Dublin – Julia's books

Literary sightseeing: James Joyce’s Dublin

I have been visiting Dublin for many years now as my husband is Irish and most of his family is still there. I have always wanted to visit on ‘Bloom’s Day’ (June 16th) – the date on which the whole of the events in Joyce’s seminal work Ulysses is set. However, since this falls in the middle of school term time, this has not so far been possible for me. Maybe next year! On this particular day (in fact, the whole of the week from what I gather), Joyce enthusiasts dress up in the fashions of the time and replicate Harold Bloom’s odyssey through his home town on that day.

I have visited a few of the many sites that occur in the book, however, and on our visit this summer I added a couple more to the list. Perhaps if I don’t get to ‘Bloom’s Day’ soon I’ll do my own little one day tour! Here is a broad itinerary if you happen to be in Dublin’s fair city not on 16th June.

Stop 1 – Sandycove and the Martello Tower

The opening scenes of Ulysses (Telemachus episode) take place in the Martello Tower (built by the British as a defence against Napoleon, who never invaded) at Sandycove. Joyce stayed here briefly when it belonged to his friend Oliver St John Gogarty. In the book, Buck Mulligan lives here and he and his two companions take breakfast following a swim in the ‘Forty Foot’, a bathing pool in the sea below the tower, which is still there.

Today, the tower houses the James Joyce museum, which has been run almost entirely by volunteers for many years, with only very limited funding. Entry is free and you can see a number of artefacts inside, as well as get a good sense of Joyce’s life and career.

Sandycove can be reached on the DART train from Dublin city centre.

Stop 2 – Sandymount Strand

Leopold Bloom takes walk here at sunset. It is a beautiful spot with fantastic views across Dublin Bay, with the iconic chimneys at Ringsend, the mouth of the Liffey. At low tide, you can walk the vast sands where work is being done here to preserve rare grasses. When the tide is in, you can walk along the promenade, along with many other Dubliners.

Sandymound Strand is a few stops north of Sandycove on the DART train.

Stop 3 – Dublin City Centre

Within the city you can walk along many of the same streets that Leopold Bloom (or Stephen Dedalus) took. I would begin at O’Connell Street (and perhaps drop in at the General Post Office while you’re there. Although not directly Joyce related, there is a fantastic museum that tells the story of the independence movement and in particular the 1916 Easter Rising, which centred on the GPO.)

From O’Connell Street you can walk south, cross the Liffey, to Trinity College (you can book tours of the famous library and view the Book of Kells), and then on to Grafton Street, Kildare Street and Merrion Square. All these locations appear in the Wandering Rocks episode.

From Merrion Square it’s a short walk then to Sweny’s Pharmacy, which I mentioned when I wrote a blog post about my visit to Dublin a few weeks ago. The shop remained a pharmacy until 2008, and the owners had changed very little of the interior from how it would have been in Joyce’s time, recognising its future tourism potential. Bloom called into Sweny’s to pick up a tonic for his wife and bought some lemon soap, a bar of which you can still purchase there today. It is run by volunteer Joyce enthusiasts, where they will chat happily to you about the author, the shop’s history, and hold weekly meetings where they read from his work.

You can get the DART from Sandymount to Connolly station, from which it is a short walk to O’Connell street. The above walking route is about 3km.

Stop 4 – Glasnevin cemetery

Glasnevin Cemetery appears in the Hades episode of Ulysses when Bloom travels there with his friends for the funeral of Paddy Dignam. It is a fascinating place with many famous Irish figures buried here including Michael Collins, Eamon De Valera, Maud Gonne, Brendan Behan and Christy Brown. Pre-booked tours are available.

The cemetery is a few kilometres out of the city centre, but there are several bus routes that pass it. Dublin buses have an excellent app where you can work out which service to get from wherever you are.

On your way there you will likely pass O’Connell Street again and can call in at the small but very interesting James Joyce cultural centre on North Great George’s Street. It is housed in one of the typical Georgian townhouses that Dublin is famous for. Another interesting stopover is the Hugh Lane Gallery. Hugh Lane was a contemporary of Joyce who established a superb art collection. He was killed in the RMS Lusitania which sank off Cork in 1915.

It is possible to visit many more Ulysses ‘sites’ than I have listed here. I can recommend the book The Ulysses Guide: Tours through Joyce’s Dublin by Robert Nicholson, which provides several detailed itineraries complete with the relevant extracts from the book.

Dublin is a fantastic city to visit with so much to see in a relatively compact area. Though Joyce spent much of his adult life outside Ireland, Dublin is at the heart of so much of his work.

Book review – “Beautiful World Where Are You” by Sally Rooney

A couple of weeks ago I posted about a work trip to London. I’d bought a copy of the very newly minted Sally Rooney novel Beautiful World, Where Are You which had been published earlier that week amid great excitement (there were queues and bookshops were opened at midnight to enable the keenest readers to get their hands on a copy). Whilst in London I also happened to stumble on a ‘pop-up’ in Shoreditch selling not only the novel, but other books to which there are references in the novel, and some merchandise echoing the design of the book’s cover. This book has surely been the most anticipated of the year, and who can blame the publishers, but it has definitely become a ‘product’. As has the author I suspect. I hope she is okay.

