Roddy Doyle, all shorn head and glinting earring, talks in his soft, steady voice about one of the things he likes most about being a writer - it allows him to "do somebody else's living". When writing his new book, A Star Called Henry, set in Dublin in the first two decades of this century, he revelled in the vicarious pleasures of living life through its narrator, Henry Smart. "My own life is dull and monotonous and faithful and loyal and crime-free. And here I am writing a book about someone who rides half of Ireland," he says. The voice may be soft and steady but the dialogue is classic Roddy Doyle.
But back to Henry Smart. Gutter boy. Lover. 1916 revolutionary. Docker. Lover. Trusted aide of Michael Collins. Killer. Lover. Husband, briefly. Emigrant, inevitably. He is Doyle's latest and, perhaps, greatest creation.
Henry is a six-foot, two-inch tall man-child with movie star looks who is forced to drag himself up through the Dublin slums and somehow creates for himself a starring role in the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence and a love story that puts the romance of Collins and Kitty Kiernan in the shade. The first time we see him "riding" is in the bowels of the besieged GPO itself. "If only all sex happened the way Henry describes it," the writer mock-wistfully observes.
The book takes us through tenement life with Henry, through his survival on the streets of Dublin and his macabre unravelling of the double life of his father, a her one-legged doorman/hitman for a madam and her a mysterious man. It is an historical novel written from the point of view of an aged Henry relating his life. The book is pure fiction although the descriptions of the action in the GPO - the whole book is fuelled by a mountain of painstaking research - written, anecdotal and photographic - would greatly enhance the factual accounts of the Rising contained in school text books.
"It is true to say that fiction makes bad history," Doyle says when asked how he thinks the story will translate to an international audience unfamiliar with the historical terrain. "It is not my responsibility to hammer home the point. I wasn't going to put footnotes in; I'm not a historian and I don't want to be." A Star Called Henry has already been hailed as a masterpiece in this newspaper, and other reviews have been similarly favourable. But, while this endorsement will doubtless please Doyle, criticism good, bad or indifferent is something he has learnt not to anticipate. The experience of Family, the four-part television series which provoked an extreme reaction in 1994, has inured him somewhat to criticism. It took him by surprise: "The vitriol, the death threats - at first it seemed like everyone wanted to kill me." Some commentators on the left were of the opinion that his violent family tableau suggested all working class men beat their wives. The church thought he was trying to undermine marriage.
"You don't expect to wake up being the subject of sermons in the church. You don't expect to be shoved while walking into a pub, or people bringing drink over to you in a pub because they thought it was great, or you don't expect women to whisper `Thanks for that' as they are walking past you," he says.
At that stage, when his old teachers union, the TUI, issued a statement against a school-based incident in the series, he thought "f*** the lot of you" and to a certain degree he feels the same way now. He points also to a review in this paper of The Woman Who Walked Into Doors; it was, he says, "breathtakingly stupid". "It's impossible to be hurt by something like that."
"This might sound a bit arrogant," adds probably the least arrogant man in literature, "but because I am something of a household name in this country people have policy on me - there are people who without having read it will have their line on me and that's the way it is." This is his sixth novel and it is, he acknowledges, quite different to anything he has ever done before. The Barrytown Trilogy - The Commitments, The Van and The Snapper - were all set in a fictional village based on Kilbarrack on the northside of Dublin, where he grew up. His sharp social observations and snappy dialogue translated into best sell-in novels and produced two successful movies. His next project is a film screenplay, a romantic comedy set in Dublin called When Brendan Met Trudy and he hopes it will be filmed before the end of the year.
After the trilogy, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha astounded those critics who up to then had refused to accept his serious literary credentials. It won the Booker Prize and The Woman Who Walked Into Doors was also widely acclaimed. "Most of them in the past have been set around a kitchen and this one (A Star Called Henry) is about a man who never had a kitchen or anything else," he says.
