Hellish motorway experience
Robert Cooper
Listening to Jim Norton reading The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on this outstanding recording is a first-class way of either revisiting James Joyce’s autobiographical novel or of dipping your toe in the water for the first time. I am a toedipper and whilst there were moments when Joyce’s ‘stream of consciousness’ technique threatened to drag me out to sea, I found that a few jabs at the ‘Play Again’ button kept me both buoyant and enlightened with regard to the author’s alter ego, Stephen Dedalus.
A memorable early scene sees young Dedalus home from boarding-school for Christmas. He is allowed to join the grown-ups for the first time for Christmas dinner, which provides a launching pad for some vocal acrobatics from our reader. There’s plenty of turkey and stuffing, but the conversation is anything but seasonal when the recent death of Charles Stewart Parnell is discussed. You really sense the vitriol in a heated exchange between Simon Dedalus (Stephen’s father), his friend John Casey and Dante (Mrs Riordan), the piously Catholic governess of the Dedalus children. Jim Norton excels, and it’s baffling how many voices, male and female, can be produced by this highly skilled pair of vocal chords. It comes as no surprise to learn that Norton won awards for his performances — and performances they really are — in Dubliners and Ulysses (also available from Naxos).
The beauty of listening on CD is the simplicity of finding a desired or memorable passage; each chapter is divided into about 20 tracks lasting roughly five minutes. For example if your constitution is suitably robust try CD 4 — Track 1: ‘Hell has enlarged its soul’ — where Stephen Dedalus, after a sermon at a school retreat, reflects on the degraded state of his soul, having spent part of a school prize on a prostitute. This first sexual experience rapidly leads to repeat performances until he can no longer contain the torment and guilt of his transgressions.
The deliverer of this hellfire sermon is Father Arnall, Stephen’s Latin teacher. In Hell, we are told, ‘the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be 4,000 miles thick’. So muscular and booming is Norton’s delivery I feared that the loudspeakers in my car would disintegrate. Thank heavens I was travelling alone on the M40, as a passenger would surely opt for alternate means of transport. I was sorely tempted to risk breaking the motorway hard-shoulder law and make an illegal stop and shout, ‘OK, I repent’ to the oncoming traffic. Compare that extended rant to the breathtaking scene where Stephen, walking on the beach, sees a beautiful girl wading in the tide. Here, in an instant, he realises that there is nothing sinful in desiring beauty and decides to live life to the full.
An unconventional method of listening to an audio book on CD is to press the ‘Shuffle’ button and listen to the tracks in random order. This would be unacceptable for a thriller, but with Joyce so unsystematic are his flights of thought that Stephen’s journey from child to student to poet can be approached from various routes; they don’t demand to be listened to in sequence. Audio books don’t come classier than this whatever the batting order.
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