A Star Called Henry

The fate of Henry’s mother, Melody Smart (née Nash), is typical of Dublin’s female slum-dwellers at the turn of the 20th century. The text emphasizes that “precious little” is known about her origins, as though a working-class, colonial subject like her is too poor and unimportant to be worthy of a history (2).

From Henry’s perspective, Melody’s poetic “name was a lie” because it promises “a great future” (3), unlike her actual miserable existence filled with dead children and evictions. Married at 16, by her early 20s, Melody is forever wrapped up in her shawl, “already old, already decomposing beyond repair, good for some more babies, then finished” (1).

Demanding, hungry and forever irritated, Melody’s surviving babies are “eating [her] away” and making her existence miserable (33). The dead ones, whom she sees as stars that manage to penetrate the Dublin fogs, give her solace. Melody loses track of her husband and living children and seeks escape through stargazing and gin. Although infant Henry loves and craves his mother, he senses that he is too much for her. He must give her up as a lost cause and make his own way in the world. 

The narrator’s father, Henry Smart, is six years older than his wife, Melody. He is also double her height and missing a leg, which he replaces with a wooden one. Still, he “definitely wasn’t bad looking” (4); an impoverished down-and-out from Sligo, a county in the west of Ireland, Henry Smart “made his life up as he went along” (7), with about 10 stories concerning the reason for his missing leg. He also keeps his work as a pimp, brothel bouncer, and Alfie Gandon’s hitman from his wife.

Although Henry Smart initially accepts that he needs to work for Gandon in order to make money, when his children die in infancy, he is wracked with guilt. His response to his healthy child, Henry, is as ambivalent as Melody’s: While he is initially thrilled and names the boy for himself and his dead son, Henry Smart does not know what to make of the child. As the years go by, his efforts in the domestic and paternal realm wane, and he passes more time at Dolly Oblong’s.

Henry Smart is killed by policemen when they find an incriminating list in his coat—the same fate that later awaits his son if the younger Henry does not escape the country. From his father, Henry learns the underground waterways of Dublin and techniques for staying safe when he is on the run. 

Melody’s mother, Granny Nash, is “a leathery old witch” who is always wrapped in her black shawl” (1); she always “smelt of rotten meat and herrings” (2). A mean figure who shows contempt for Henry, she nevertheless has a library full of classics and avant-garde books written by female authors. Her greatest gesture of affection toward Henry is to lend him books when he is cycling about Ireland, working for the IRA.

Granny Nash acts as a herald who delivers Henry news of Alfie Gandon’s importance and whereabouts, and also of Miss O’Shea’s imprisonment. She also declares that Henry is like his father, which prompts a bout of self-reflection in Henry regarding a job that sends him off to do his superiors’ bidding.

Although Henry feels that Granny Nash can read his “every thought,” her own origins are mysterious: “I don’t know where she came from; I don’t even remember an accent” (2). The ambiguity of Granny Nash’s origins helps her stand apart from the narrative and comment on it rather than becoming actively involved. 

The mistress of the brothel where Henry Smart is a bouncer, Dolly Oblong is a prodigious businesswoman, knowing “what boats were on their way, the big race meetings, the date that Ash Wednesday fell on, years in advance” (14). She also understands the business advantage of continuity, giving all her “girls” the pseudonym of “Maria” and insisting that they stay inside because “she wanted them white-skinned and captured” (15). Physically, Dolly is a symbol of exaggerated sexuality. Henry sees her as “a brasser, her hair was a wig” and she is heavily powdered, although her lips “were real, red, huge and open” (335). Her abundant hair and large lips give an impression of sensual excess in an atmosphere of deprivation.

Dolly was raped by Alfie Gandon, the man who owns her brothel, when she was only 13 years old, and in a rare moment of vulnerability, she tells Henry “that it hurt then. It hurts now” (336). When following the advent of the Irish Republic, Gandon restyles himself as the respectable O’Gandúin, Dolly worries that she will be killed off, along with the past life the man wants to obliterate. Although Gandon instigates corruption, Dolly stands to be punished because her brothel is its symbol. 

Alfie Gandon, later O’Gandúin when he becomes a “national politician, of a new nation eager to prove itself to the world” (336), is the criminal mastermind and a consistent presence in the Smart men’s lives. He first appears as Henry Smart’s boss who orders the elder Henry to kill a list of people who have been getting in his way. Despite being a crime-ring leader, Gandon avoids getting blood on his hands, and gets away with his actions while Henry gets caught and disappeared by the police. The greeting Henry gives when he performs each killing—“Alfie Gandon says hello” (17)—is a testament to Gandon’s elusiveness: Like the British, governing Ireland from a neighboring island, Gandon is an unseen agent of power.

