A truly great book is always about now. By that measure, Joyce’s Dubliners is great

The word “epiphany” was important to Joyce. His work is so full of incredible richness and strangeness and pleasure. He’s our Cole Porter, our Bob Dylan, our Bessie Smith. You dance with him, weep with him, sing the blues to his words, and you stand in humble awe before the sunbursts of his language, astounded that such beauty is possible.

But it’s dark work, too. Joyce doesn’t do Rare Auld Times. There are stories in Dubliners that would crack a snooker ball’s heart, tales of embittered, crushed men full of swallowed-down violence. They walk streets they hate, do jobs they detest, and carry home their victimhood to wives and children scorched on the fumes of male disappointment.

In perfect sentence after sentence, he unfurls a city that has become a state of mind. It’s often funny – some of the conversational non-sequiturs are as fantastic as anything in Father Ted or Derry Girls – and the dialogue is a remarkable archive of how Dubliners of the era spoke. Their talk is sly, tender, tough, warm, possessed of a strange logic, full of digs and unanswered questions.

You can imagine later great Dubliners like Imelda May, Paula Meehan and Damien Dempsey at home in Joyce’s sonic cityscape. As in the work of Brian Eno, the contemporary artist Joyce most resembles, sounds are charged with meaning. Indeed, music is so important in Dubliners that it would be impossible to imagine the book without it. In a way, every story is a song. Dubliners is an album.

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Suffused with religious imagery, it is also a sort of prayer book, offering a story called Grace among its many downbeat meditations on belief and doubt, two states it seems to understand to be siblings.

If Dubliners is sometimes playful, it’s more often painful, but the pain is translated into a stoicism of that particularly Irish kind whereby gaiety is only grief on a good day. This Dublin is the city of my grandparents’ Francis Street tenement childhood. Whenever I reread Dubliners, as I always do at this time of the year’s turning, they walk out of its pages, and I meet them again.

Politics is an empty game in Dubliners. Ivy Day in the Committee Room is a farewell to revolutionary Ireland. A Painful Case is almost unbearably sad. In Eveline, the frail flame of love is blown into smoke by fear. Somewhere in the musk of inhalations and annihilations are the ashes of promises broken.

A truly great book is always about now. By that measure, Joyce’s Dubliners is great. He gives us a city hollowed out by inequality, where people walk the rainfall of ducked responsibilities. It’s a book about wisdom – hard-won and ruthlessly unsentimental – and finally it’s a book about hope. More than that, it’s a prayer to language, the starlight it offers. All these ideas, and more, are present in its glorious closing story, The Dead, a piece of writing that deepens every time it is re-encountered.

On the night of the Epiphany, January 6th, the feast of the wise men who came to the Bethlehem manger, Gabriel Conroy is attending an annual party at his aunts’ house in Dublin. He has a task to perform – he must give a speech – and is preoccupied because he doesn’t want to make a mess of it.

Other guests arrive. Gabriel feels out of place. The ritualised formality of dancing, while it allows for physical closeness, seems a lifeless substitute for something else.

[ My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor: A masterful, seamless blend of fact and fiction ]

The Dead is full of music from start to finish. There is music in the prose itself – very muted and quiet – and John Huston replicates this in his screen version by his use of muted and quiet colours. Many of the characters’ reminiscences are about music and melody. A song summons the stunning conclusion.

With great subtlety, Joyce uses the middle of The Dead to ease the minor characters into wistful lamplight: the stories of poor Georgina Burns, the singer who died, and of the rituals of the Cistercian monks at Mount Melleray abbey, hint at what is to come. But it’s the use of a ballad, The Lass of Aughrim, that opens a portal into another immensity, an epiphany. This is Joyce as witness and mage.

Here we become aware that The Dead has never been about Gabriel or his wife Gretta. A spirit is haunting the proceedings. By the time we get to the end, the narrative voice is completely different, almost music, snowing sibilance and rhyme and half-rhyme.

The ending of The Dead shimmers a new start into being. As all endings of great stories should. Glimpsing truth, the Magi, like Gabriel, set out to return to their certainties, but it won’t be easy. It’s not the Epiphany but the morning after. Matthew 2:12 is a roadmap: “And being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way.”

Somehow, they still seek, are still out on the road. Sand-blown, silent. Eyes on the comets. In the iconography of pilgrim imagery, they will always abide. Two millenniums later, the supernova of better possibilities still glints. Sometimes on deserts. Sometimes on the Liffey. Sometimes in the dunelands of dreams.

Joseph O’Connor’s novel My Father’s House is published by Vintage. It was selected as a Washington Post Notable Work of Fiction of 2023