The Dead Republic
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4.5 • 6 Ratings
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
We last saw Henry Smart, his leg severed in an accident with a railway boxcar, crawl into the Utah desert to die - only to be discovered by John Ford, who's there shooting his latest Western.
The Dead Republic opens in 1951. Henry is returning to Ireland for the first time since his escape in 1922. With him are the stars of Ford's latest film, John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara, and the famous director himself, who has tried to suck the soul out of Henry and turn it into Hollywood gold-dust.
Ten years later Henry is in Dublin, working in Ratheen as a school caretaker. When he is caught in a bomb blast, he loses his leg for the second time. He is claimed as a hero, and before long Henry will discover he has other uses too, when the peace process begins in deadly secrecy...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Doyle digs into the modern history of Ireland in the concluding volume to the life story of Henry Smart, a teenage Sinn Fein triggerman first encountered in A Star Called Henry. Here, an aging Henry must preserve his own legend, which is taken away from him first for a film, and then by the IRA. In the mid-1940s, film director John Ford plans to make a movie based on Henry s life, but Henry eventually realizes the film that Ford has planned will reduce his story to sentimental pap. Upon returning to Ireland with Ford, Henry plans on killing the director, but his callousness has faded, and he drifts into the Dublin suburbs, where he meets a respectable widow who may be his long-disappeared wife. Henry ages in obscurity until the 70s, when the IRA uses a distorted version of Henry s story as a PR ploy; as the IRA man who runs Henry explains, we hold the copyright to the Irish story. Doyle is a stellar storyteller, though not a faultless one characters tend to editorialize at the drop of a hat; yet Doyle exhibits a peerless ear for cynicism as he grapples with the violence and farce of Irish history.
