Hyenas at the Lion's Print

An election day in Dublin, a bare committee room, a dying fire, and a sprig of ivy on every lapel. For the twelfth story in James Joyce's Dubliners, John Banville starts a decade early, with Charles Stewart Parnell: the leader Ireland briefly allowed itself to believe in, and what the Church and the mothers of Ireland did about him. Then he takes you inside the room, where the great cause has shrunk to a dozen bottles of stout, and the fiercest talk is saved for whoever just left. Why fight so hard over nothing at all? Banville's answer comes from the animal kingdom.