The Confession Box

A dark wooden booth, a metal grill, and a profile in the half dark, waiting to hear what you have done. This hour John Banville steps out of story order and pulls one thread straight through James Joyce's Dubliners: the Church, seen from the inside. Banville was a child of it, and he remembers the whole inheritance: a catechism no boy could understand, a Mass in Latin with its back turned to you, the strange weekly transaction conducted in the dark. He is scandalously funny about all of it, and dead serious underneath. At the end, he tells you what the confession box actually was.