Literary Dublin with Joseph O'Connor

This week’s book club recommendations come from Joseph O’Connor, award-winning author of the bestselling novel of Irish emigration, Star of the Sea, who takes us on a tour of literary Dublin, old and new.

“He is always there, the phantom who haunts Dublin writing, the genius who spun the meanderings of a handful of fictitious nobodies into the greatest novel in the history of the form – James Joyce’s Ulysses. Few novelists have ever written more beautifully about any city and perhaps nobody has ever depicted with such scrupulous precision what it is to be a native of the colonised place. The book is of course full of beautiful sentences and beautiful music, but the Dublin of Joyce’s Ulysses is noticeably long dead now, replaced by one that markets itself as funky town on Liffy. But somehow the ghost of Joyce still wanders Dublin’s margins and certainly it peeps over the shoulder of many young Irish novelists as they work.”

“I can remember the moment around Christmas 1987 when I realised that Dublin fiction would never be the same again and that all of us with an ambition to write it had better wake up. A student at university college, I bought a little book in the campus bookstore, a novel that had been self-published by a North Side schoolteacher called Roddy Doyle. It was called The Commitments. It ripped up the rules of Dublin fiction. No unnecessary guilt, on colleens, no descriptions of rain. It isn't much of an exaggeration to say that it was the first Dublin novel I’d ever come across that didn’t contain the word crucifix. It was no longer possible to recycle the other world that had appeared in Joyce’s Ulysses which for so long had possessed the imaginations of Irish writers. We children of the U2 epoch knew that our home town was no longer the one our grannies had lived in, but Roddy Doyle was the first novelist with the courage to say it loud and proud.”


Ulysses by James Joyce
Written over a seven-year period, from 1914 to 1921, this book has survived bowdlerization, legal action and controversy. The novel deals with the events of one day in Dublin, 16th June 1904, now known as ‘Bloomsday’. The principal characters are Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly. Ulysses has been labelled dirty, blasphemous and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book – although he found it not quite obscene enough to disallow its importation into the United States – and Virginia Woolf was moved to decry James Joyce's ‘cloacal obsession’. None of these descriptions, however, do the slightest justice to the novel. To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. It is funny, sorrowful, and even (in its own way) suspenseful. And despite the exegetical industry that has sprung up in the last 75 years, Ulysses is also a compulsively readable book.


The Commitments by Roddy Doyle
Barrytown, Dublin, has something to sing about. The Commitments are spreading the gospel of the soul. Ably managed by Jimmy Rabitte, brilliantly coached by Joel 'The Lips' Fagan, their twin assault on Motown and Barrytown takes them by leaps and bounds from paris hall to immortality on vinyl. But can The Commitments live up to their name?