The Best and the Rest of James Joyce
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THE BEST AND THE REST OF JAMES JOYCE By Ian McDonald British author Ian McDonald is an ambitious and daring writer with a wide range and an impressive amount of talent. His first story was published in 1982, and since then he has appeared with some frequency in Interzone, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Zenith, Other Edens, Amazing, and elsewhere. He was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award in 1985, and in 1989 he won the Locus “Best First Novel” Award for his Desolation Road. He won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1992 for his novel King of Morning, Queen of Day. His other books include the novel Out on Blue Six and a collection of his short fiction, Empire Dreams. His most recent books include a new novel, The Broken Land, and a new collection, Speaking in Tongues, as well as several graphic novels. He is at work on another new novel, tentatively entitled Necroville. Born in Manchester, England, in 1960, McDonald has spent most of his life in Northern Ireland, and now lives and works in Belfast. In the daring, playful, and lushly inventive story that follows, he gives us a look (or a succession of different looks) at a world-famous writer as you’ve never seen him before—in fact, as no one’s ever seen him before . * * * * Aboard His Britannic Majesty’s air-dreadnought William and Mary as it leaves the Command Holdfast buried beneath the cratered mudscape once known as London in the one-hundred-and-first year of the war are 112 ratings, 66 officers, and six highly important, highly secret passengers: Air Lord Blennerhasset, Admiralty Lord Van Loos, Marshall Valery-Petain, Director Ames, Sub-Academician Giorgio Joyce and his father, senior Academician James Joyce. Reinforced concrete bombproof doors open as William and Mary rises cautiously, every sense tuned, toward the perpetual rainclouds that discharge their poisoned drizzle over the mudfields of Staines. Despite two atomic cannon, a complement of ten turret-mounted 18-inch guns and a veritable arsenal of lighter artillery and rocket racks, the artillerymen standing by their weapons and the glider-marines ready at the launch tubes are nervous. They have heard stories of dirigibles, dreadnoughts even, surprised and destroyed attaining altitude by marauding Tsarist airships lying grounded, half buried in the mud. For the lynchpin of His Majesty’s airfleet to lift unescorted, unprotected, into potentially hostile airspace . They have long suspected that the High Command locked up in their War Room half a mile under Command Holdfast have gone insane: now they have proof. But His Majesty’s Air Lords need not justify, to the crew of William and Mary their decision that a lone dirigible might escape the attention a dreadnought with full escort would warrant. Their destination, the very fact that they are carrying passengers, have been kept secret from them. But seeing the cindered cities of the midlands slipping away far beneath their armoured glass observation bull’s-eyes, they know that their course is northward. A combined services mission, perhaps, supporting the beleaguered 19th Army bogged down in melting permafrost north of Bergen, or a search-and-destroy mission on Tsarist submarine traffic across the Barents Sea. Maybe William and Mary has been sent to rendezvous with the remnant of the Royal Dutch Airfleet stationed at Scapa Flo Holdfast and destroy the Tsarist North Polar Fleet. In his armoured cubicle the Captain opens the envelope sealed with the wax sigil of His Majesty’s Directorate and after reading and burning the flimsy within, calls a heading, altitude and velocity down the gosport to the flightbridge that will, in 18 hours’ time, bring William and Mary and its secret passengers north to Iceland, to the Keflavik Chronokinetics Research Facility. * * * * In the summer of 1973 I was asked by a doctor of my acquaintance if I might examine a patient of his, a gentleman from Ireland of late middle age who had come to him complaining of persistent and severe insomnia. My doctor friend prescribed sleeping tablets but the patient, who I shall hereafter refer to as Herr J., complained that the prescription was ineffective and that the true source of the insomnia lay in a powerful and disturbing dream that recurred nightly, whereupon my colleague referred him to my practice. I was advised that the man, a writer of international repute, would not make the most co-operative of patients. My first interview with the patient was at an outside table at a café on the Burkliplatz. The tetchiness against which my colleague had warned me made itself immediately