The Dead Republic - ISBNLookup.com

Tom LeClair

…if you don't already know Henry, The Dead Republic is an excellent place to meet him—because it's the best of Doyle's trilogy…As Henry has aged, his creator has also matured. And here he has avoided crowd-pleasing formulas to create an original and amusing octogenarian double agent, composing a thoughtful book about a sometimes thoughtless political process.
—The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

Doyle digs into the modern history of Ireland in the concluding volume to the life story of Henry Smart, a teenage Sinn Fein triggerman first encountered in A Star Called Henry. Here, an aging Henry must preserve his own legend, which is taken away from him first for a film, and then by the IRA. In the mid-1940s, film director John Ford plans to make a movie based on Henry’s life, but Henry eventually realizes the film that Ford has planned will reduce his story to sentimental pap. Upon returning to Ireland with Ford, Henry plans on killing the director, but his callousness has faded, and he drifts into the Dublin suburbs, where he meets a respectable widow who may be his long-disappeared wife. Henry ages in obscurity until the ’70s, when the IRA uses a distorted version of Henry’s story as a PR ploy; as the IRA man who runs Henry explains, “we hold the copyright” to the Irish story. Doyle is a stellar storyteller, though not a faultless one—characters tend to editorialize at the drop of a hat; yet Doyle exhibits a peerless ear for cynicism as he grapples with the violence and farce of Irish history. (May)

Library Journal

Doyle's latest concludes the saga of Henry Smart, the Irish revolutionary first introduced in A Star Called Henry (1999) and revisited in Oh, Play That Thing (2004). Here, the Irish rebel is older, perhaps wiser, and alive after having once again cheated a certain death. Opening in the 1940s and concluding in 2010, the book propels readers on a dizzying trajectory from film-studio lots in the States to quiet suburbs north of Dublin. Though Smart is retired, his old loves and enemies reappear, and admirers insist on making his acquaintance. Pressed into action, he crisscrosses parishes in the Republic and counties in the North, sometimes walking on his wooden leg and sometimes riding in a car or van with a pillowcase over his head. Doyle suggests that there is no escape for anyone with a past that others have claimed for themselves. VERDICT Once again, Doyle masterfully renders Henry Smart's voice. A triumphant tale from a lyrical and thoughtful storyteller. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/10.]—J. Greg Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman