Ulysess, You'll Not See by Neil McGowan

 

I was wondering what to write about this month. I’ve done very little in the way of writing (or music, or work) due to illness – some nasty bug that had me confined to bed for over a week. Not Covid, but still not very pleasant.

It did give me a chance to catch up on my reading, though – after the first four days or so, I was reading an average of a book a day. I also listened to a lot of radio, and that’s what inspired this post.

Unbeknownst to me, it’s the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s one of those books that I’ve never read, and never been sure if I even want to, so when a series of programmes were playing on Radio 3 I took the opportunity to listen, and see what all the fuss was about.

The initial programme didn’t exactly fill me with a burning desire to read it. Almost a thousand pages describing the course of an ordinary day where nothing much happens.

Still, I continued to listen – after all, there was nothing else to do. Over the next few programmes I became intrigued, and began to see how it could engender fascination in people. A modern retelling of the Odyssey, apparently, and groundbreaking style. One of the most important works in modernist literature. I listened eagerly to some of the extracts.

There were parts I liked; there was some witty wordplay in places and a few parodies and jokes – although for me some of these were showing their age – and the characterisation was deft. There was an almost poetic quality to the language in places.

Then there were the parts I didn’t like. The last part, for example - the whole stream of consciousness thing, turned up to max. The idea made sense – I had an image of a woman’s thoughts in disjointed fragments as she was falling asleep – but I just didn’t like the execution. It made it difficult to listen to (and, really, I suppose the reader was interjecting their own form of punctuation through breath control and rhythm of speech). And did we really need such an exhaustive description of someone’s bowel movements?

Yet despite my misgivings, I’m still intrigued. Will I go and read it? Probably not – I can’t see the time I’d need to invest paying off, for me; I like my stories to have at least some plot. Would I listen to an audio version? That’s much more likely, even accepting that the nature of audio means I may miss some of the nuances of the writing.

My biggest problem is it isn’t a book that invites reading. I’ve always tried to write with reluctant readers in mind (especially when I write for young adults), and my goal is to make the writing as transparent as possible. Do I succeed? Not all the time, and not enough, I suspect.

J K Rowling did it brilliantly with the Harry Potter books – each book was pitched at the relevant age, and as a result, reluctant readers found themselves understanding more complex texts simply by following the series through. Ulysses, on the other hand, demands your attention and insists you consider each sentence (or chunk...looking at you, final eight paragraphs…) and look for the text and subtext in the words. It’s not a book I could imagine reading for escapism, or for that matter pleasure.

I was sharing my reservations with a friend just this afternoon (I’m writing this on the evening of 7^th). She writes poetry, and I was half-expecting her to be outraged that I wasn’t a huge fan. To my surprise, she laughed, and described it as the ‘marmite of literature.’ She then suggested I don’t look too closely at Joyce’s next work, Finnegan’s Wake...