Ulysses (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)

I'm not sure what they're saying about the novelists but apart from McGahern's books they all seem to be about people living in apartments in Dublin 4. Maybe that's because James Joyce was the man who invented the Great Universal Urban Novel by publishing Ulysses back in 1922.

Dublin on 16th June 1904 (the location and date of 'Ulysses') was far more sophisticated and 'multicultural' than it was to be at any time again up to the mid 1990s - that world was banjaxed by the likes of the Legion of Mary and an extreme Catholic Jansenism and isolation that set in with Independence in 1922. (On the negative side Dublin back then also had a third world type gap between rich and poor - with a rate of infant mortality only exceeded in the British Empire by Calcutta).

Ulysses ranges over a plethora of modern sounding topics: relationships, sex, the press, publicity and advertising, popular culture and music, adultery, nationalist posturing and political cynicism, alienation, racial and ethnic prejudice, technology and consumerism - to name just a few. The book's two major characters are both outsiders in the traditional Irish sense - Leopold Bloom is a Jew and Stephen Dedalus a disaffected and now agnostic Catholic.

Joyce does it all in deadpan comic fashion interspersed with parodies of other writers' style. He employs all kinds of cinematic techniques with flashbacks, dissolves and close ups (Joyce was very interested in film and actually opened Dublin's first cinema - the Volta - in 1909, but he didn't prove a great entrepreneur). The technique par excellence in Ulysses is the 'stream of consciousness' e.g. of Molly (Mrs Bloom) in the famously dirty last chapter - Joyce admitted he actually got this technique from an obscure French writer.

If you haven't read Ulysses yet don't be put off by it's hearsay reputation of difficulty - apart from a small number of passages it's easier than many literary modern novels - let me give Captain Corelli's Mandolin as an example - don't confuse it with Finnegans Wake which is another matter altogether. There's lots of excellent stuff on the internet to help you but one thing you'll need to do is to get hold of a good map of Dublin.

The length of the book, the legendary "difficulty" of the English, even the lack of punctuation, all serve to make most potential readers queasy. This perception is enhanced by the enormous volume of secondary writing on the book and Joyce himself. Everything about the text seems to be a license for academics to be pretentious and superiour. Read Ulysses for pleasure? Are you mad? Have you been down the pub with Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus?

As far as I am aware, I am neither mad nor drunk, but I do recommend holding one's literary breath and plunging into this masterpiece.

This book is truly an extraordinary novel. Joyce is a master at depicting and analysing mankind. His ability to describe human emotions on both a concious and sub-concious level is amazing. I am not saying it is easy. To be honest, there are large parts of the book that even after re-reading are way over my head, but too many believe that the book is beyond them. One should not focus on the bad, but the good, and the overall effect of the novel is nothing short of awesome.

So go on, ignore the stigma and the prejudice.

Read Ulysses, for fun.