Krishna
Henry Smart comes to USA in a boat and lands in New Jersey, with the intent of disappearing into the crowds and erasing his past. His fake passport calls him Henry Drake, which he gets rid of as soon as he has got immigration approved. We know that there are people who are searching for him in Ireland and he ran all over England, with people always coming after him and decided to flee to America. Even here he has to keep switching jobs as there are people who recognized him from time to time. He joins an undertaker and also had to flee from there. Finally he ends up carrying ‘sandwich’ advertisement boards on his person for Henriette, an old woman whose husband is a drunk.
When hoodlums beat him up and order him to return the sandwich board to the rightful owner and then leave the area permanently, he obeys the first order. But one of his best boys are then beaten up in an unmistakable message to Henry.
Henry, undaunted, goes to another part of town to ply his trade. When he is finally captured, being tricked by a group through his girlfriend, the girl saves him by capturing a gun and they run far away from New York. Defeated, Henry contemplates going back to Ireland, giving up the whole USA thing, figuring that the ‘heat’ in Ireland would now be off and he can blend in.
Meanwhile the duo continue their con game far away from New York, she foretelling the future and he ‘divining for water’. But circumstances catch up with Henry. When he ‘pulls teeth’ for the villages, a farmer gets his teeth pulled and forces a rich store owner into hiring ‘the dentist’. The man realizes that he has been conned and investigates Henry. With the result that his past in New York (Albany?) catches up with him and he has to flee, leaving the half sister behind on her own insistence.
He makes friends with a coloured girl called Dora and falls hard for her. He is now in Chicago. This is segregationist times and he has to be careful to meet her only on ‘allowed places’ where mixed race couples are allowed to dance together.
The story takes an interesting turn. He meets and becomes an assistant to Louis Armstrong. (The title is relevant to this phase of the story).
They rob houses to make ends meet (Not kidding you guys. This is what the fiction says) and Henry meets his wife and his daughter working in an old lady’s house. She introduces him to the owner as her husband after exhausting her anger on him for disappearing from her life – by beating him up.
When Louis refuses to be the Mafia’s puppet because he realizes that he can be independent and wealthy with his talent, the rough men corner Henry and Louis, and they barely manage to run ahead and escape.
The book is irritating. They go to Chicago where Henry meets his wife (whom he had left in Ireland and run away) and renews his acquaintance with her and a daughter that he did not know he had. Then he decides to leave for Bronx again because that is where Louis wants to be – leaving his family again. Does not make any sense at all.
Louis makes a name for himself at a club but Henry seems to be just left behind to rot. He wonders if he should go back to Ireland.
But he goes back to meet his ex flame, the half-sister of his buddy. He makes her a star by combining her sex appeal with the magical play of Louis.
The story is stupid – not the natural charm of his Barrytown Trilogy for example, not the humour of Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha or the emotional weight of The Woman Who Walked into Doors. Henry seems to keep meeting people (his wife) and running away from her and stupidly walking repeatedly into trouble by going back to the very areas where he is wanted by a whole gang.
When the inevitable happens again, he runs to his wife whom he had abandoned only to find, reasonably, that she had left (and presumably moved on). What kind of rubbish is this to make a central theme of the story. And Louis Armstrong hanging around him, then ignoring him, then helping him and then walking away.,,,
It all reads like the jottings of the author on various plausible story lines and then, on a whim, to take all of it and put it in sequence to make this jumble of a story.
It goes even weirder. He meets his wife but gets trapped by his old enemies from Ireland. His wife rescues him (even though she, in the bad men’s tale, is the one who betrayed him) and they are on the run – aimlessly on trains like hobos. He even manages to make her pregnant again and they have a child called Seamus. All highly yawn-inducing stuff.
It moves again when he meets his wife and kid and produces another kid, but their vagabond style is cut short when he falls off the train and loses a leg.
The rest of the book is a huge blather, and I really struggle with the way it abruptly ends with no ties to anything that went before.
This is a far cry from Roddy’s other books. It rambles, drops plot points half way through, makes Henry Smart just run aimlessly and keeps moving in random directions like a liquid particle under a microscope. Not good in a story.
3/10
– – Krishna