In 1988, James Joyce’s grandson Stephen destroyed all letters he had from, to or about his aunt Lucia Joyce, the novelist’s daughter. Many saw the destruction of documents pertaining to Lucia, who had spent the majority of her life in asylums and had been close to her father, as the destruction of keys to understanding her father’s work. Stephen replied: ‘No one was going to set their eyes on them [the letters] and re-psychoanalyse my poor aunt.’
Stephen, still alive today, appears — though with his name blacked out — in this novel, an imagining of the life and legacy of Lucia. ‘A silly old cunt,’ he is called by a character we are made to sympathise with. He is a villain; his destruction of Lucia’s letters is an act of vandalism — the silencing of Lucia’s voice.
In the absence of truth, and within the safe confines of fiction, Alex Pheby picks his way through surviving information as though through bones, and adds imagined flesh. Lucia’s brother Giorgio sexually abuses her and tortures her rabbit to ensure her silence. Her father drunkenly mistakes her for her mother, his ‘arousal transferred’. Her uncle is ‘in her bedroom with an erection, borne of a fever dream of mermaids’. Through these violently sexual passages, a strange, constricted picture of Lucia is created — a woman defined only by the brutality of men. Concurrently, the men in Lucia’s life are painted as demons, their characters made to contain all possible iterations of cruelty towards women in the 20th century.
‘Do not destroy documentary evidence of the truth, since it will come back and bite you in the arse,’ Pheby writes, hinting that this novel is less an attempt to reconstruct Lucia’s life than an act of vengeance.
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