39 pages • 1 hour read
A Star Called Henry
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Henry Smart’s Wooden Leg
Before Michael Collins gifts him a paper birth certificate on his wedding day, Henry considers his father’s wooden leg “his birth cert” (70): the only artifact that binds him to the disappeared parent, who would never call him by his given name. The leg is a motif that connects father and son, although they are apart for the greater part of the novel.
One-legged Henry Smart uses his prosthetic wooden leg as both a crutch and a club to floor his enemies before he sticks a knife into them. Although the wooden leg compensates for Henry Smart’s physical defect, it also becomes a proud and comforting marker of his presence for the younger Henry, who longs to hear “the wood of my father’s feet” after one of his long absences (54).
Henry, who takes the leg on his adventures both in the Easter Rising and later as a Fenian, uses it as both a weapon and a reminder of who he is. When Henry is shot and injures his leg, Miss O’Shea helps him attach his father’s wooden leg as a support. They find that it fits him “like a glove” (277). Although Henry recovers and goes back to using the wooden leg as merely a relic and a weapon, wearing it changes him; when Granny Nash next sees him, she says, “You’re just like your father. And that’s no compliment” (289). Her comment proves prophetic and welds Henry’s destiny to his father’s as he acknowledges that, like his father, “I’d been given the names of men on pieces of paper and I’d sought them out and killed them […] because I’d been told to” (318). Henry realizes that a sense of continuity with his father’s past is no boon, and he prefers to disown his wretched legacy and start anew.
Stars
The “star called Henry,” the book’s title, is also the basis of its hero’s complex: Henry is not recognized as the legitimate bearer of his name within his family because his parents cannot let go of the dead elder brother “up there” in the sky. The star identified as Henry symbolizes what could have been, an idealized version of the present, and it preoccupies the entire Smart family.
For Melody, with her “beautiful name, promising so much” more than her wretched life of poverty (2), evictions, and hungry mouths to feed, the star belongs to a celestial realm where God took all the best children “to light the night” (1). The starry sky exists apart from her suffering and allows her the respite of her hopes and daydreams. Henry Smart, meanwhile, decides that he “hated the sky over Dublin for not being thick and dirty enough to hide the stars” (33). He is tortured by the sense that his job as a hitman caused his children to be taken away by some malevolent destiny, a guilt that the birth of healthy Henry cannot permanently take away.
Henry, the dusky “shadow” to his older brother’s luminous star, is full of rage when he contemplates a night sky that pronounces others as worthier than he. After the novel’s action ends, and the narrative telescopes forward to where Henry lives an immigrant in America’s Utah desert, Henry finds the star called Henry—its “sly twinkle and fade could never hide from me” (35)—and attempts to “stare” it out. Fixed on his star, he shouts his name to it, insisting that he is “the one and only Henry Smart” until it disappears (35). When he can no longer see “its shadow against the blueness of the night” (35), Henry feels that he has successfully “killed” his brother, a ritual that he repeats nightly.
The Streets of Dublin
The streets of Dublin are both a setting and a crucial motif where both the battle for Ireland and Henry’s character development take place. Navigating the Dublin streets is in Henry’s blood and connects him to his father. When Henry and Victor insult Edward VII and the police, Henry Smart finds them and leads them to where a big bush makes way for an underground passageway beneath the city; they encounter the Swan River in “unbroken blackness” (57). Henry Smart is so fluent in the passageway that he knows every street they encounter and the stories of each street’s inhabitants.
Although Henry Smart hails from Sligo, he considers himself a true Dubliner because he knows how to navigate the city, both in its overground streets and underground passages. When Henry Smart disappears into the gutter, never to be seen by the boys again, Henry misses the underground landscape of their shared experience, and he feels a “heartache that made a little death of every step away from the rusty shore and the river underneath it” (60). With Henry Smart absent, Henry has to take on his paternal mantle and ensure that he and Victor feel that “the streets were ours. No one could touch us. We knew every sound and warning, every escape route” (63).
Years later, when Irish rebels are being killed after the Easter Rising has collapsed, Henry escapes through a manhole and falls into a place where he hears water and feels like he can smell “the sweet smell of my father’s coat” (140). He hears his father’s voice saying, “We’ll go home be the water” (140), a symbolic return to his origins and to the feeling that like his father, he can disguise himself and take care of himself: “The river had dyed me […] There was no [Irish Citizen’s Army] uniform now. I was just a big wet boy in a pair of brown britches” (141).
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