Roddy Doyle: Oh, play that thing

Reviewed by CHRIS BOURKE

Roddy Doyle's hero Henry Smart has the luck of the Irish. In A Star Called Henry, the first volume of Doyle's projected Last Roundup trilogy, Smart seemed to take part in every key moment in Irish republican history. We left the charming professional killer on the run after the civil war of 1922, the same age as the century but with several lifetimes worth of victims and lovers.

Like any self-respecting young Irish-man with a past to forget, Smart flees Eire for the greener pastures of the United States. Moments after arriving at Ellis Island, he has biffed his fake passport into the Hudson, bought a new suit, seen a Douglas Fairbanks silent film and found a job as an advertising sandwich-board bearer.

Smart is an Irish hustler in a hurry, taking on Manhattan as the jazz age is in full swing. All the ingredients are present for an exhilarating journey through time, with snappy dialogue, walk-on roles for famous names, bootleg liquor and great music. E. L. Doctorow and William Kennedy have mined this territory, and in the hands of Doyle — whose debut The Commitments sang like the soul music it championed — Oh, Play That Thing should be magical-realism gold. But it's an annoying mess.

Doyle makes Smart too smart for his own good; his swagger becomes tiring and his choppy, Chandleresque dialogue is often incoherent. Smart hits New York, but New York hits back, so after a maddening hundred pages the hero hits the road.

In Chicago, Louis Armstrong enters stage left and the narrative finds some direction. Doyle's research starts to pay dividends with his use of black vernacular and a soundtrack of Satchmo at his hottest.

Smart becomes Armstrong's white man ("my purpose was my whiteness") dancing to Heebie Jeebies and Potato Head Blues, the "sharpest ofay [white person] in Chicago". Al Capone supplies the booze, Mezz Mezzrow the grass, Dutch Schultz the violence.

Suspending disbelief is all very well — it worked in A Star Called Henry — but this feverish, tough-talking B-movie isn't engaging enough for us to indulge Doyle's conjuring tricks. Smart escapes more scrapes than Jimmy Cagney, but when he takes Armstrong along on a night of crime — cue ludicrous blackface dialogue — the ensuing coincidences make the story laughable.

Doyle's characters are undeveloped and his narrative flow lurches every which way, then throws away such promising material with a daft, hurried ending. With Oh, Play That Thing Henry Smart and Roddy Doyle are stranded mid-trilogy, in a blind alley playing the blues.


* Chris Bourke is the producer of National Radio's Saturday Morning

* Jonathan Cape, $54.95