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John Banville on James Joyce's Dubliners

Video 8

The Boarding House

Featuring John Banville

Film · John Banville on Dubliners

John Banville confesses he finds "The Boarding House" terribly funny, then shows why he also calls it one of the most terrible stories in James Joyce's Dubliners. Mrs. Mooney, separated from a butcher who mistreated her, needs a husband for Polly, 19 or so, who throws her eyes up like "a little perverse Madonna" and sings "I'm a naughty girl" to the lodgers. Polly snags Mr. Doran with a candle that has blown out, relit from his; Banville relishes how subtle Joyce's sexual innuendo is.

The turn is the silence. Mother and daughter conspire without a word, Seamus Heaney's "Whatever you say, say nothing" made into a Venus flytrap, and Doran is caught for life, since in that Dublin there was no divorce. Banville forecasts the marriage: a drunk within five years, home at three in the morning. He leaves you with Joyce's verdict on so-called ordinary life: extraordinary and horrendous, and grindingly obvious.

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