Dubliners

James Joyce Dubliners (1907)
I'd been umming and ahing about tackling Ulysses before my brain fully reverts to adolescent slush in the wake of my having resumed reading comic books with teenage fervour. Nick Sweeney, or possibly someone else, suggested I first give Dubliners a shot, and so I have.

I thought A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was mostly wonderful, inhabiting territory with which I was loosely familiar. Dubliners I've found a little more impenetrable in so far as I couldn't really tell whether there was anything to penetrate, so to speak. I picked up a few hints from the internet, but mostly themes which I'd already noticed, or at least suspected might be in there somewhere, none of which significantly increased my reading pleasure. Dubliners is a collection of short stories describing significant moments of understanding in the lives of Dublin people around the turn of the century, but feels a little like a novel given the consistent themes running through these fifteen vignettes; and the progression from youth to age, book-ended by death in both the first and final stories is surely deliberate. The turn of the century apparently saw a rise of Irish Nationalism, notably in Dublin, which Joyce views with scepticism, regarding it as a stifling influence. Much of the book is concerned with inertia and the weight of tradition or expectation, with the contrast of modernity and social progress faintly tangible as occurring around the edges of the narrative.

I could tell what the collection was doing, and I enjoyed most of the stories, but the sense of detachment was a little overwhelming in places, with the author leaving us to pass judgement in situations which seemed to rely upon a much greater investment in the culture of Dublin than I've ever enjoyed. This isn't to say that I needed - ugh - identifiable characters, so much as that it was all a bit too relentlessly brown for my tastes. It felt like reading a Walter Sickert interior of roughly the same vintage.

Probably a bit too soon for Ulysses then.