It’s a tricky business, writing about Ireland, a country where myth–and now, marketing–have been used to great effect. It’s not just the long shadows of Joyce and Yeats a writer has to fear, but the dangers of cliche in an era when Irish culture is big business. Kits for build-it-yourself Irish pubs are sent across Europe, and “Riverdance” has played Boise, Idaho. “For entertainment value, it’s easy to slip into the stage pattery,” says Doyle. “But you’ve got to keep a strict leash on yourself, or you become a walking ambassador for the tourist industry.”
Doyle’s Dublin doesn’t make the glossy brochures, but it does make for riveting novels and films. His first three books–“The Commitments,” “The Snapper” and “The Van”–followed the Rabittes, a working-class Dublin family whose soul bands, chip vans and out-of-wedlock pregnancies are chronicled in lively dialogue. In his latest novel, “A Star Called Henry,” (Jonathan Cape, £16.99) Doyle moves away from kitchen-sink comi-drama to magical realism. And his new production company, Deadly Films 2, will start shooting his first original screenplay this fall in Dublin.
A bricks-and-mortar glimpse of Irish romanticism, “A Star Called Henry” is Doyle’s most ambitious book. Henry Smart is born in 1901 to a bouncer at a Dublin brothel, and grows up to be a freedom fighter during the Irish rebellion against British rule. Like an Irish Forrest Gump, Henry turns up at key moments in the republican struggle: the General Post Office on Easter 1916; at president Eamon De Valera’s elbow and at the wrong end of rebel-leader Michael Collins’s fist.
If Doyle’s early books stripped away the stereotype of Irish working-class life, his latest tackles the myths of Irish nationalism. The Irish Republican Army fought the British not just with smuggled guns and homemade bombs, but with stagecraft–costumes, props and rhetoric. Propaganda, a rebel tells Henry, is “getting your boot in first, man. And propaganda is the shine on your boot.” Michael Collins’s spin-masterpiece came at the funeral of a hunger striker in 1918. The funeral is filmed, the footage developed in a car with darkened windows, and shown at Dublin movie houses that night. “That was Collins,” says Doyle, whose research for the book produced a heavyweight bibliography.
Despite its head-on approach to nationalist propaganda, the book has been well received in Ireland. There are perhaps a hundred Irish, estimates Doyle, who might be angered by the portrayal of the IRA, “and they probably don’t read books–they’re too busy hiding in ditches and hedges.” Like the novels of Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie and Don DeLillo, “A Star Called Henry” places huge events and tiny details in what Doyle calls “a distorting glass, so that reality wobbles a bit.” Doyle’s art makes history–and fiction–shimmer brilliantly.
