Released, as its sub-title indicates, to tie in with the film, Nora, John McCourt's James Joyce: A Passionate Exile is a very clear, reliable account in brief compass of the writer's life. While very much intended for the general reader, it does reflect some of its author's special expertise. This is especially true of the Trieste period of Joyce's life, on which the author is an acknowledged expert. McCourt gives a full account of Joyce's emotional and intellectual life in the now Italian city, at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
He shows how Joyce was affected by the city's strong irredentist atmosphere - the movement to unite the Italian-speaking areas of the empire to Italy. This did strike a chord with the Irish writer, who was inevitably reminded of Irish nationalist aspirations. In that context, he wrote a number of articles for the leading irredentist paper and gave a lecture which conveyed a fascinating but far from simple impression of Joyce's attitude to the political situation in his native land. The full implications of these pieces are still being debated and are dealt with at much greater length in McCourt's more substantial volume reviewed elsewhere on this page by Anne Fogarty.
But the chief charm of this handsomely produced, coffee-table sized volume is its photographs. Many of these will be new to even the most jaded Joyceans. Again, the Trieste section provides the major new material, with the large range of contemporary photographs providing a vivid portrait of a bygone age. The book has a number of unusual portraits of Joyce, and of other people (I was particularly taken by Tal Coat's portrait of Gertrude Stein). Also very striking is the original playbill of the English Players' first theatre productions in Zurich, including Nora Joyce in Riders to the Sea. And the front and back endpapers of the book feature a very atmospheric picture of the Dublin Custom House in the late 19th century, "along the riverrun".
Terence Killeen is a Joyce scholar and an Irish Times journalist.