THRILLER:JAMES JOYCE MIGHT well be surprised, but not necessarily displeased, to find Ulysses used as a kind of template for a hard-boiled thriller set on the same day of the month, though not the year, of his own masterpiece.
Ulysses itself operates as a kind of parallel to The Odyssey, using the much older work as a template, so Adrian McKinty is only following in the footsteps of two masters in The Bloomsday Dead. McKinty's hero, the genteelly named Michael Forsythe, which makes him sound like an accountant, is living reasonably happily in Peru, of all places, following the bloody events described in this book's prequels, Dead I Well May Be, and The Dead Yard (spot the common motif binding these three titles together).
His idyll, if that is what it is, is interrupted by contact from an old foe, Bridget Callaghan. Callaghan has more reasons than most for wanting him dead (the style is catching) but a greater need has driven her to seek Forsythe's aid: her small daughter is missing and she knows, just knows, that Forsythe is the only man who can possibly find her. Thus begins a tangled and bloody odyssey through Dublin and Belfast (a non-Joycean note, that) which will take Forsythe through more perils and tribulations than Leopold Bloom himself, if not Bloom's own predecessor, Odysseus/Ulysses.
The 12 chapters (as compared to the 18 of Ulysses), are given suitably Joycean titles: it is rather piquant to find that "Ithaca", which is Number 7, Eccles Street, Dublin, Bloom's home, in Ulysses and the name of Odysseus's home in The Odyssey, is here Islandmagee, Co Antrim. A certain loose analogy is maintained in the earlier chapters between the Ulysses titles and the events of the corresponding chapter in The Bloomsday Dead: 'Oxen of the Sun' ends up, rather arbitrarily it must be said, in Holles Street, 'Circe' is partly set in a brothel, the first encounter with Bridget Callaghan is called 'Penelope', etc. Understandably, as the action moves North, the Ulysses references are generally less insistent: here and there the author abandons them entirely, opting for such enticing titles as 'The Rat's Nest'. Quite a bit of information about Bloomsday and Joyce is provided in between all the blood and guts: the author does not assume that everyone is privy to this, and the hero himself has an appealingly semi-detached attitude to the whole business: he knows it's Bloomsday, but that fact is of only incidental value, as indeed it is for the book itself: it possibly sugars the pill of violent action which is so fundamental to works of this kind.
Obviously, McKinty found the Bloomsday framework a useful narrative device. The 24-hour time-scheme is great for inducing tension, since the narrative has to end on Bloomsday or very shortly after it; other than that, though, it's hard to see what particular bearing the invocation of that day has on this well-paced, edgy thriller: the mystical significance of the placing of the letter "j" in italics at all times is presumably a sort of awkward homage to the great precursor. One very fundamental area where there has been no attempt to follow the master is in the matter of style: the style here is in the canonical clipped, breathless mode that is essential for these works: "I pointed the gun at him", is a fairly representative sample of what is on offer. A reference to "Marrion Square" does nothing to enhance one's confidence in McKinty's Dublin expertise.
Other such works exist: Amanda Cross's The James Joyce Murder is a far more subtle adaptation of a Joycean paradigm, in her case using the stories of Dubliners as a template. But McKinty has taken this on, and taken the risk of odorous comparisons, with a certain brio: and yes, there are no prizes for guessing what is the last word of this book.
Terence Killeen is the author of Ulysses Unbound: A Reader's Companion to Ulysses and is an Irish Times journalist
The Bloomsday Dead, By Adrian McKinty, Serpent's Tail, 289pp, £10.99