“The Ghost of the Real Leg”: Maurice Walsh, John Ford, and Adaptation in Roddy Doyle’s The Dead Republic

In Roddy Doyle’s The Dead Republic (2010), the central character, Henry Smart, has lost a leg and walks with the aid of a wooden prosthesis. His rituals of attaching and detaching the artificial leg, losing and finding it, and acquiring replacements for it over the second half of his life—a very full life, indeed—are a persistent and significant leitmotif throughout the novel. In one passage, Henry unstraps the leg and notes, “It came off without a whinge. I took it away, and there was nothing there in its place. I’d never felt the ghost of the real leg. And that was grand. There were enough ghosts in my life. I needed a rest.”¹ Henry’s wooden leg is a useful trope for, as it were, attaching and detaching The Dead Republic to and from its prequels, A Star Called Henry (1999), in which Henry uses his father’s wooden leg as a deadly weapon during the Anglo-Irish War, and Oh, Play That Thing (2004), in which he loses his own leg in a train accident.

However, Doyle’s uses of the artificial leg also call our attention to provocative questions regarding “original” and “copy,” “real” and “fake,” “stump” and “extension,” “source” and “adaptation”—questions that are the primary concerns of the entire novel. The Dead Republic is, essentially, a story about adapting stories, most notably Maurice Walsh’s “The Quiet Man” (1933) as John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952).

It is also an indictment of the failed promises of post-Independence Ireland, and of the tenacity of a particular narrative: the nationalist version of twentieth-century Irish history. Through the extended metaphor of the wooden leg and through the theme of adaptation itself, Doyle’s novel testifies to the necessity of adapting this narrative—being neither too deferent nor too dismissive of it—in the interests of gaining a more nuanced understanding of the period. Doyle advocates both fidelity and infidelity to source texts. Indeed, his skepticism regarding the conferral of the status of “source” upon any narrative reflects his own investment in an interpretation of Irish history that is certainly not nationalist nor emphatically revisionist. As such, Doyle’s position falls closer to that of “postrevisionist” historiography, a marked shift from that evinced in A Star Called Henry and much of Doyle’s earlier work.²

The Dead Republic is the final instalment in Roddy Doyle’s “Last Roundup” trilogy, his panoramic view of twentieth-century Ireland—sometimes by way of America—as perceived through the eyes of Henry Smart. In A Star Called Henry, Henry is born in a Dublin slum in 1902 and grows up to bear witness to and participate in some of the defining events of modern Irish history, including the Easter Rising of 1916 and the Anglo-Irish War, all the while remaining extremely skeptical about Irish nationalism, insisting “I didn’t give a shite about Ireland.”³ Forced to emigrate in the early 1920s when he realizes his execution has been ordered, the second instalment, Oh, Play That Thing, resumes Henry’s story as he arrives in New York in 1924, two years after leaving Ireland for Liverpool at the conclusion of the first novel. After spells in New York and Chicago, Henry is briefly reunited with his wife and children, spends years on the run from shady characters from his past, loses a leg in a train accident, and eventually turns up on the set of My Darling Clementine in 1946, where he meets director John Ford.

The Dead Republic opens in 1951 with Henry’s return to Ireland aboard a flight carrying Ford and the cast and crew of The Quiet Man. After a violent confrontation with Ford at Ashford Castle, the rest of the novel—which spans the years 1951 to 2010 and two-hundred pages—has Henry lead a relatively tranquil life until he is injured in the Dublin bombing of 1974. He comes to the attention of the IRA, and is seized upon as an icon...