His own views of the times explored in the book were forged as a young boy and as a student. He was eight years old in 1966 when the 50th anniversary of the Rising took place. "At that time we learnt the proclamation off by heart in school and learnt about what went on . . . it read like an Irish western with this collection of saints and martyrs," he says.
As a student in UCD he used to ridicule the 1916 heroes. He wrote a satirical piece at college about one of the leaders of the rebellion having gone into the GPO to buy some stamps and ending up being caught up in the Rising and five days later being put up against the wall and shot. "So the book is poking fun at the whole thing but at the same time it is earnest and quite serious. I was really intrigued that Padraig Pearse was a bit overweight," he says.
This fact is toyed with and Pearse's poetry mildly derided in the book as a kind of revenge. "When I went to Christian Brothers school Pearse was a god, a saint - we had to read those shitty sentimental stories and write these glowing reviews of them," he recalls.
As he researched the book the human stories of this eclectic bunch of men became gradually more real to him. "What really brought it home as serious and tragic was going to Kilmainham Jail with my kids and I bought a few books. One was full of letters from the men just before they were executed," he says. "These were men with young families. They left their families high and dry. The responsible middle-class father in me wondered what would have driven them. It was fascinating."
He says he was attempting a "an oldfashioned novel" which he wanted to be almost Dickensian in approach. He succeeds most in this when bringing a squalid city to life - Henry and his brother would earn money begging, robbing or catching rats. Alfie Gandon, for whom Henry's father worked indirectly as a hitman, is a "man on the make" who sniffs the air and realises the personal rewards that can come from revolution. "It's a side of the revolution that hasn't been acknowledged popularly," says Doyle. There will be some who won't be happy to see it explored now, and more especially in the context of a novel by Roddy Doyle.
HE is lovely to listen to. Much of the time Doyle speaks as he writes and the conversation flows with a natural rhythm, or dries up equally naturally depending on whether there is anything more to say. It's as though he hates the thought of wasting words. At 41, he is quietly satisfied with the way things have turned out, both in his career and in his family life. He continually refers to the fact that he, like Henry Smart, holds no truck with religion ("I'm a pagan") but he exudes an almost Zen-like calm and it surprises when he doesn't concede to being in anyway spiritual.
"If you ask me why we are around - leaving aside the fact that even at my most miserable I always thought life was preferable to nothing - I would say it is the continuity in my kids and in my parents," he says. "This continuity, the transferance of physical traits, gives a sense of meaning, a sense that one isn't in a vacuum and that's enough for me."
When his first child was born he was reading Vaclev Havel's book of letters from the Czech leader from prison to his wife Olga. "He wrote about how even a casual encounter has a meaning and can leave an impression on that person. Even a word of encouragement from a teacher or a compliment from someone you will never meet again can add inches to your height - and then you have other people who bring meaning to your life and you try to give that back and . . ." Doyle checks himself, grins and muses that he is beginning to sound like a trendy lefty Christian.
Doyle says he has been "a slave to realism" in the past but that with this book he had the freedom to play around slightly more with reality, the language and the facts of a story. "With Henry's story it was like putting a magnifying glass over reality and making something bigger of it," he says.
He is fond of Henry, "which is fortunate because he is with me for the next 10 years or so" - the book is the first in a three-part series called The Last Roundup. We will next see Henry in 1920s America and Doyle is considering moving to the US with his family for a time, for research.
"Dublin will always be the centre of my world but we are thinking of going for a calendar year - it would be nice to live in a place where there is a difference between winter and summer, then to go home again and say, `Jesus I'm never going back there again'. Now is the time to do it," he says.
A Star Called Henry is published by Jonathan Cape at £16.99 in UK
Roddy Doyle will give a reading at the Hot Press Irish Music Hall of Fame at 8 p.m. on Monday, August 30th, followed by an open conversation with fellow-author, Nick Hornby. Tickets available from venue, telephone 01-878 3345.