The Dead Republic

The Last Roundup #3

by Roddy Doyle

The triumphant conclusion to the trilogy that began with A Star Called Henry

Roddy Doyle's irrepressible Irish rebel Henry Smart is back-and he is not mellowing with age. Saved from death in California's Monument Valley by none other than Henry Fonda, he ends up in Hollywood collaborating with legendary director John Ford on a script based on his life. Returning to Ireland in 1951 to film The Quiet Man - which to Henry's consternation has been completely sentimentalized-he severs his relationship with Ford.

His career in film over, Henry settles into a quiet life in a village north of Dublin, where he finds work as a caretaker for a boys' school and takes up with a woman named Missus O'Kelly, whom he suspects- but is not quite sure-may be his long-lost wife, the legendary Miss O'Shea. After being injured in a political bombing in Dublin in 1974, Henry is profiled in the newspaper and suddenly the secret of his rebel past is out. Henry is a national hero. Or are his troubles just beginning?

Raucous, colorful, epic, and full of intrigue and incident, The Dead Republic is also a moving love story-the magnificent final act in the life of one of Roddy Doyle's most unforgettable characters.

Genres: Fiction, Ireland, Historical Fiction, Irish Literature, Historical, Novels, Contemporary

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Roddy Doyle (Irish: Ruaidhrí Ó Dúill) is an Irish novelist, dramatist and screenwriter. Several of his books have been made into successful films, beginning with The Commitments in 1991. He won the Booker Prize in 1993.

Doyle grew up in Kilbarrack, Dublin. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from University College, Dublin. He spent several years as an English and geography teacher before becoming a full-time writer in 1993.

Reviews

[Angus McKeogh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ll sum up this trilogy thus: First book was amazing and the best of the lot. Second book was borderline terrible with a ridiculous storyline. This third book was in between the other two. Average. Not nearly as good as the first but much improved over the second.

[Spiros · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many years passed between my reading of the first two books of this trilogy, A Star Called Henry and Oh, Play That Thing, and my digging this out of our bargain bins at work. Here's what I remember about Henry Smart: he grew up in extreme poverty in Dublin, joined the IRA at an early age, took part in the Easter Rising in 1916, married his former schoolteacher, the ravishing Miss O'Shea, fought at her side during the Civil War, became a political liability to the new government, fled with Miss O'Shea to America, where he befriends Louis Armstrong, fathers two children with Miss O'Shea, rides the rails with his newly reunited family, looses them and his leg, wanders off into the desert, and is saved from death by John Ford. This book takes up the tale from there.
John Ford recruits Henry to inform his story, The Quiet Man; Ford is enraptured with the story of his true Irish Rebel, and pledges to make Henry's story into the movie. Once arrived in Ireland, Henry is infuriated to find that, due ostensibly to Hollywood conventions, the story will go back to the original, sentimental story. Henry abandons the project and returns to Dublin, where he becomes a caretaker for a state-run school, and is drawn into the sectarian politics of the '60's. The deadly battle will be fought to determine who represents Irishness.
Essentially, what this trilogy examines is the question "What is the meaning of Ireland?", tying in nicely to Rebecca Solnit's Book of Migrations, which I read a couple of weeks ago. Who says that there isn't a divinity that shapes my reading, rough-hew it as I will?

"It wasn't just the message; it wasn't really the message - very few actually cared. It was the voice, the reminder of who and what we were, Nothing. No blacks, no dogs, no Irish. We were nothing and Thatcher told us that every time she spoke. She was in her hotel bed in Brighton when the hotel blew up all around her. She lived and climbed out, a bigger, sharper version of herself. There would be no solution. The murder was there, like the rain, sad but Irish. It was part of what we were, a big, sore lump on the tragedy. With the Guinness and the crack - we sold it."

[Paul Gleason · Rating 2 out of 5]

The final installment in Doyle's trilogy is a bit of a mess.

For starters, the inclusion of the Ford material at the beginning of the book doesn't allow Doyle's minimalist, speedy prose and plot to pull the reader in at the outset. This means that the first 100 pages or so are a bit of a slog, even though they set up Henry as a metafictional protagonist (even more so than in the other two volumes). He's the creator and "star" of his own life.

