A Little Cloud

John Banville talks you through "A Little Cloud," which he thinks the perfect title for a story about a small, dainty, timid man in James Joyce's Dubliners. Little Chandler, a legal clerk at King's Inns, meets his old friend Ignatius Gallaher at Corless's: a brash London journalist who left Dublin after some faint financial scandal, has been to Paris, and won't come home to meet the wife. Chandler goes back to a child, a sentimental poem by Byron and the knowledge that he'll never get to Paris or London.

Banville names the theme that runs through the whole book, the hunger for freedom and the terror of being free, and still calls this story a triumph, spoken very quietly, because of Joyce's empathy with small lives at 23. Gallaher is one of Joyce's brutes ("you can smell his hair oil"), yet Chandler must envy him. The film ends on the title: a cloud like those in medieval paintings that rain grace on a saint, except this one occludes the light.