Finnegans Wake (Penguin Modern Classics) (Paperback)

So what is it, after all?

The funniest novel ever written. The best book about adultery. The best book about sibling rivalry. The only book which reruns a country's history from the point of view of a provincial pub landlord. The best written book ever. Better than Ulysses.

Right, I'm obviously not going to precis the plot or anything. Why should you read it?

The first thing to say is that you can read Vico, Bruno the Nolan and the Four Masters if you want, but why bother? It's not an intellectual book. Joyce was clever enough, but he wasn't an intellectual. So this is not a book for intellectuals. Hardly surprising, Joyce was much more interested in the smell of dirty knickers than in philosophy.

Read it aloud in a cod Oirish accent if you want to feel the prose. Get the casettes to help you out, I have.

Read the prose from "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recurculation back to Howth Castle and Environs." to "Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the"

Yes it does make more sense if you reverse them. This is something you learn.

What about the first words of the most accessible section, about the Liffey. (This is a gross simplification of the theme.)

"O tell me all about Anna Livia! I want to hear all about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now" And thus the washerwomen set off, we can only follow.

If you read the work you will gain information in a thousand areas. Here are some at random

How to talk dirty in geometry classes. The irritating qualities of unpruned trees. Aspects of chicken rearing. What the thunder said. (Quite a lot, actually) What a quark really is. The role of Norsemen in Ireland. And many, many more.

I repeat this is not an intellectual book, you don't need to be a scholar to read it.

I first read it when I had just turned 16. I had romped through Ulysses without a note and without a qualm. I found the Wake a bit tougher and had to give up around page 300. However, I trusted Joyce, every time he wrote a book it was better than the last. So I started again. I used the Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by Campbell and Robinson; now a VERY rare work. Today I would use A SHORTER FINNEGANS WAKE, Edited by Anthony Burgess. Spend thirty or forty hours getting your bearings and the book is yours for life.

Read it regularly if you want. If you don't want todo this, park it by your desk and open it at random whenever you fancy, read a page aloud, laugh a lot.

So, why make the effort? Well if you like well made plots, neat outcomes, clean lines on a well-polished body, don't bother. If you like puns, obscure jokes, fake scholarship and a swamp you will never plumb, give it a go.

What about the words stuffed with meanings? Well, mainly they are just the shortest way to tell a good joke!

Give it a go, save it from the maniac academics.

It's just the ultimate novel. All novels, even the simplest, have various layers of allusion or symbolism going on; this one just has more. All novels are written with some kind of self-conscious style; this is the most stylish. All novels are structured one way or the other; this is uber-structured. I've often thought that Finnegans Wake is in many ways a precursor of HTML. Some genius should do an online version of it. Practically every word would be a hyperlink, leading to a page or so of annotation (Roland McHugh's book 'Annotations to Finnegans Wake' is the most ambitious print venture of that sort, but with the novel itself you get the most alarming sense that the layers go on forever...)

Every novel is difficult if you've never read novels before. If you've only read trash, then even a middling good novel is tough going; the writer demands more of the reader. James Joyce merely wants you to spend the rest of your life reading this book. Personally I think that's one of his better jokes. To go back to Schoenberg again (yeah, I know it's not exactly enticing to compare Joyce to Schoenberg, but bear with me), the essential thing is that there's just more going on here; Schoenberg has a million tunes going on at once, Joyce has a million linguistic things going on at once. I don't call that "having a shoddy grip on his talent", I call that generosity.

After trying to work out why people resent this book so much, I've come to believe that some people hate to think that there's anyone out there who's effortlessly smarter than they are. I, for one, am happy to accept that Joyce can just write anyone else off the planet.

Personally, I believe that the book becomes a lot more realistic if you read it with an Irish accent in your head. But try it and see. Nobody will seriously believe that you're reading it, so what have you got to lose?

If you study this book with an open mind (I don't pretend that it can be "read" straight through, or without the benefit of analytical texts), you will find yourself learning more than you could have hoped about philosophy, history, Ireland, writing, epistemology, art, and humanity than you ever could have supposed. Each sentence will stimulate the curious mind to greater knowledge.

Joyce would be amused at the tirades presented here. Even academics and writers cannot agree on whether this is trash or treasure. With such controversy around a topic, how could it not have some inherent worth? People love to label things. Finnegans Wake cannot be labelled.

The bottom line is, you will get out of this book what you put into it. A glance at Campbell's Skeleton Key will prove that at least he gained a great deal of meaning from it. To get Joseph Campbell running that fast, this work must be worth something.

If you decide to "read" it, don't expect to put the puzzle together. Read a bit each day (like a page). Consult Campbell, Tindall, McHugh, Bishop. Read about Ireland. You will hopefully be inspired. If not, the book is not for you. Don't scorn it for that reason.