Existentialist? No.

Metafictional? Yes.

In the first part, Henry and Ford (the famous filmmaker) attempt to make a film about Henry's life. But - get this - even the script secretary is named "Meta."

The second part is much more compelling. Henry returns to Ireland and through his eyes, we see the second half of the 20th century enfold. Of course, Henry manages to get mixed up in all the political complexities and violence of the time - and Doyle's text covers a lot of historical ground in about 200 pages.

Doyle's sentences serve as a history lesson of sorts. But because the lesson is so short, it's superficial and doesn't really get at the complexities of the age.

It also makes Henry seem less human...less realistic. I know that Doyle wants to present Henry as a "white whale" of sorts - a symbol onto which anyone with any political or ideological perspective can attach meaning. And this allows him to demonstrate the futility and pointlessness of the "Troubles."

Doyle also includes some awkward magical realism, the allegorical significance of which is all too simplistic.

[Tony Laplume · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an essential piece of literature, a reflection on a pivotal element of the 20th century, one that remains relevant today, and the book itself an excellent reminder on why.

The Dead Republic is itself a sequel, actually the third book in a trilogy. Aside from a series of references to Louis Armstrong, however, you can easily understand it on its own terms and for what it accomplishes. You might feel compelled to read the earlier installments, but you really don't need to.

I came away understanding a lot more than I thought I would, than I could possibly guess. I had in recent years developed an affinity for the American writer Jerome Charyn, whose literary voice kept prodding at me through Doyle's prose. I'd read Roddy Doyle before (The Guts, a lovely but far less consequential read), and seen movies based on his books (The Commitments, The Snapper, The Van), but I don't remember having that impression. I'd already read plenty of Charyn by the time I'd read Guts, so that wasn't it. Charyn's books betray his connections to Ireland, and I can now only guess a debt to Irish literature, but his material never really approaches the depth of Dead Republic. You can see it in the superficial sense of Henry Smart hanging out with famous people like Armstrong and director John Ford. Charyn builds a lot of his work around famous people. But that isn't it, really. It really is the language, the kind that permeates much of the early Dead Republic, before he gets down to business. It's a kind of flippancy. Charyn grew up in the Bronx, a kind of Irish town, where his brother went into police work, and Charyn learned enough from that to infuse his Isaac Babel crime books with Irish cops. He writes endlessly of seductive redheads. And Doyle drafts Maureen O'Hara, said to be a quintessential beauty, Irish and otherwise, into his story. But where Charyn pokes and prods but ultimately dances around conclusions, because it's the poking and prodding that interests him most, Doyle finally plunges in.

Because this is a vivisection of Ireland, of the long struggle of the 20th century, how it evolved over time. Henry Smart was there at the start of it, and yet he missed where it carried on from there because he ended up in America, and eventually in the hands of John Ford as he prepared to make The Quiet Man, which was supposed to be inspired by the Irish struggle but instead was a comedic romp set in Ireland. Eventually we learn that it's Ford's attempt to create the Ireland of his dreams, and also a fair bit of propaganda. Ford was never properly Irish, but wished he was. Smart, by the time we catch up with him, had forgotten what it was to be Irish, too caught up in his own narrative, and thoroughly lost in it, suffering from blackouts never explained in the book. Smart feels betrayed by Ford, who claims Quiet Man was based on Smart, and yet Ford shamelessly fabricates out of thin air everything he needs, with Smart hired to agree to all of it, legitimizing by his existence a work of fiction. Smart uses it as an excuse to begin remembering his real life. By the time they end up in Ireland to shoot it, he begins the slow journey of reintegration.

At first he's totally lost. Ireland doesn't feel like home anymore, doesn't feel familiar at all. He becomes a gardener, and then is drafted into a caretaker role at a school. Eventually he learns there was a hidden agenda to it, but the real business is that he remembers who he was, and what that meant, a responsibility to help shape the future of Ireland. Then he reunites with the wife he lost, along with a leg, years ago. It's a callback to events in another book, but the way Doyle writes about it, it feels completely contained in Dead Republic. And then he's recruited back into the cause. It remains inexplicable to him, and yet that's merely Doyle's narrative voice. It's Smart's, who only knows what he knows, and that makes everything far more effective than if Doyle had merely drafted a diatribe.

