A Star Called Henry

The novel’s first five chapters tell the story of Henry’s childhood and show his strange predicament of being an exceptional boy to outsiders and feeling like an imposter at home. Unlike the dead brother for whom he is named, Henry, his “stomach crying to be filled,” is no ethereal star but a “shocking substitute for the little Henry who’d been too good for this world, the Henry God had wanted for himself” (1). Given that the Smart family’s living conditions in turn-of-the-century colonial Ireland are so wretched, Melody resigns her hopes to an inaccessible celestial realm rather than placing them in her living children.

Henry, “a healthy, good-sized baby” who “glowed guaranteed life” in a way nearly unheard of in an impoverished neighborhood where infant mortality is rife (23), is a miracle in himself. His health temporarily alleviates Henry Smart’s guilt that his sins as a hitman have killed his babies and brings hope to the neighborhood. Although written in Henry’s voice, the text has an omniscient perspective, conveying an understanding of the histories and viewpoints of those other than himself. Henry conveys his own infant needs and his desire to control the narrative, through the repeated phrase “What about me? What about me?” (31). His drive to survive and supersede the original Henry is furious, almost ruthless, as he becomes someone who is “eating” his mother and her nostalgic fantasies “away.”

When Henry Smart insists on naming the new baby Henry, the name proves a curse because the memory of Melody’s first “one and only Henry” relegates the healthy newborn to the status of cuckoo (31). True to the cuckoo stereotype, Henry becomes too big for the dark, poky rooms where his family is sequestered; he bursts out onto the streets of Dublin. Henry’s realization that “it was my world and it could be as big and as small as I wanted it to be” is crucial to his taking ownership of his life (45)—“it” referring to an ambiguous space of adjustable scale. Born into poverty, and having nothing to lose, Henry is on a constant search to fill his emptiness.

Once he has tended to his and his brother’s material needs for food and shelter, Henry grapples with the worldlier entities of education and politics. Although initially too focused on survival to give much thought to the plight of British-ruled and exploited Ireland, the sight of the British monarch Edward VII, a “fat foreigner” who has “thousands of people […] cheering and waving for him” (52), makes Henry angry. He is later willing to sabotage cows to help end the plight of further monarchical visits as long as he is paid for the work.

Similarly, feeling the need to “better” himself and his brother, Henry smuggles two days of free education for them at the national school. The teacher, Miss O’Shea, who will play a critical role in Henry’s life later on, pronounces Henry a “‘genius” owing to his quickness in arithmetic and social charm. Still, Henry’s desire for “more” is undercut by devastating setbacks, including his eviction from the school, Victor’s death, and the disappearance of both parents.

The perennially hard odds of Henry’s life, set against his determination to do better, parallels the fermenting unrest in an Ireland growing tired of its British oppressors. In the early 20th century, nationalists (who tended to be Catholic) were chafing for independence from the United Kingdom, while unionists (who tended to be Protestant) feared they would lose the rights they enjoyed in the U.K. if they lived in a Catholic-ruled Ireland. Henry’s quest for “more” will lead him into the heart of this rebellion, into the company of its most visible leaders, and into a life that he thinks will be different from his father’s—until he finds that he, too, is working as a hitman, and the revolution’s leaders are merely bosses of another sort.