PDF EPUB} Oh Play That Thing by Roddy Doyle Ireland on My Mind

Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Oh Play That Thing by Roddy Doyle Ireland on my mind. Even the leanest of writers sometimes have a fat novel inside them fighting to get out. In Ireland, writers don't come much leaner than Roddy Doyle, who inherits the niggardly style of Samuel Beckett rather than the lavish manner of James Joyce. With his laconic Dublin-Northside realism, Doyle is a virtuoso of the sentence that travels no further than four or five words. But the fat novel inside him has now come bursting through - two of them, in fact, of which the first was A Star Called Henry , and the second is this fast-moving sequel. In its mixture of history and magic realism, A Star Called Henry reflected the rise and fall of the Irish revolution of independence in the fortunes of its picaresque protagonist, Henry Smart. At the end of the book, Henry is a Republican killer on the run; at the start of Oh, Play That Thing, he washes up where a lot of good Irishmen and women go before they die, the United States. This novel, in other words, begins with that most revered of all Irish customs, getting out of the place as soon as you can. The Irish write about history as habitually as the English write about suburbia. For one thing, there is a lot of it about in Ireland, much of it of the turbulent kind, which lends itself to gripping fic tion. For another thing, there is an Irish literary tradition of using individual characters to represent a wider history, a tactic which makes sense in a country where the private/public divide has always been less emphatic than it is across the water. It's true that many of the Irish these days relate to their history by the simple device of disowning it. A Star Called Henry is savagely disenchanted with nationalist politics, as nations usually are once the revolutions that brought them to power are safely behind them. Once the gunfire has died down, the trick is to forget about these embarrassing origins, which are scarcely good for business and social order, and rubbish the heroics you previously celebrated. This is known as revisionism, without a discreet dose of which you won't get an academic job teaching Irish history. Irish nostalgia has often been interwoven with a ferocious hunger for the modern, and one name for modernity in Ireland is America. Dublin is a lot closer to Detroit than it is to Harrogate. Oh, Play That Thing , like Frank McCourt's 'Tis , belongs among other things to an Irish love affair with the New World. In fact, one of the deepest divisions between the Irish and the English is that the Irish, for obvious historical reasons, are deeply fond of the Americans, whereas the English, for equally historical reasons, are not. For a cramped, clerical, down- at-heel country, the US means affluence, space, self-invention. Manhattan is a lot more exciting than the Giant's Causeway, and this narrative positively crackles with these transatlantic energies. At the start of the story, Henry Smart has landed on New York's Ellis Island, where intending immigrants have letters chalked on their shoulder by officials: L for weak lungs, J for too Jewish, X for mental, SE for too far south and east of Budapest and so on. Triumphantly eluding all these categories, Henry gets his start in the Land of the Free as a small-time literary type, otherwise known as a sandwich-board man. This recalls the greatest of all Irish small-time literary men, Ulysses 's Leopold Bloom. Chased out of New York by the Mob, Smart packs meat in the Chicago stockyards and falls in, a touch implausibly, with Louis Armstrong. Louis hires Henry to lend him some white cover and credibility, and the two of them go off on the odd burgling spree when times are hard. The coupling of Black and Irish is a classic one. Henry knows he has become an American when "black and tan" suggests to him not a bunch of British military thugs in Ireland but a racially mixed New York night club. But the past, as usual with the Gothic-minded Irish, refuses to lie down, and by the end of the novel the hero (now minus one leg and plus one baby tenderly known as Rifle) is still being pursued by the ghosts of his IRA past. A third and final novel is to follow. Despite its capaciousnes, Oh, Play That Thing isn't really a break with Doyle's earlier minimalism. What it does instead is convert the lippy idiom of the Dublin working class into the quippy one-liners of the American underworld. "The pants weren't invented to hide my happiness," reminisces one former lover. Dublin sarcasm becomes New York smartassery. Doyle