Which reminds me. Earlier this year I read a book, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. I tend to write, when I have enough of a reaction, lengthy thoughts about what I read, and yet by the time I was finished that one, I muzzled myself. I was disappointed, mostly in the book. More often than you'd think, even when you try and be selective, you can be disappointed in literature, which is a terrible crime of nature. Ministry is basically Dead Republic without the perspective. It's a reaction rather than a meditation. It's propaganda. It's Quiet Man. And yet it's just comprehensible enough, in what it tries to say, that it's recognizable, and because it's recognizable, it's disappointing for its lack of perspective. And Dead Republic is a triumph because of its perspective, the way it sneaks up on the reader, the way Smart slowly fills in some of the gaps.

The history of revolution has been by definition messy. You can't have revolution without mess. The most famous revolution, at least as far as Americans think, is the American Revolution. It was successful. It left no one like Henry Smart behind. Right? Well, not really. The same petty divisions Doyle laments are there, too. Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr. Both of them could be Henry Smart. Deaths of political convenience. Alexander Hamilton. Even John Kennedy. Put aside every other consideration (hey, he's Irish-American, by the way!), and he was assassinated because Lee Harvey Oswald was caught up in the Cold War, plain and simple. And, political squabbling. Smart's caught up in that. That's the whole point. He endures because he remains relevant, one way or another. He's convenient. Yet for him, for the narrative of Dead Republic, it's all a lifelong tragedy, just making it by, decade by decade. Even the Founding Fathers had lives like that. Doyle trips along the years, skipping ahead. He keeps a lot of details indistinct. That's important to Smart's frame of mind, and to Doyle's whole thrust.

I'd suggest the whole book is a work of disgust. It just kept going on, and today it doesn't seem to have left any impact behind at all. There was a time it made Ireland famous, all right, from Patriot Games to the career of U2 to Sinead O'Connor tearing up a picture of the pope. And yet the kind of background terror it helped create transferred to different lands, and we don't seem to have learned anything at all. Do I think Doyle had that in mind? Good man.

Dead Republic is a singular achievement, Roddy Doyle's ultimate impression of his homeland. Forget anything else you know about his work. This is what it was all building to.

[Ron Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Roddy Doyle's trilogy about the fight for Irish independence in the 20th century exploded in 1999 with its incandescent first volume, A Star Called Henry. Full of violence and blarney and harrowing escapes, the novel opens in 1901 with the birth of Henry Smart, who quickly grows into a ferocious killer and a hilariously voracious lover (with an ego as big as Dublin). Doyle had already garnered a broad audience with "The Commitments" (1987) and won a Booker Prize for "Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha" (1993), but with its audacious narrator and fiery take on Irish history, "A Star Called Henry" was, to my mind, his most powerful novel.

Unfortunately, the rest of The Round-Up trilogy hasn't maintained the parabolic trajectory of that first volume. In "Oh, Play That Thing" (2004), Henry Smart skirts his execution by fleeing to Jazz Age America, where he falls in with gangsters and bootleggers and signs on as Louis Armstrong's handler. It's as frenetic as ever -- "Ragtime" with an Irish brogue. But without the fight for national freedom to anchor Henry's life, the action seems to scatter rather than build.

Now, in the third volume, Doyle brings his Irish action figure back to the motherland to rest -- though not for long. At the opening of "The Dead Republic," it's 1946, and the Hollywood director John Ford is making that incomparable western "My Darling Clementine," when he discovers Henry near death in the desert of Monument Valley. It's an outlandish but perfectly apt encounter between two great Irish mythmakers, one who worked on celluloid, the other in blood. Like everyone else, Ford finds Henry irresistible and pledges to take him home and make an epic movie about his life. Having created America's romantic notions of the Old West, he's ready to tell the real story of Ireland's travails.

"I was an old man," Henry says, though he'll more than double his age by the time this novel ends. "The bullets and grief had caught up with me -- but I felt bright and new. We shook hands. Ford was an old man too; he understood. I looked up at the black-blue sky, at all the dead and wandering stars, and I shouted. -- My name's Henry Smart!"