The younger Henry hears of Gandon both through Granny Nash, who tells him that Gandon is the author of his family’s woes, and through Jack Dalton, who tells him that Gandon is their respectable Republican landlord and has changed his name to O’Gandúin. Henry confronts O’Gandúin at the moment when the latter wants to “kill Alfie Gandon” and the past he represents (336); instead, Henry beats this “neat, small” man to death after O’Gandúin reveals that Henry, like his father, has been working for him by getting rid of the so-called “‘spies”’ that threaten the Republic (337). Henry’s killing of Gandon is a symbolic end to his family’s commitment to acting on behalf of others and Henry’s attempt to claim ownership of his destiny. 

May O’Shea, addressed as Miss O’Shea and 16 years Henry’s senior, is first Henry’s teacher and then his wife. Physically, Miss O’Shea is identified by “brown boots that had a woman’s toes neatly packed into their points” (71), brown eyes, and “a bun that shone like a lamp behind her head” (72). As both a teacher and a Republican, her efforts to be radical are continually undermined. The nuns who run the national school where she teaches forbid her to give impoverished street children like Henry and Victor an education. Later, when she wants to help with the Republican cause, misogynists like her cousin Ivan push her to perform the domestic ancillary duties of the women’s group Cumman na mBan instead of “queering things” by her insistence on doing armed soldier’s work.

Miss O’Shea, however, is in the revolutionary business “for my freedom. Just like you and the men upstairs” (122). She defends her vision of a free Republic to the end, leaving her daughter with her mother while she traverses the country with her gun. She pays for transgressing the boundaries of what is expected from someone of her gender, and the new state disciplines her by cutting her hair and locking her in jail. The anarchic force that Miss O’Shea, from the Republicans’ perspective, threatens the nation as much as the British rule did.

Moreover, Miss O’Shea embraces a sexual freedom that would have been astonishing for a woman at time in history when patriarchal mores prescribed double standards, and there was no reliable method of contraception. Doyle conveys Miss O’Shea’s sexual intensity in exaggerated, almost surreal terms; for example, she brands “two nipple-made pockmarks” on Henry’s forehead and marks her claim to him (121), regardless of the numerous other women he beds. The sexual tension they share is based on their earlier teacher/student relationship: He insists on covering his ears at their wedding, when the priest reveals her first name, so that he can maintain the fantasy of her being Miss O’Shea.

Annie, the supposed widow of an Irish World War I veteran, is “gorgeous” when her mouth is closed and “hiding the bitts of her teeth” and has eyes that are “starving, greedy and dark” (104). Like Miss O’Shea, she is sexually voracious and jumps at the chance to have sex with Henry whenever she can get away with it.

Annie’s mission is survival. When she and Henry meet, she is queuing for the widow’s allowance that the British Empire affords wives of men at the front. When her estranged husband returns from war with one arm, she has no choice but to turn Henry out, and she can only visit Henry clandestinely.

Annie, a keen singer, favors American songs. She has notions of wanting to go to America, feeling that “I could do things there” (206). However, she feels tied to her husband, who wants to “die for Ireland” (206), and tied to the promise of a letter from Henry when he leaves her.

Former architect Jack Dalton’s middle-class origins are evident in his hands, which have “softness in the fingers under the blisters and cracks” (169). Jack is a smooth-talking Republican agent who flatters Henry into rejoining the battle for independence by composing ballads about Henry’s heroism in the Easter Rising. Jack’s origins in architecture reveal themselves in his view of Ireland, post British rule, as a vision without any “remainder” of the Empire: “a bridge across the Liffey” (177), named after Henry Smart.

As an architect who becomes an MP, Jack orchestrates action from a higher place, while hands-on builders of the new Republic like Henry become invisible to the history books. Whereas Henry is initially grateful to be able to board with Jack and receive the same fare, Jack’s true colors are revealed when, in order to maintain his standing in the new Republic, he severs connections with Henry after Henry disobeys his orders. 

Real-life historical figure Michael Collins (1890-1922), a leader in the post-Rising campaign for independence and Chairman of the Provisional Government of the Irish Free State until his death in 1922, makes a cameo in Doyle’s novel. Twelve years older than Henry, Collins adopts the former as his protégé in the Irish Republican Brotherhood, fixing him up in a suit and telling him to find a bicycle and go up and down the countryside, training country boys to use guns. Physically, Michael Collins looks ambiguous because “everyone knew him but no one could describe him,” his hair being “brown, fair and black,” his stature “broad but not particularly tall […] the tallest man in the room” (191). Collins is viewed from so many different perspectives that there can be no single reliable account of his appearance. His elusiveness is such that Henry judges Collins’s name to be a safe one to go by when he doesn’t want to give the authorities his own name.

Rather than contributing to Collins’s hagiography, Doyle makes Collins a quasi-comic character who beats Henry up in front of a girl he likes, to make himself look impressive. He also delivers one-liners such as telling Henry, “by the way, Cathleen in Kinnegad says you’re the best and slowest ride she’s had in weeks” (204). Fictitious surreal elements like these ensure that Collins does not steal the spotlight from Henry, Doyle’s working-class hero, and they make Collins seem a down-to-earth man rather than a legend.