wonderfully recreates a world of flophouses and speakeasies, flappers and bootleggers, populated by characters with names like Johnny No and Jimmy the Priest and reeking of multi-ethnic odours. It's all a bit too Chandleresque and relentlessly hardboiled, with little of the suggestive symbolic depths of A Star Called Henry; but what it lacks in human thickness it makes up for in pace and drama. But in the end, the novel is too starry-eyed rather than too streetwise. Its hardbitten realism can't conceal a very Irish romanticising of the American outlaw and spiritual hobo. The alienated Dubliner becomes the footloose adventurer riding the railroads. American on-the-roadery is just the flipside of Irish claustrophobia. Henry Smart is the eternal emigré, a loner even in his own country, who is nothing like as admirable as his author seems to imagine. And not only because he is a murderer. · Terry Eagleton's latest book is After Theory (Allen Lane). Oh, Play That Thing. This follow-up to Roddy Doyle's rambunctious and courageous A Star Called Henry is every bit as fiery, if not more so. Like such recent books as Darin Strauss' The Real McCoy , Doyle's latest novel shows us an entire period through the eyes of one character in this case, an Irish renegade assassin. Doyle, an Irishman himself, displays great sensitivity for the nuances of the American vernacular of the '20s and '30s and convincingly portrays the American national character at that time, by turns downtrodden and explosively arrogant. Henry Smart, on the run from his stormy IRA past, leaves his wife and comes to America to try to reconstruct his dignity and build a new legacy. Upon arrival, he becomes a succession of different Henrys. One is a smashing sign painter and salesman, whose con-artistry brings his employers success. Another is the assistant, or "white man," to the young trumpeter Louis Armstrong. The master musician, as Doyle portrays him, is a true rake. From his drug habits to his love of female flesh to his willingness to accompany Henry on criminal capers, Armstrong is far from the wooden historical figure one might expect. On his haphazard journey across the continent, Henry finds himself at last reunited with his tougher-than-tough wife. He also comes face to face with many criminals who are none too happy to see him. Doyle's dialogue reads like a hybrid of classic-movie chatter and near-gnomic condensation. This mixture makes the book sashay right out of its historical-novel trappings. The quirks here the way the characters constantly say "yare"(for yes), or Armstrong's semi-grammatical utterances, which tamp the depiction of his virtuosity, give this work extra zip. Oh, Play That Thing charges along in a suspenseful manner, but not without a fair bit of craft on Doyle's part not willing to sacrifice poetry for action, the accomplished author instead merges the two. Dublin for Chicago. It is almost 20 years since Roddy Doyle charmed us in The Commitments with his brilliant, foul-mouthed take on life in the housing estates of Dublin. His hometown has altered a great deal since then and his writing has gone through many changes, too. In Oh, Play That Thing, he ventures away from Ireland for the first time, locating the story in the gutters of New York and the jazz clubs of Chicago, in smalltown Connecticut and the cotton fields of Oklahoma. It is all over the place, in fact, and nowhere does he seem quite as comfortable as he did back home in Dublin. Oh, Play That Thing is the sequel to A Star Called Henry, the high-energy first volume of a promised trilogy called The Round-Up, which saw him move backwards into social history and sideways to take a swipe at the origins of the Irish republican myth. In most respects, it is less successful, less convincing. Perhaps, in part, this is because Doyle's idiosyncratic Irish voice sounds less sure of itself among the diaspora in America, and a lot less authentic in the mouths of Americans themselves. Like its predecessor, the book centres on the adventures of Henry Smart, a street urchin who clawed his way out of the slums of Dublin to become a ubiquitous, valiant presence at every major Irish event between 1916 and 1923, but also a hitman and an improbably prodigious fornicator. Oh, Play That Thing begins where the previous novel ends, with a disillusioned Smart on the run from his former brothers-in-arms, abandoning his wife and baby to start a new life in America. But Henry's American company is less appealing than his Irish, and he no longer has the revolutionary cause to ennoble him.

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