Doyle spends the first third of "The Dead Republic" describing the on-again, off-again negotiations between Henry and the great director, and there are some amusing bits involving Ford's minions and Henry's tendency to hobble into hiding on his one leg. But it's a long, lax prologue, made more frustrating by Doyle's spotty narrative, which gives little sense of time or place and eventually arrives at the wholly predictable revelation that Henry isn't pleased with the sanitized script that Ford plans to shoot. (Only someone like Henry, who's never seen a talkie, would be surprised by Hollywood's homogenizing rewrites.)

Once the novel shifts to Ireland, though, it's on firmer ground. Henry moves to a town outside of Dublin, reacquaints himself with a country utterly changed and works as a caretaker at a boys' school. "It was boring," he admits, "but maybe freedom was supposed to be boring. . . . The quiet life was mending me." Rooted in a real place that Doyle knows well, the story finally starts to breathe as Henry goes about learning how to live a respectable life for the first time. Although he's in his 60s, he's happy climbing over walls and sneaking into places, particularly the home of an older woman who may be the love of his life. Now and then he'd still like to whack off the priest's head with a shovel -- old habits die hard -- but generally he behaves, becoming a phantom protector of the students.

Doyle doesn't leave Henry in peace, though, and there's a cruel symmetry in seeing the old, one-legged man thrust back into the long war he helped launch 60 years earlier. His days of hunting down informers are over, but soon enough he has a new, involuntary role as a piece of propaganda: The Provisional IRA needs living legends as much as it does dead martyrs, and with his alleged connection to the founding battles of the republic, Henry gets wheeled out at meetings and funerals to rally the faithful. "I was Moses," he complains with a certain degree of disgust, "someone who'd actually spoken to God. I wasn't a symbol: I was an old, rediscovered fact. . . . I was their walking legitimacy."

Doyle can conjure up the terror of the Troubles, the unnerving sense of surveillance and cross-wired loyalties, but in this novel he usually keeps the explosions and assassinations in the background. What interests him more as this trilogy concludes is the manipulation of national myths. Pubs are bombed, boys have their kneecaps smashed, and zealots starve to death in prison, but Doyle suggests these are merely props. What the factions are really fighting over is not control of territory but control of "what being Irish means." Margaret Thatcher becomes the monster the IRA needs her to be, and the world media inflate Irish nostalgia till it floats above all the facts on the ground. Henry, once the murderer who did whatever the cause demanded, finally sees peace up ahead, but it looks nothing like what he imagined.

Maybe it's inevitable that this complicated and subtle conclusion can't be as propulsively entertaining as Henry's days as a charming killer at the start of the 20th century. But "The Dead Republic" exacerbates these challenges to its own detriment, particularly for a book so dependent on two earlier volumes. The novel's pacing is erratic, stalling and jumping like a worn-out tractor. The romantic element of the plot falls into a coma from which it never recovers. And Henry remains such an elliptical narrator that the story constantly risks losing its drive and color. I'm as convinced as ever that "A Star Called Henry" is a classic of modern Irish literature, but unfortunately the trilogy it began isn't.

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[Derval Tannam · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars. I never thought I'd use the word boring to describe a Roddy Doyle book, but this one was. The first section had Henry writing a script with John Ford. I didn't care about any of it and found it all pretty tedious. The middle section was, for me, the only with merit. Henry found a normal life back in Dublin and terrorised some slap-happy teachers. As soon as he realised who the widow in his life was though, it lost me again. How a section based on the Troubles could be dull is beyond me, but I had absolutely no interest at this point and was just trying to reach the end. This was a thoroughly disappointing read.

[Joshua · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant ending to the trilogy, perfect couldnt predict the next chapter. Beautifully written, filled with humor but such heart. The evolution of Henry Smart through the books is wonderfully truthful with extraordinarily exceptionalism.

[Tim Blackburn · Rating 3 out of 5]

The conclusion of the Henry Smart trilogy. Somewhat reminiscent of the Winston Groom classic "Forest Gump" with regards to Henry interacting with real historical characters but not in a comedic way. This installment includes a long, dark, and eerie interaction with the movie director John Ford and the making and filming of the classic movie "The Quiet Man". This episode consumed approximately a third of the book and left me wondering thr purpose. In fact, the entire trilogy left me asking that question often. I did learn a great deal about Ireland's struggle for independence from England and I did savor this knowledge. Overall, just an ok series.

