IRELAND WITHOUT TEARS.

A Star Called Henry
By Roddy Doyle
Viking, $24.95, 343 pp.

The early novels of Roddy Doyle were recognizable simply by the way they were laid out in type: long kite-strings of dialogue running down the pages, one- and two-word tags of speech set off by dashes and surrounded by gales of white space. The books were so slim, so light, so casually done, so effortlessly enjoyable, that at first it was hard to believe a big international publisher had troubled to print and bind them and pay smartly dressed graduates of fancy American colleges to write letters and make phone calls on their behalf. And yet The Commitments, about some Irish kids in the sixties who formed an after-school soul band, had the elusive quality the band and its mates craved-it had soul. And when it was put together with two other little books and dubbed the Barrytown Trilogy, suddenly Roddy Doyle himself-he was a public school teacher outside Dublin, but now he had quit his job and was writing full time-seemed a kind of authentic Irish soul man. The two novels that followed the Barrytown books (Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and The Woman Who Walked into Doors) were more conventionally prosy and well-rounded, and the Booker Prize given to Paddy Clarke in 1993 established their author as legitimately literary, but Doyle's writing still seemed to me most distinctive for what was left out of it. There was no silence, exile, or cunning here; no church, and no cramp of religion, but no folk religion of Ireland and the Irish, either; no lace-curtain lyricism, no author striving to transcend his origins or educate his reader. Here was a street-level, come-as-you-are account of contemporary Ireland, a place made new and surprising to its people by their sudden lack of interest in their past and their identity-an interest, it seemed, that had been exported to the United States.

Perhaps it was inevitable that Doyle would get around to writing a historical novel. A Star Called Henry takes place during the founding of the Irish Republic, the time of the Great War and afterward, and its characters cross paths with James Connolly and Michael Collins (but not, it is worth noting, with any of the literary figures of the period). The title page says the novel is the first book of The Last Roundup, another trilogy, and the two books to follow will presumably bring the story up to the time where Doyle started his career, the sixties Dublin of The Commitments.

The novel begins, though, with a sepia prehistory set in Victorian Dublin. The protagonist, a young man named Henry Smart-for this is a coming-of-age story-is his family's third Henry. His mother, called Melody, likes to sit him down on the front step in the evening and look up at the sky and point out the star that is her first son Henry, whom God took to heaven. Her husband, too, is Henry, an amputee ne'er-do-well who tramps around in an overcoat that hasn't been washed in generations, and sometimes works as the doorman at a Dublin brothel, where he wields his wooden leg like a club. As it turns out, the young Henry knows his father hardly better than his dead brother when the father, caught in the middle in a bit of underworld double-crossing, disappears. "Who was he and where did he come from? The family trees of the poor don't grow to any height. I know nothing real about my father; I don't even know if his name was real....He made up his life as he went along. Where was his leg? South Africa, Glasnevin, under the sea. She heard enough stories to bury ten legs. War, an infection, the fairies, a train. He invented himself, and reinvented. He left a trail of Henry Smarts before he finally disappeared. A soldier, a sailor, a butler-the first one-legged butler to serve the Queen. He'd killed sixteen Zulus with the freshly severed limb."

That passage is a good example of Doyle's herky-jerky street poetry, which he has retrofitted in this book for the nineteenth century, mixing in legend, maxim, and on-the-spot fictionalizing with the narrator's frank first-person talk. His trademark single-word exchanges are here, too. And so is his light touch. As Henry comes of age-a "street arab" traipsing around London with his younger brother, Victor-their desperate circumstances are depicted as comic adventures: grasping rats barehanded before crowds to earn spare change, sneaking into school only to be thrown out again for being too poor. They are characters on the margins, which allows Doyle to write a historical novel without bringing in large tracts of history, facts and figures, period costumes and furniture, or old-time diction and slang. And here, as in his earlier books, his omission of these seems to make a point about Ireland and Irish writing.

-Do you love Ireland, lads?

We didn't understand the question. Ireland was something in songs that drunken old men wept about as they held on to the railings at three in the morning and we homed in to rob them: that was all. I loved Victor and my memories of other people. That was all I understood about love.

Victor dies soon afterward; Henry grows up to be astonishingly handsome, a fact he is too fond of telling the reader, and seduces the boys' young teacher, a flouter of convention named Miss O'Shea. Before long-Henry's stated indifference to Ireland notwithstanding-the two of them are caught up in the war for Irish independence: lovers, revolutionaries, and finally husband and wife, father and mother. "We became man and wife without me hearing her first name. She was and stayed my Miss O'Shea. I never knew her name."

The story from there must be one of the cheeriest war stories ever written. Henry and Miss O'Shea pass from one historical point to the next-now losing, now finding each other. Their story is exuberantly told; line for line, the prose is vivid, sensual, original, gripping-yet it points up the one real weakness of Roddy Doyle's writing, one that is perhaps more obvious in a historical novel about the Irish revolution than in an offhand comic sketch about an Irish soul band. His novels are easily read, easily enjoyed, and, once finished, easily forgotten. Little survives the reading but their charm. And so it is for Doyle's protagonist here: Although he is a war hero and the hero of his own exploits-and his own sexual exploits-Henry Smart is not interesting enough to be the hero of a novel.

Not yet, anyway. After all, A Star Called Henry is the first book in a trilogy. Roddy Doyle is a star himself now; whether he is a great novelist is another matter. We await his, and Henry Smart's, further adventures.

Paul Elie, a frequent contributor, is the editor of Tremor of Bliss: Contemporary Writers on the Saints (Riverhead).