I sort of hoped I might devour the novel on the return train trip to London, but I didn’t and in fact it took me a further week or so to finish it. Rooney’s previous novel, Normal People, was a sensation, not least because of the success of the television series, one suspects, which was brilliantly put together with brilliant performances from the two wonderful new young Irish actors playing the lead parts. It was all a moment of pure serendipity and it was a joy that something so good got the attention it deserved.

Rooney’s follow-up novel therefore was always going to be a challenge and I admire her for just getting the thing out under what must have been intense pressure. It is unmistakeably Rooney – the beautiful prose, the masterful dialogue, the introspective characters, Dublin, the palpable tensions between the characters and the things unsaid. There are four characters: Alice, a successful, famous and thus fairly wealthy author (hmm) who has recently had a nervous breakdown and whom we meet when she is renting a seaside house in the country. Felix, her lover, whom she meets on Tinder, a warehouse worker and cash-strapped under-achiever. Eileen, who lives in Dublin and is Alice’s best friend from childhood. Eileen works for a publishing company in a junior role which pays poorly. She is intellectually and emotionally unfulfilled, and bitter at the hand life has dealt her. Simon is Alice and Eileen’s friend, also from their youth, but a little older, a political researcher he lives in Dublin too. He is single, but seems to have a series of much younger girlfriends, handsome, gentle and compassionate, with a strong Catholic faith.

Much of the novel is an exchange of long and detailed communications between Alice and Eileen. They are more like letters, the kind that middle class people of previous centuries might have exchanged, full of lengthy discourse on the meaning of life, love, sex, career, fame and mental health, cleverly punctuated with much more prosaic gossipy tidbits on their love lives. These of course are emails, though, not letters. In between the letters chapters we follow the various events of the characters’ lives, primarily Eileen’s gradual descent into personal crisis and her relationship with Simon, and Alice’s recovery and unlikely relationship with Felix.

It is some way into the book before the characters collide, when Simon travels with Eileen to visit Alice at her rural retreat. The weekend is a kind of catharsis for them all. Everything must break before it can be reassembled in a meaningful way.

If you are expecting a re-run of Normal People you will get some of the same things – a good deal of sex, middle-class angst and working-class insecurity, and a grown-up exploration of Irish identity in the 21^st century. But it is a very different book. There are surely some autobiographical elements. It has a lot less pace and it seems a long time before anything significant happens. This novel is a much slower burn. I liked it but I didn’t love it. I did not care as much about any of the characters as I did about Marianne and Connell. I think it is the book Sally Rooney needed to write though, good enough to follow Normal People but perhaps not quite as good, so that, one hopes, some of the hype around her dissipates and she can get on with being a brilliant author and not have to worry about being a celebrity.

I think it will always be worth reading what Sally Rooney writes, so I have no hesitation in recommending this book.

Literary sightseeing #2 – James Joyce’s Dublin

I have just returned from a couple of weeks holiday in Dublin where we were visiting my in-laws whom we had not seen since Christmas 2019. We spent most of our time with family, naturally, but with two whole weeks to fill (and not wanting to go any further afield on this trip) it was a good opportunity to do a bit of sightseeing in the city. Remarkably, in all the years that I have been visiting Dublin, this is something I have rarely done. I decided to start re-reading Ulysses a few months ago. I had not got very far into my mission so I used the downtime to read, listen and study the book. I took my Ulysses companion with me and at a secondhand book stall in Dun Laoghaire market I picked up a copy of The Ulysses Guide: Tours through Joyce’s Dublin by Robert Nicholson (first published in 1988) which offers several tour options corresponding to the different chapters in the book, in the order that Leopold Bloom takes them.

James Joyce was actually born less than a mile from where my in-laws live in Rathgar, a south Dublin suburb. Joyce was born at 41 Brighton Square, a red-brick Victorian terraced house in a quiet residential area. The house is very typical of the area, but fairly unremarkable.

The building with which Joyce is most associated, however, and the venue for the first part of Ulysses (Telemachus) is the martello tower at Sandycove. This is now home to the James Joyce Tower and Museum. I visited it many years ago on a trip I once made to Dublin in the ’90s. I would have loved to have gone again this time, but unfortunately, at the time of writing, it has not yet reopened following the pandemic.

Sandymount strand, another site in Ulysses is lovely, really typical Dublin by the sea, with a view of Howth on the opposite side of Dublin Bay, a haven for walkers and dog owners and now also a protected area due to some rare grasses having taken root there. You can reach both the museum and the Strand from the city centre by taking the Dart train at Connolly station (to Sydney Parade for Sandymount Strand, then a 10 minute walk, and Sandycove for the Museum, followed by a 15 minute walk). On the left hand side you can also see Ringsend pier, another site in Ulysses.