[Frank · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Dead Republic is the third installment in a trilogy, the second part of which I did not read. I was heartened by various reviews that the book could stand alone, and while I was very glad that I'd read the initial installment (A Star Called Henry, 1999, which I enjoyed immensely), I seemed to muddle through the references to the second book without too much trouble. I got off to a shaky start: the first section of the book is set in Los Angeles and Monument Valley, Utah, where the narrator, Henry Smart, has become acquainted with the real-life Irish-American film director John Ford. Ford wants to tell Henry's story of the birth of an independent Ireland (from A Star Called Henry) but combined with a short story he read in 1933 about a Yank returning to Ireland called "The Quiet Man". As we know, there is no Henry Smart-character in Ford's post-card like film The Quiet Man; but that becomes part of the plot.

Henry returns to Ireland with the film company in 1951 after almost thirty-years in the States, and stays. He returns to Dublin, takes a job as a school custodian in one of the new North Dublin suburbs (Doyle's home turf), and spends years in relative obscurity (he always was a rather obscure character, always on the fringe of the great events of 1916 and afterwards, Zelig-like, just out of the frame of the famous photographs, etc.) before he's an accidental victim of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings of 17 May 1974 (a series of car bombings in Dublin and Monaghan town which killed 33 civilians and wounded almost 300—the highest number of casualties in any single day during "the Troubles").

As a result of the notoriety gained from a newspaper interview while he's recuperating in hospital, Henry is once again tapped by the I.R.A. in spite of his advanced age and physical limitations. (Like his father before him, he bears a wooden leg—not as a result of the bombing, but from an incident in the second book.) It is here that the novel takes off, after a gradual climb beginning with his return to Dublin. The earlier section of the book set in Los Angeles I found confused and dull, and I realise that was the point, that it described Henry's state of mind and well-being. But I didn't enjoy it.

The remainder of the novel, which tracks Henry's progress (again, somewhat on the fringes) of the Republican movement in the North was much more satisfying. It's somewhat melodramatic, there are lots of convenient coincidences which Henry attempts to believe are all orchestrated by higher powers—not supernatural, just political and military—but we know are literary.

One of the great charms of the original novel, besides the absolutely charming nature of the narrator, was the pacing: it literally ran. It wasn't until Doyle was back on Irish turf that he found his footing in this one, and the pace increased dramatically. It's a great yarn altogether; I'm not sure if I'll go back and attempt to read the second installment. One of my initial reservations about reading it was that it was set in the States, and after being somewhat disappointed with the section located there in this book, I'm afraid my reservations may have been justified.

[Stefan Szczelkun · Rating 5 out of 5]

See my review of this book as part of my review of the trilogy
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
Volume 3. The Dead Republic 2010

The story in Vol 3 takes off with Henry’s arrival in the heart of the movie making industry. John Ford has ambitions to break away from Westerns to make an Irish film and he intuits that Henry Smart is a manna from heaven - he takes Henry on as a kind of muse and with the hope that a film script will spill out of him. The writing of this script is a struggle between Henry’s passion for truth and the exigences of movie making as a myth-making process that has to serve capital and the state. It feels raw and personal in a way that departs from any common understanding of making a movie. One gets a real sense of how the truth of struggle is battered into submission by the gloss making media business. Even a genius like John Ford is a somewhat willing player in this game. At one point Ford is blamed for all the wrong headed myths of the Great American West and its white machismo. I hope its not a spoiler to say he ends up almost murdering Ford before the section ends!

After this Henry finds a low-key job as a school caretaker in the newly built outskirts of Dublin. This is interesting and Doyle imagines Henry playing a part in banning corporeal punishment twenty years before a ban is legislated. The strap was only banned in Irish schools in 1982. Henry is evocatively described enforcing a ban in his school in the mid Sixties. This is done with the use of personal threats. Is Roddy Doyle to imagining being spared the experience of the strap himself? Anyway its heartfelt writing that I related to from my boyhood opposition to the use of capital punishment in England in the early Sixties.

