In full bloom

It’s as if James Joyce was writing for radio, as if he understood the potential of the new audio technology long before the BBC had begun to broadcast plays and poetry. All that freakish literary invention in his 1922 novel Ulysses suddenly begins to make sense when heard on air, spoken out loud, with sound effects to tell us where we are.

If you’ve never read it, but are too embarrassed to admit this (like the academic guests at David Lodge’s dinner party who get caught out in a game of literary humiliation), you could have tuned in to Radio 4 on Saturday and become an instant expert on Joyce’s quarter-of-a-million-word blockbuster (at least three times the length of anything by Ian McEwan or Julian Barnes). I’ve never been able to get past the first few pages because of the way the novel looks on the page. The reader has to do so much of the work, and slow down to a snail’s pace in order to figure out what’s going on. Those dense, non-paragraphed, non-punctuated reams of text. Joyce surrenders no compromises. Who is speaking now? Is this a bit of narration? Or are these Leopold Bloom’s inner thoughts? Where are we? On Sandymount Strand, in the pub, walking down Prince’s Street? And what’s the point of all this stuff about Hamlet?

Saturday happened to be Bloomsday, 16 June, the single day in June 1904 on which we follow the adventures of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus as they wander round Dublin chasing thoughts of Molly Bloom, and much else. If you’d had the stamina, you could have tuned in to five-and-a-half-hours’ worth of Joyce’s fantastic, frustrating wordgames as they were played out between Saturday Live, The Now Show and Cerys Matthews’s Blue Horizon, just like Bloom’s day.