CHATTING recently with a Joyce enthusiast, I mentioned that I was reviewing Frank Callanan’s book, James Joyce: A Political Life.

The reaction was instantly dismissive. He recoiled from the idea of Joyce having had ‘a political life’ of any description. And yes, Joyce was certainly no activist and often showed a disdainful attitude to political developments during his lifetime, in Ireland and beyond.

Frank Callanan argues that Joyce took an active interest in the politics of the country he left behind when he moved to Trieste in October 1904.

His writing continued to be fully anchored in the Ireland of that era. Callanan presents Joyce as an Irish nationalist, espousing views of his own making, who “refused to think in conventionally nationalistic terms.”

Indeed, he maintains that Joyce’s nationalism was most evident “in his critique of nationalism”.

I made a similar argument in my book, Ulysses: A Reader’s Odyssey (New Island Books, 2022), but in less detail and with, I freely admit, far less erudition than Frank Callanan, a prominent barrister who died suddenly in 2021 with this magnum opus on Joyce almost completed. It has been finalised by some academic friends of his. They have done us – and James Joyce – a favour.

I say that because of a belief that Joyce’s reputation can suffer from the image many have of him as a remote occupant of an inaccessible eyrie of literary modernism. Callanan offers a corrective, delving into his deep engagement with the affairs of turn-of-the-century Ireland. With the........

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