“Six was a many as I’d tolerate. Six of the famous best. I’d allow no more. But then I heard the seventh, and the eighth. The ninth, the tenth. I heard the objections, killed in the throats of fifty four witnesses, the silent outrage. And the terror. I was outside. The boys were inside, watching a brute lose control fo himself. Living it, and being destroyed by it.” v3 p.145

“There’d been a sharp increase in the use of corporal punishment in the weeks leading up to Easter week. Rebel songs and laments had t be learnt, and time was running out. But I let most of it go. I knew it would poison the boys, that they’d always associate A Nation Once Again and Kevin Barry with being skinned alive by some mad culchie teacher with spots across his forehead, bouncing and down with a tuning fork in a cloud of chalk dust and dandruff.” V3 p.160

He loves laying on the irony with a trowel in referring to the patriot songs. This is my favourite passage because it shows the deep values of Henry the ex cop killer who is driven not by nationalism or religion but by a deeply felt opposition to all oppressive violence which itself might need a firm hand to institute. Violence has been such a theme through the books that this pulls the reader up to consider the aftermath on the young. “They were producing a brand new middle class, quick-witted and hungry, who’d grow up soon and make the country theirs.” V3 p.161 Roddy Doyle is describing his own generation.

Doyle uses Henry Smart’s return to his homeland to get a close up to the Irish struggle of a new post war generation. This time he doesn’t get close up and personal with any famous Irish historic figures. That might have been a bit too uncomfortable at this later date, but still one wonders what he heard about from his own grandparents or that generation who might have been about the age of old Henry Smart. He gives us the essence of the history of the partitioned North in a few pithy lines.

“The prods had always managed to convert their own patches of hell into some sort of England. Trees grew were none could; hedges flourished where finding muck to cover the spuds was the yearly struggle for the Catholics. I knew: it was the history of the place. The conquerer had taken the land that could support the trees and left the shite for the natives, and had even taken rent from them for it. I knew all that. But it was easy to fall for the alternative story: the conqueror was just better at it, more industrious, there because he deserved to be. Plants grew because he planted and tended them; he told them to fuckin’ grow.” V3 p.104

But his early experience of being present in the Post Office in 1916 has repercussions in his life now. He is a symbol of this heroic battle for liberation, a mythical hero figure, and the current IRA want to use him for its own propaganda and wouldn’t take kindly to a refusal. This scares him witless and contrarily awakens the youthful thrill he felt when he played his part the nations struggle. He has an older man’s perspective, a down to earth wisdom, distrust of authority, disinterest in personal power and contempt for financial gain and the grubby realities of politics. Henry, like the author, is also an atheist.

“But I knew. I’d learnt it years ago. It was religion and, so, it was madness. It was the sanctity of the words. Republic or free state. Choose the wrong one and you were damned. Choose the right on and you were dead.” V3 p.186

Henry is blown up but not killed in the terrible bombing in Dublin, by the Loyalist UVF, on 17th May 1974 which inhale horrible reality killed 33 people and an unborn child. Henry wakes up in hospital and needs to talk. A young woman reporter lends him her ear and he becomes a story in the newspaper and so his past becomes widely known for the first time.

Doyle also hazards opinions on the IRA he must have felt as still dangerous at the time of writing. e.g. Henry abhors the knee capping of young offenders by the IRA. He think hunger striking is a middle class tactic! “I knew hunger all my life, I said - And it was never a fuckin’ strike. Only the middle class would come up with starvation as a form of protest.” V3 p.242.

To be fair, he modifies this opinion later:
“I didn’t like the hunger strike as a tactic but it was honest - it was absolutely clear. The striker chose silence, emptiness, the step forward into nothing. Nothing was better than what was on offer. It was full freedom, or death.” V3 p.257

Later Margaret Thatcher comes to the rescue as his energy begins to fail with age.

