Born into squalor, Henry Smart has all the cards stacked against him. With a mother ruined by poverty and childbirth, and a one-legged father who deserts the family soon after his son is born, Henry is forced to fend for himself.
From an early age, he finds himself scouring the fetid alleys of Dublin's slums, stealing food wherever he can find it, for himself and his consumptive little brother. Racked by hunger and riddled with lice, Henry grows up with the cunning of a street fighter, a natural intelligence and stunning good looks. By the time of the Easter Rising in 1916, he is the perfect candidate for Michael Collins' newly-formed Irish Republican Army. As the conflict becomes a full-blown war of independence, Henry is recruited as an IRA assassin, travelling from coast to coast on his rusty bike, executing British agents and Irish informers with ruthless efficiency.
This is Irish history a la Roddy Doyle, a bawdy romp through the most important event in that country's troubled past. The insurrection is seen through the eyes of this street urchin turned killer, a boy fired by nationalist fervour, who grows into a man, gripped by the sadness of disillusion. Doyle's revolution is stripped of rose tinted glamour. Its players are an incongruous mixture of the saintly and the damned; the idealists and the opportunists.
As Henry becomes more politically aware he realises that the real heroes, the James Connollys of this world, end up dying for the cause. The opportunists are the ones who come to power. As a fellow IRA soldier, who is out for the main chance tells him, 'It's about control of the island, that's what the soldiering's about, not the harps and martyrs and the freedom to swing a hurley.' Doyle's descriptions of graphic violence and sex are not gratuitous. They are integral parts of the text describing a life lived on the margins of society. His urgent and passionate style fills every page. Characteristically, he uses the minimum of punctuation, with no quotation marks. This gives a greater fluidity to his writing, as prose and dialogue run together seamlessly.
The scenes in Dublin GPO during the Easter Rising are engrossing. Mixing real and fictional characters is a device in literature which often fails, but Doyle manages to pull it off. If the middle of the novel sags a little, it is only because the rest of it is so vibrant, with an ending that turns the story a full circle.
This is volume one of The Last Roundup. The publicity material is giving nothing away about volume two, but I expect we haven't seen the last of Henry Smart.