by James Joyce
Read by Jim Norton with Marcella Riordan 27 hours, Naxos AudioBooks Unabridged CD and CD-ROM £85
The centenary of Bloomsday will be celebrated this week: 16 June 1904, the single Dublin day detailed by Leopold Bloom.
It begins with his search for a breakfast kidney; later, Bloom goes to a funeral and visits a brothel.
But what happens is incidental to the complex, shifting internal dialogue played out inside his head. Layers of Bloom's and Ireland's past are interwoven with the present, as the listener is washed into eddies of his thought processes, and into the rich undercurrents of the journey of Homer's Ulysses.
Like Joyce's language, Jim Norton's performance is coruscating. He conveys every facet of Joyce's kaleidoscopic and dynamic language: from the abundantly allusive, semitic, outrageously profane to the laugh-aloud witty, the lyrical, the vibrant (the 'blood-hued poplin' in the silk mercer's window); from the onomatopoeic (the 'steelhoofs ringhoof ringsteel' of the horses' hooves on the Dublin streets) to the tenderly intimate (the 'wondrous revealment' of a girl's breast).
A particularly impressive cameo scene, thickly suffused with Bloom's sexual desire, is where he watches young Gerty as she gazes at the cascading fireworks. Norton captures brilliantly the divinity of the moment experienced by Bloom.
Norton is the son of a Dublin grocer and it is those voices of his childhood which he gives to the Dubliners here: the conversation of the working men 'swilling, wolfing, gobfuls of sloppy food' in pungent Burton restaurant; the auctioneer's cries ('4/9d for curtains'); tips for the races; the academic discussions of Stephen Daedalus and his colleagues about Shakespeare. And it is these voices which create the real protagonist - the city itself.
The listener, ears agape, is washed over with awe at his performance.