“I’d been getting cocky, stupid. But Thatcher gave me energy. I was a few montHenry Smart off eighty, and Thatcher had woken seven hundred years of racial hatred. She kept me awake at night. I shovelled spuds into me, thinking of Margaret Thatcher.” V3 p.259. Thatcher, “was the Provisionals’ greatest asset. She was living, breathing evil and she was on telly every night.” V3 p.284

He is forced to take part in IRA propaganda and, yet again, lives in fear of his life. Anyway the third book is a wonderful mixture of a description of a big man getting old and frail and yet there is still plenty of excitement as he vividly describes what it is like to be abducted by gunmen, hooded and taken to a secret location. His humanity always in struggle with the glamour of armed insurrection.

There are major things I’ve not discussed and in particular the reappearance of his wife and daughter.. but I will leave that for you to discover...

[Robert Strandquist · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite not having read the first two of this trilogy, this one is a solid novel on its own due to the omnipresent past of Ireland's Troubles participating like an active character. The two halves of this tale are connected on a thin line drawn between Hollywood, California and the holy land of Ireland where director John Ford moves his film crew to shoot the story of Henry Smart, the protagonist of the trilogy. This connection sort of works because Ford did shoot his Academy Award winnning "The Quiet Man" in Ireland using Henry as a consultant. The near-murder scene between Ford and Smart is visceral - one of the 3D moments in the novel. After Ford's crew departs, Henry's former life as a Republican revolutionary engulfs him. Doyle returns to using Henry as a prism through which we witness the Troubles from the 1960's up to 2010, when our narrator is 104 years old. So, Doyle's taking the mick here, but at this point we both pity and praise the old fart for keeping up the good fight as he takes the stage to proclaim that the struggle for independence must continue. I enjoyed this historical, hysterical tall tale. For my money, Doyle is a master of dialogue and innuendo-laced nuance. Yes, a master... he's grand.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

The third in a trilogy -- and the only one in the series I've read -- picks up the later life of Henry Smart, an IRA hero, first in cahoots with Hollywood director John Ford, later as the mascot/totem/source-of-legitimacy for 1980s-1990s provisionals (though he is not exactly who they think he is). I was not really clear how the two halves of the book related to one another until right at the end (the IRA had been image-making via Smart even during the Ford section, though we don't find out about it until later). The dialogue is really good, and there's one really lovely scene where Smart and another IRA veteran, both in their 80s, both not quite as legit as their handlers seem to think, meet riding piggyback on the backs of footsoldiers, quietly agree not to rat each other out and part. Still, kind of confusing and a bit too laden with symbolism for my taste. (OK, Henry Smart IS Ireland, but he's also a character in a story, so let him breathe a little.)

[Margareta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pros and cons:
I can only see one minus in the story, which to me is the first part of the book. I found that part (if you don't mind me saying) cold and hard to get in sink with the hero of the story. I do anderstand that that's the part when Henry is not himself and is trying to remember and find himself. After reading little more then 100 pages I started warming up to our hero, and from that point on I could not put the book down. I would like to see little warm parts of the hero before page 100.
Wonderful story and it is so true. When you are a true hero you don't always walk around and tell people about it, you keep it to yourself, and sometimes you do get credit for alot more then you did. Such is life.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sobering conclusion to Doyle's trilogy. Violent and tender, the story traces the slow erosion of the revolutionary ideals of the Easter Uprising on nearly a century of cynical political realism and human frailty.

And yet something remains of the original spirit of Republicanism in Doyle's characters: their fierce love, loyalty and shame.

In many ways the troubles of the Smart family reflect the emotionally and geographically divided territories of Ireland itself.

The Dead Republic deftly explores the strange landscapes between representation and reality. I recommend watching The Quiet Man, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, and Fifty Dead Men Walking alongside reading it.

[Andrew Wood · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved A Star Called Henry, skipped the next in the series due to poor reviews, and came to this one.
I enjoyed the first chapters, especially the way that the intervening (lost) years of Henry Smart are gradually filled in or just hinted at. The telling of Henry's relationship with major movie director/producer John Ford and his enotourage of stars such as John Wayne, Maureen O'Hara etc is clever and absorbing.
Unfortunately, once Henry is plonked back in Ireland, the plot becomes non existant. It simply rambles along, whole years are skipped in a paragraph and the amusing and wry views of Henry gradually wear thin.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

The final book in the Henry Smart trilogy -- probably the best, not as much fun as the first, but Doyle deftly deals with the question of Irish identity. Henry starts out with John Ford -- whose Westerns re-wrote American history -- writing the script for The Quiet Man which is supposed to be Henry’s story of Irish Republicanism. It doesn’t turn out that way, but as Doyle explains the movie didn’t tell the truth, but it made an Ireland worth dying for. Much of the book deals with this question of the truth, the fight, and peace and how they all may be mutually exclusive.