Chapter six of the book, also known as Hades, covers Paddy Dignam’s funeral procession (an associate of Bloom’s and many of the other characters appearing throughout the book) from Sandymount to Glasnevin Cemetery. The cortege passes through and along many of the city’s most well-known locations – O’Connell Street, the bridges over the Liffey, the Dodder and Grand and Royal Canals (these four waterways represent the four rivers on Odysseus’s journey to the underworld). They also pass through Ringsend and Pigeonhouse Road (Poolbeg Road), where a family member of mine actually now owns a house.

Glasnevin Cemetery, where the funeral cortege ends up, is a Dublin ‘must-see’. It is one of the most important historic sites in the country. Covering 124 acres, it is the final resting place of approximately 1.5 million people. Its inhabitants include Michael Collins, Daniel O’Connell, Eamon de Valera, Charles Stewart Parnell, Maud Gonne, Brendan Behan and Christy Brown. Tours of the cemetery are usually possible and are expected to resume shortly. The cemetery is also adjacent to the National Botanical Gardens, nothing to do with Joyce, but a beautiful place that should be high on the list of any Dublin visitor.

*The Round Tower, which stands over the grave of Daniel O’Connell, at Glasnevin Cemetery, as seen from the Botanical Gardens*

That’s as far as I got this holiday, both in my reading and my sightseeing. James Joyce devotees in Dublin run a programme of events every year on 16 June, the day depicted in Ulysses. These include talks, tours, readings and dressing-up! It is on my bucket list to participate sometime, but always falls in term time for me so has not been possible yet…but soon! For more detail on all of the above as well as many of the other wonderful things you can do in the beautiful city of Dublin see www.visitdublin.com

Book review: “Normal People” by Sally Rooney

I’m travelling to Dublin on the ferry from Holyhead, north Wales as I write this, making our annual summer visit to see family and friends. I love Dublin and think of it as a second home, having visited the place several times a year for about two decades now. I haven’t seen all the ‘sights’, although Dublin Zoo, the art gallery, Powerscourt, and the Natural History Museum have all been well and truly ‘done’! When we visit we seem to spend much of our time just hanging out, visiting people, sharing meals, etc. For me, it’s only when you do that, after visiting a place so many times that you really get to the heart of it.

Normal People img It seems appropriate that I should be posting a review of Normal People this week, a book so very much about Ireland, the challenges and contradictions at the heart of a nation that has transformed itself in recent years. It is not just about Ireland, but about what it means to be young in Ireland and about class. It is also about identity and, in common with some of the issues faced in the UK and many other societies I am sure, the draw away from regional towns and cities, towards a centre, a capital, where there is perceived to be more opportunity, and what that means both for the individual and for society in the wider sense.

Connell and Marianne are two teenagers attending the same high school in Carricklea in the west of Ireland. Both are very bright and hopes about their future prospects are high, but that is where the similarities end; their lives couldn’t be more different. Connell is the much-loved only child of a young single Mum. The live together in a small house and Connell’s mother cleans for Marianne’s family. Although academically a high achiever, Connell still manages to be popular and admired. Marianne is much more of a loner and lives with her working Mum and brother (a threatening figure who becomes increasingly violent towards her). She is remote from her family, not well-liked at school, and has a spiky personality.

Despite their differences, Connell and Marianne develop a closeness which soon blossoms into an intense and sexual relationship. The author portrays skilfully the subtle differences in their perspectives, which will at times lead to difficulties of communication and understanding throughout their young lives and the ebb and flow of their relationship.

The pair both end up with outstanding exam results which means that both secure a place at the prestigious Trinity College, Dublin. We follow them to college and here their positions are reversed – it is Marianne now who finds her ‘tribe’ amongst the affluent, the elite, the middle classes, and Connell who struggles to feel at home, whose financial and social background contrasts so markedly with that of his peers.

Despite this, Connell and Marianne continue to have an on-off relationship for the duration of their university careers and beyond. At times their relationship is passionate and sexual, at others it is more platonic, mutually protective. But always it is intense, even where there is little contact between them, such as the period Marianne spends on a Scandinavian scholarship with the abusive artist she has for a boyfriend at the time.

It is a fascinating and compelling book, part elegiac romance, part social commentary, where there is very little in the way of plot, but an abundance of humanity that is acutely observed and intimately drawn. The book has rightly earned its young author widespread plaudits and praise and was shortlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. (The winner, An American Marriage by Tayari Jones, which I reviewed on here recently, was a worthy victor but I don’t envy the judges having to choose between these two outstanding novels.)

Normal People is a beautiful, clever book that will at times break your heart and at other times lift it, and I heartily recommend it. The only pity is that it’s relatively short!

Normal People has been widely read and reviewed – what did you think of it?

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