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.
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