again, Henry decides to look for his mother and goes to his maternal grandmother, Granny Nash. Granny Nash tells him that his mother is dead and that a man called Alfie Gandon was the cause of his family’s troubles.

Although Henry goes by the pseudonym Fergus Nash—because he thinks it will be easier for him to get work that way now that Annie’s real husband has come back—Jack Dalton, a former architect, recognizes him and hails him as “the pride of all the Gaels” (170). Jack persuades Henry to reenlist in the battle for independence, and Henry is “ready to fall dead for a version of Ireland that had little or nothing to do with the Ireland I’d gone out to die for the last time” (171). In the next weeks and months building up to the war for independence, Henry is a celebrity, admired by men and lusted after by women. The Irish rebels buy guns and taunt the British authorities to arrest them. They also parade the flag and the British-banned hurleys (instruments of hurling, an ancient Irish sport).

When the “jails in England had been emptied of Irish rebels and Dublin was full of restless men, desperate to get back into action, still sweaty and giddy after Easter week” (180), the mood changes and the war of independence truly begins. At Phil Shanahan’s pub, Henry meets real-life hero Michael Collins and is sworn into the Irish Republican Brotherhood, “the secret society at the center of all things” (184). He murders a policeman in his first week of membership. 

The campaign goes on, as the rebels provoke and the British retaliate. Henry considers the British Ireland’s greatest ally because, by their indifference to the national mood, the British “made rebels of thousands of quiet people who’d never thought beyond their garden gates” (186). Henry continues to borrow books from Granny Nash and learns that Alfie Gandon is the landlord of the room he shares with Jack.

Michael Collins adopts Henry as his protégé and fixes him up in a suit, so that he will appear inconspicuous in a country filled with British spies who report back to Dublin Castle. Under Collins’s orders, Henry steals a bicycle and rides his “Arseless Horse” across Ireland, delivering messages through “wind, rain, and bullets” (195). Collins both admires Henry and tests him, giving Henry a black eye to impress a girl he admires. Henry rests in a bed owned by a Missis O’Shea (who claims to have no daughters who are teachers). Collins wants Henry to train the country boys in using rifles until they are fit to fight the British.

Henry says goodbye to Annie before going up and down the country on IRA missions. By 1918, the World War I has ended, and the election brings victory to Sinn Féin. Collins, Éamon De Valera, and Jack become MPs; although Henry is “bang in the middle of what was going on” (208), he does not become an MP. Henry feels that he and other working-class boys like him “were nameless and expendable” like “the squaddies in France” (208). He continues to visit Granny Nash, who supplies him with books. She tells him that Alfie Gandon has translated his name into Irish: “O’Gandúin.”

Henry comes across Miss O’Shea—who is in fact, old Missis O’Shea’s daughter—and they marry in September 1919. As a wedding present, Michael Collins gives Henry a birth certificate upon which four years are added to his age, so that he is legally 22 and only 10 years younger than Miss O’Shea. Miss O’Shea has fighting ambitions, and she regrets that her Cumman na mBan duties were mainly domestic chores that supported the men; she prefers to wield a rifle.

Meanwhile, the Irish Republican Army’s tactics become increasingly violent, and Henry is ordered to eliminate people who get in the way of Collins’s plans. Jack defines their strategy as keeping at the British “until it becomes unbearable. To provoke them and make them mad. We need reprisals and innocent victims and outrages […] until the costs are so heavy, they’ll decide they have to go” (252).

Victory is as yet uncertain. Henry has to commit many cold-blooded acts, such as killing Annie’s one-armed husband and leaving a note that says, “Shot as a traitor and a spy. The IRA.” (256).

The war is not going in the IRA’s favor, owing to the brutal Black and Tans, who are World War I “veterans who’d been unable to get work in England and Scotland after the War and who’d now been promised good money, 10 shillings a day, to sort out Ireland” (258). The Irish rebels find themselves underequipped in comparison to this violent new army. Both Miss O’Shea and Henry are shot, and she carries him to a safe house. Though injured, they “crossed the Midlands many times, a crazy route of ambushes and burnings” (275). He dons his father’s wooden leg to help with walking while his own leg is healing.

When he returns to Dublin, the city is rife with spies who are out to catch IRA members. Michael Collins orders the members in turn to become “My Black and Tans […] We were the ones who’d do the killing” (287). Meanwhile, one of the country boys Henry trained up as a fighter, Miss O’Shea’s brother, Ivan, becomes drunk on his own power and rules his local area in the style of a dangerous, entitled landlord. One day, Henry decides that he has had enough of life on the run and declares that “my war was over” (288).