The Copied Day

A bell rings in a law office in Joyce's Dublin, and a voice with a piercing North of Ireland accent calls for Farrington: big, thirsty, and paid to copy documents. John Banville calls Counterparts the most brutal story in James Joyce's Dubliners, and he walks its whole circle: office to pub and home again, where the day ends badly. Midway he steps out of the story into the country around it, with a theory about the Irish and their eight hundred years of occupation that he admits could get him shouted at. And at the close, a line from Philip Larkin shuts the day like a lid.