In dire straits, as he often was, James Joyce latched on to a casual remark from his sister Eva, who was visiting her brother in Trieste, about the lack of a cinema in Dublin. Securing Italian syndicate backing, Joyce returned to Ireland and the Cinematograph Volta opened on Mary Street in December 1909. Once it was up and running Joyce retreated to Italy but the nascent business ran aground soon after and the struggling author remained, for the time being at least, potless.
But what if Joyce’s picture palace had taken off? This is the notion behind Paradise House by UCD professor of creative writing Paul Perry. If his last novel, 2021’s excellent The Garden, evoked American masters like McCarthy, Steinbeck and Hemingway then this one takes inspiration from F Scott Fitzgerald, specifically The Great Gatsby.
Here the Volta is renamed Paradise House and its success in a Dublin that’s “a city of half-truth and half lies” seen through the eyes of narrator Jacob Moonlight, has brought Joyce (called Kinch, the nickname bestowed by Oliver Gogarty, throughout) the financial rewards which previously eluded him. Like F’s Jay however, what he truly longs for is love. This “magical venue” has only one purpose: “Kinch was trying to win Norah back”.
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Upstairs at the House there’s an after-hours club, The Worm’s Ditch, which brings “a sensuous kind of alternative reality” to “a dreary outpost of colonial rule” and allows Joyce to throw Gatsby-esque, champagne-soaked get-togethers where luminaries such as Caruso can enjoy themselves, while he gazes longingly towards the green light of Norah’s dock.
Perry’s Joyce is a might-have-been who “wrote a book and it was pulped” and was fired from his teaching job “for turning up ossified”. Moonlight, a Jewish outsider like the Bloom this Joyce never gets to finish writing about because he’s determined to drown any such ambition, doubts the Kinch he knows would ever want bridges or buildings named after him or to have his face on the currency or have “ignorant, power-hungry politicians quote him without a clue” anyway.
This alternate history also takes in to account war in Europe and rising unrest back home, and further borrows from Fitzgerald for the fates of supporting characters. It’s a fascinating, original and well-executed what-if conceit, and highly entertaining to boot.
