CULTURE SHOCK:Cheery popularisation of Bloomsday projects 'Ulysses' as a period piece when in fact it is a cutting-edge book, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
'State LY Plum P. Buck Mulligan". This is of course, the famous opening of . . . Adrian McKinty's thriller, The Bloomsday Dead. It is the full content of a coded note handed to the protagonist, a former hitman who is now in charge of security at a hotel in Lima. It means, we soon learn, that in "Stateroom LY (that is, the 50th floor, room Y), a Plum (in other words a drunk American) named P Buck was creating a Mulligan (ie a disturbance)."
The hitman is soon summoned to Dublin, where he is told it is Bloomsday. "Is that some sort of flower festival?", he asks. "Good God, no, not that kind of Bloom. Leopold Bloom. You haven't read Ulyssesthen." Actually, as he says, "like every other Mick in the world, I'd tried to read Ulyssesa couple of times."
What he doesn’t yet know is that he’s trapped inside a story that will parallel Joyce’s novel all the way to its final word which is, of course, “yes”.
Even hitmen feel they have to attempt to read Ulysses. It may well be that more people have tried to read it than any other book. Why do they fail? James Simmons, in his sardonic poem The Catholic Church's Revenge on James Joyce, suggested that it was the author's fault for (paradoxically) encoding his message in "a towering Gothic prose cathedral": "So the people cower/ coming near his creation and sidle in, astounded,/ and wait for official experts to show them how to read it." That is not quite fair but there is undoubtedly an air of reverence, a sense of obligation, that parallels the approach of tourists to a must-see cathedral. Obligation is never a good reason to read.
In Ireland, the public approach to Joyce remains deeply ambivalent. On the one side, there is still that reverence – think of the way in which the (very expensive) Joyce manuscripts bought by the State were handled as sacred relics, the contemporary Irish equivalent of a medieval city receiving a piece of the true cross.
On the other, there is the attempt at cheery popularisation in the Bloomsday celebrations. All that dreary parade of kidneys and gorgonzola, of canes and carriages, may be harmless enough at one level, but it probably puts off more people than it entices. It projects Ulyssesas one thing it most clearly is not – a period piece. This most cutting-edge of books, which anticipates urban globalisation, is cast as a backward-looking slice of Edwardiana.
Is there a middle way between solemn worship on the one side and touristic antics on the other? How about thrillers? Anyone who can read a good thriller is half way towards being able to enjoy Ulysses. Murder stories have a lot in common with Joyce's masterpiece. They venture down the mean streets of the city. Their plots depend on a concentrated unfolding of time in which everything has to be carefully sequenced. Chance encounters acquire significance. The city, unknown at first, gradually yields up its hidden mysteries.
This is why thriller writers have long been drawn to Ulyssesand also why thrillers can serve as excellent introductions to the book. McKinty's recent hard-boiled, fast-paced The Bloomsday Deadis as dark and violent as any thriller fan could demand, but it also serves as an intelligent homage to Ulysses– not so much to its content as to Joyce's way of telling a story.
But perhaps the best introduction to Joyce for anyone inclined to approach him with a sense of dread and duty is Bartholomew Gill's The Death of a Joyce Scholar.
This is another thriller in which, early on, the protagonist (in this case Chief Supt Peter McGarr of the murder squad in Dublin) is loftily accused of not having read Ulysses. He, too, "tried it once and had nearly thrown the book across the room". McGarr has to read the book now, though, because a famous Joyce scholar has been stabbed to death on Bloomsday in a lane behind Glasnevin Cemetery.
In the course of Gill's witty murder mystery, therefore, McGarr has to discover his own way to read Ulysses: "he found himself forgetting the many allusions to symbol, history, and myth and merely 'listening' to the words on the page, much as he would listen to a piece of music." He becomes so absorbed that he also misses the conversation on the way to Glasnevin cemetery in the book, with its references to the Childs murder case and Bloom's thoughts about "murderer's ground" – the same spot where the victim in his own case met his end. The book begins to appeal to his detective's instincts for discovering the many layers of reality: "McGarr could imagine himself reading it over and over and over again, forever finding something new and forever only scratching its surface." As he reads, the novel he is in gradually comes to resemble, at key points, Ulyssesitself.
Books like McKinty's and Gill's are good ways into Ulysses, not just because they illuminate aspects of Joyce's novel for their readers, but because they have the right mix of the serious and the playful.
Thriller writers have to know their material: McKinty's grasp of the chronological structures of Ulyssesis as firm as any scholar's, while Gill's book contains highly sophisticated discussions of the differences between Joyce and Beckett.
But there's also an appropriate sense of play. Thrillers that use Ulyssesas a framework are repeating, after all, Joyce's own games with Homer. They add another layer to the multi-layered text. Instead of looking for a key to Ulyssesthey use it as a key to real urban life. That's rather more fun than eating kidneys for breakfast, and also more in keeping with the spirit of a book that is so imbued with life.