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John Banville on James Joyce's Dubliners

Video 6

After the Race

Featuring John Banville

Film · John Banville on Dubliners

John Banville takes up "After the Race," one of two stories in James Joyce's Dubliners that Joyce himself thought weakest. Jimmy Doyle, 25 or 26, is the son of a butcher known in Dublin as a merchant prince; he's been to Cambridge and is out of his depth with two Frenchmen and a Hungarian pianist, drinking champagne and gambling after a motor race. Banville borrows a line from Finnegans Wake, Shem the Penman preferring a hash of lentils in Europe to Ireland's split little pea: Jimmy is the split little pea.

The turn is money. Banville sets Joyce's own father beside the story, a charming wastrel from Cork who lost the family's property, and notes that every character in Dubliners finds money to drink. Dublin in 1904 is an offshore island of an offshore island, dependent on Britain and fearful of the continent, a city that "wore the mask of a capital." When a player calls "Daybreak, gentlemen," Banville hears the irony. There's no daybreak in Dublin.

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