Oh, Play That Thing - Softcover

Doyle, Roddy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099477653 ISBN 13: 9780099477655

Publisher: Vintage, 2005

Synopsis

It's 1924, and New York is the centre of the universe.

Henry Smart, on the run from Dublin, falls on his feet. He is a handsome man with a sandwich board, behind which he stashes hooch for the speakeasies of the Lower East Side. He catches the attention of the mobsters who run the district and soon there are eyes on his back and men in the shadows. It is time to leave, for another America...

Chicago is wild and new, and newest of all is the music.

Furious, wild, happy music played by a man with a trumpet and bleeding lips called Louis Armstrong. His music is everywhere, coming from every open door, every phonograph. But Armstrong is a prisoner of his colour; there are places a black man cannot go, things he cannot do. Armstrong needs a man, a white man, and the man he chooses is Henry Smart.

About this title

Review:

Oh, Play That Thing is a fast-moving picaresque sequel to Roddy Doyle's novel about the Irish War of Independence and Civil War, A Star Called Henry. On the run from his former commanders, IRA assassin Henry ends up in the USA and copes indifferently with the gang-dominated New York of the early 1920s, and the worlds of Chicago jazz and the migrant workers of the Depression. Henry is a charming chancer, and a survivor, but this does not mean that he has an especially nice time for more than moments--his own ruthless past continually returns to haunt him.

Doyle does a nice line in memorable unpleasant images--a bunch of homing pigeons swollen and dying from bathtub gin; a wooden leg smouldering unnoticed from closeness to a campfire. There's also a strong sense of the changing language of immigrants trying to belong; this is, among other things, the story of how his Irish hero learns to think and speak in the American vein. The vignettes of real people--notably Henry's friend the young Louis Armstrong--are more than just decoration. In the Depression chapters, Doyle writes powerfully about the way folklore grows up. In places, this is a jerkily structured book, but it is always a highly intelligent one. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

"The words crackle and fizz - a dazzling evocation of the Jazz Age... Magical and marvellous" (Independent on Sunday)

"A virtuoso of the sentence...Doyle wonderfully recreates a world of flophouses and speakeasies, flappers and bootleggers" (Guardian)

"Doyle's performance is, again, extraordinary for the richness of allusion, the facility with which history is dovetailed with invention, the energy of the prose" (Daily Telegraph)

"Brilliantly imagined... Utterly magnificent, the finest work he has done" (Sunday Tribune)

"Kicks off at a furious lick and just gets faster, hotter, louder. Hugely, unremittingly entertaining" (Scotsman)

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0099477653
• ISBN 13: 9780099477655
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384