In the first volume of what he promises will be a trilogy called The Last Roundup, Roddy Doyle unpicks the stitches of the tatty, fragile and occasionally rather lurid fabric of modern Ireland. A retelling of the 1916 Rising and its aftermath, A Star Called Henry is itself a work of weft and weave; a curious blend of pop - the narrator/protagonist, Henry Smart, has the looks of a Mills & Boon macho man and the viciousness of a Mario Puzo mafioso - and gratuitous Paddywhackery - witness the description of a blameless cup of buttermilk as "old cow piss that would make you sick to your stomach". Doyle hasn't lost his gift for striking imagery - here's Henry on his granny: "Wrapped in her sweating black shawl, she could have crept out of any century" - and the poverty of turn-of-the-20th-century Dublin is all too well described, but the book (especially in its latter stages with the handsome hero pedalling around Ireland, a terrorist on a pushbike) hovers uneasily between its largely rural milieux and a dawning urban sensibility. But then so, until very recently, did Ireland. The second and third volumes may well reveal the apparent awkwardness of A Star Called Henry as a deliberate ploy.
