Henry Smart is on the run. Fleeing from his Irish Republican paymasters, the men for whom he committed murder and mayhem, he has left behind his wife, Miss O'Shea, in a Dublin jail, and his infant daughter. When he lands in America, it's 1924, and New York is the center of the universe. Henry, ever resourceful, a pearl gray fedora parked on his head, has a sandwich board and a hidden stash of hooch for the speakeasies of the Lower East Side. When he starts hiring kids to carry boards for him, he catches the attention of the mobsters who run the distrist. It is time to leave, for another, newer America.
In Chicago there is no past waiting to jump on Henry. Music is everywhere, in the streets, in nightclubs, on phonograph records: furious, wild, happy music played by a man with a trumpet and bleeding lips called Louis Armstrong. But Armstrong is a prisoner of his color, and the mob is in Chicago too: they own every stage - and they own the man up on the stage. Armstrong needs a man, a white man, and the man he chooses is Henry Smart.

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

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