Book of a lifetime: Ulysses by James Joyce

From The Independent archive: Joseph O’Connor on the great modernist masterpiece

The ghost of Joyce still haunts the margins of world literature (Getty)

He is always there, the genius who spun the meanderings of a handful of fictitious nobodies into the greatest novel in the history of the form. The city of James Joyce’s Ulysses is long dead now – it was already disappearing when the book was published in 1922 – but somehow the ghost of Joyce still haunts the margins of world literature like a wanderer yearning to come home.

The lost Dublin he immortalised is a shadowplace of contrasts, a provincial Edwardian backwater. It has elegance and pitiless squalor; the desolation of a scandalised diva reduced to beggary. Chandeliers illuminate her mansions, candles glow in chapels; red lights flicker in the brothel doorways. Joyce said his hometown had “a faint odour of corruption”. But few novelists have written more beautifully about any city. And nobody has ever depicted with such scrupulous precision what it is to be a native of a colony.