A Star Called Henry. By Roddy Doyle. Jonathan Cape. 342pp. £16.99 in UK
Roddy Doyle's speciality is speech that reveals the soul in a way normal talk never does. Schoolboys, battered wives and soul aficionados - all more or less contemporary - have bared their all, but in his latest novel we have something new in the canon: a figure from the past.
This is the star of the title, Henry Smart, and in the book, in his unique street voice, he tells us his story. Henry, son of a one-legged brothel bouncer cum hitman, is born in a Dublin slum at the start of this century. He grows to be a garrulous and infinitely resourceful individual. Think Orson Welles in The Third Man, add devastating good looks, and you will begin to have his measure.
Henry is befriended by James Connolly, who teaches him to read. Like Doctorow's fiction, this novel is dotted with real people. Come Easter 1916, Henry is in the General Post Office in the uniform of the Citizen Army. And in the midst of all the excitement (interestingly described, incidentally, which is saying something, given the familiarity of the terrain), Henry has an epiphany. The first of many.
The Volunteers, Henry realises, are Catholic, mother-fixated, Anglophobic, stupid and petit bourgeois. They abhor the looters out on Sackville Street and they abhor the shawlies who beat a path to the GPO door in search of the pensions of their men folk who are on the western front. The Volunteers, who cannot understand how poverty determines behaviour, see these women and their men as pro-British traitors.
But then they would, wouldn't they, given the uprising is for themselves, the Catholic rural middle class, and not the poor. This is what Henry grasps.
After the surrender in the GPO, Henry miraculously escapes the British, goes underground and becomes a docker (one of the best parts of the book). He resurfaces in 1917 and, despite what he has understood, he allows Collins's charm to work its magic; he becomes embroiled again. He is sworn into the IRB.
He trains IRA volunteers. He is made one of the "twelve apostles" and stiffs dozens of spies for Collins (none of them "spies", it turns out, just men with minds of their own whom the republican movement couldn't tolerate). He marries a republican with psychotic tendencies.
When he can suspend thought (which he mostly manages to do), Henry is your classic amoral maniac on which all revolutions depend. He just does the business, he doesn't ask questions and, when he kills, there is no ideology involved. Killing in Ireland, Henry emphasises, is always a politics-free zone.
The trouble, though, is that Henry can't suspend thinking all the time. Now and again his brain clicks in (more and more, as he matures) and when this happens, he is truly, in Irish terms, subversive.
For a start, according to Henry, the peelers and soldiers, the Tans and Auxiliaries, were never the monsters of republican lore. Au contraire, they were just hard-nosed bastards who did a job. They were also good at their job.
According to Henry the Irish didn't win and never could; on the contrary, the struggle consisted of unheroic, horrible acts (a pig's nose rings are inserted as ear-rings in the ears of a girl who loves a peeler, for instance). These deeds are calculated to provoke the enemy into doing horrible things, such as burning creameries or nailing Shinners to trees. This is depicted as Saxon brutality (the novel is brilliant on the Sinn Fein capacity for spinning stories to its advantage) and this in turn gets the population behind Sinn Fein.
Our struggle, in other words, was a gigantic confidence trick. It was all advertising; we were swindled. It was non-consensual and it was non-democratic. Our founding fathers had no vision and no commitment to improving our lot.
Far from being a noble anti-colonial battle, the fight for Irish freedom was a squalid putsch (in the classic sense) by a small group of ruthless, well-armed, ideologically arrogant men and women who finessed the withdrawal of the British and their ascension to power. Ireland post-truce was no different from the Anglo-Ireland that existed before except that the new clique got to run it for their own benefit. The Free State and what followed may even have been worse than Anglo-Ireland. In concrete terms, our glorious uprising, with its hundreds of dead people, achieved nothing more than the transfer of power to a repellent group of men who founded parties with Gaelic names that have milked us, like aphids, these last 80 years. No wonder then that Henry flees to Liverpool on the last page of the book.
Both in its sweep and the vigour of its diagnosis of everything that is wrong with Ireland's sense of itself, this novel is the equal of Grass's The Tin Drum and Celine's Journey to the End of the Night (though Doyle's politics, I emphasise, are of the left not the right; nor are they anti-Semitic - quite the reverse, in fact). Like those works, this is a brilliant and breathtaking act of apostasy.
It exposes each of the ideological underpinnings on which the state rests and then it demolishes each in turn.
Confrontation with the truth is how a nation matures but this will not be to everyone's taste, especially those who benefit from the lies we believe - our politicians. They are venal (as we know to our cost) but happily our system (filched from our old oppressor) inhibits their latent authoritarianism.
However, in other, less forgiving climes (say, the Soviet Union), Doyle would be put on a cattle truck and sent away. For ever. There is no higher praise, I believe, than to say a book is that dangerous.
I can also say that here, for once, that most overused of terms is applicable: this really is a masterpiece.
Carlo Gebler's recent novel, How to Murder a Man, is now out in paperback and his children's book, The Base, has just been published