[Keith Currie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Henry Smart returns in the final volume of Doyle's account of an Irish revolutionary in the Twentieth century. In the course of the novel Henry ages from early fifties to 108 years old. This speaks volumes about the novel's plausibility as a whole, but it is a lot of fun, makes many serious points about Irish history and also packs a strong sense of menace in its latter stages when the Provisional IRA become involved. I found this a very readable, entertaining story, especially the first part which focuses on John Ford and the genesis and concept of his film, 'The Quiet Man'.

[Daryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved A Star Called Henry -- in fact, I've given more than a half dozen copies as gifts over the years. Oh, Play That Thing is much less firm in my memory (Henry working as a driver/bodyguard for Louis Armstrong is about all that comes to mind). But I absolutely loved this, the third novel in the Last Roundup trilogy. By turns, tragic, humorous, touching, informative, and sly. Roddy Doyle is an author I'll definitely be reading more by.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did not read the first two books of this trilogy, but will be sure to do so. This is a grand book. beginning in 1951 with the filming of The Quiet Man and the main character< henry Smart seems to be the embodiment of the Irish Republican Movement. It tells of his highs and lows through the six decades to now. Great dialog cynical and humorous by turn. I was sorry to reach the final page.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was definitely the best of the three even though the timespan seemed too long for the length. The writing had lost much of the mannered approach of the second in the trilogy which made for a far more satisfying read. Altogether a fascinating insight into the Irish psyche (whatever that may be) of the last one hundred years

[A. Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Henry is an old man now. One absolute treat for me is the development of "The Quiet Man" storyline. I've read the story that supposedly was adapted as the movie, and they have almost nothing in common, beyond the title. Doyle fills in the gaping divide with vivid skill. The book is a satisfying conclusion to the star that is Henry.

[William Doonan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have no idea why I waited so long to read book 3 of the Henry Smart trilogy. I thought the other two were fantastic. This is Henry's last book. It's not as good as the first book, but then the first book was amazing. But it's definitely a great read. And if you've been following this character all along, you'll be warmed by his finale.

[Alexa Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had been waiting for this book to come out for years, and while it was horribly depressing, it beautifully wraps up the themes of the trilogy - particularly the mutability of history. It would be very difficult to read the trilogy without a basic knowledge of 20th century Irish history.

[Debbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the third book of a trilogy about the life of an IRA fighter named Henry. The first two books were A Star Called Henry and Oh, Play That Thing. Very readable with more than a touch of Irish sardonic irony that was also evident in his book The Commitments.

[Tilly Mint · Rating 5 out of 5]

The final part in the trilogy of Henry Smart, bringing us back to Ireland and right up to the modern day. I have loved these three books, and feel a genuine affection for Henry Smart - due to Doyle's wonderful story telling.

[Dennis · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first and last of this trilogy were my favorites. I think the Dead Republic was made better by the cumulative development of the main character across the books. I was quite sad to say goodbye to Henry Smart by the end.

[Stella Ofarrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally finished this! Struggled with it as bought it not realising it was the third in a trilogy.
But i persevered and I'm incredibly glad i did. Henry Smart has had an interesting life and Roddy Doyle tells it well.
Going to be look for the previous two books now.

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Roddy Doyle's concluding volume of his trilogy ("A Star Called Henry" & "Oh Play that Thing") and his best. All three feature Henry Smart, all three are excellent reads.

[Rita · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the most profound and interesting series of books I have ever read. These books explore the history of Ireland, the IRA and love.

[Deborah Schuff · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful ending to a fabulous trilogy. The story of Henry Smart is the story of what it is to be Irish as well as the story of The Republic of Ireland. I am going to miss his voice very much.