At last, a book about James Joyce that makes you laugh

I do not think I am alone in confessing that I had read critical works on James Joyce before I got around to reading him. As a schoolboy I drew up my own private curriculum, and one influential book was Malcolm Bradbury’s The Modern World, where I first encountered Joyce; and then moved on to Anthony Burgess’s Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader. Eventually I did read the actual work. All my teachers told me Ulysses was ‘mucky’. When they said that Finnegans Wake was even muckier, it slightly fritzed my brain when I finally got a copy.

This year being the centenary of the publication of Ulysses, there has been a flurry of new books and republications: the anthology The Book About Everything; Terence Killeen’s extremely useful Ulysses Unbound; Patrick Hastings’s The Guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses and Sam Slote and Marc Mamigonian’s Annotations. But to my mind David Collard’s Multiple Joyce is the most joyful and the most Joycean.

The book is, to use a term from Finnegans Wake, a ‘collideorscape’. The initial essay shows its antic disposition. I cannot think of any other book about Joyce’s work that would begin with a discussion of the Monster High toy called ‘Finnegan Wake’, a punk, wheelchair-using merman. Collard’s reaction to discovering such a thing is, understandably, bafflement. The strategy of the book, however, is to take bemusement seriously. Is this plastic gewgaw, like the book itself, ‘a complex, cryptic, multi-layered bundle of signifiers, not all of them comprehensible’?

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From there we jump through references to mermaids in Finnegans Wake, Thomas Aquinas on beauty, Roland Barthes on toys and even the bankruptcy of Toys’R’Us (tough luck if you want a Finnegan Wake of your very own).