evident in his response to my introduction of myself: “Ah yes, the Swiss Tweedledee, not to be confused with the Austrian Tweedle•dum.” It was clear to me that the caustic witticism with which he leavened his subsequent conversation concealed a deep-seated discontent. He was a tall, thin man, of protrusions and angularities. Behind the thick glasses he wore—he was a sufferer from persistent iritis—his eyes were an extraordinarily penetrating ice-blue. His hands moved constantly, making idle play with the table utensils. He was quite refreshingly frank about the details of his life, though more, I felt, from a mischievous delight in outrage: his first sexual experience had been at the age of fourteen with a prostitute on the banks of a canal. This had precipitated his lapse from the Catholic faith—an almost inevitable fall, I have heard, for the intelligentsia of his country. At the age of 22 he had left Ireland with his lover, Frau Nora B., and lived the following years as an artistic exile in Paris, Trieste and Zurich, during which time he produced his most notable work. He confessed to having been unfaithful to Nora B. only once; a short, tempestuous affair with one Martha Fleischmann of this city. Eighteen months ago he had embarked upon a new, major, work, to be entitled Finnegans Wake, a “stream of consciousness” exploration of a single night’s dream. After three months he had abandoned work on account of failing concentration which he blamed on insomnia caused by a recurring and vivid dream. Two months to the day after the first dream, the Travellers arrived and threw our affairs into disarray. He found himself no longer capable of working on Finnegans Wake and was convinced that the Travellers were the source of his dreams. Indeed, his attention was continually being diverted from our table across the Burkliplatz to the large number of spectators who thronged the promenade with telescopes and field glasses, and from these spectators upward, to the focus of their observation, the hazy curtain of air, half hidden by thin cloud, beyond which the incomprehensible forms of the Travellers may occasionally be glimpsed. “Dreams of falling, Dr Jung? Well, we all know what they mean,” he said. “Dreams of flying? Doubtless, there is some handy psychological rebus for these too.” “I don’t deal in psychological panaceas, Herr J.,” I said. “You tell me rather what you think these dreams signify.” “A belief and a fear, Herr Doctor. I believe that the Travellers will soon leave. I fear that I want more than anything to go with them.” * * * * Righteous Rhythm Rocks the Musik Halls A traditional sound from the Eastern Emirates of the United Kingdoms is the new popular music craze of the basement clubs in the Capital. Sarif, a fusion of traditional Moorish music with Western Kingdoms electric instruments has emerged from the kasbahs of the cities of the Southern Counties to become the essential listening of the new youth underground, a new musical wave determined to sweep all before it. Lyle Santesteban goes every week to the musik clubs in the depressed area of Vincastra where sarif is drawing packed houses to dance all night to the rhythms of Afrika and Islam. Escapism through music, or something deeper? “Sarif speaks to us,” says Lyle Santesteban. “Sarif has something to say. That stuff on the wireless, the electric crooners, the neoballadeers, they got nothing to say; it’s all just love and romance and let’s get married tootsie-wootsie. What’s that got to do with life in the United Kingdoms, what’s that got to say about Vincastra in 1902? Sarif is music of the street. Sarif speaks with the voice of the street. Sarif has something to say about being young, about being old, about being poor, about being rich, in a job, out of a job, family problems, arranged marriages, polygamy, sex, morality, God; sarif speaks to us.” Sarif’s musical revolution is essentially a righteous one. The clubs and cafés that specialize in the new music serve nothing stronger than coffee. Says Haran Gomez, manager of the El Morocco Cafe: “Islam and sarif cannot be separated. And that means no alcohol, and certainly, no drugs. We catch anyone in the toilet toking a kif, he’s not just bounced, we call the cops as well. What sarif is about is having a good time, hearing great music, dancing, meeting people, without getting blind drunk, smashed out of your skull, or into a fight. But it’s not a wank. Sarif’s got steel at its core, it’s strong, like Islam. The spirit of sarif is the spirit of Islam.” James Joyce would agree. He is one of the most promising of sarif’s rising stars; coupling social consciousness with intense verbal imagery and ingenuity. This seminal figure is in many ways an anomaly in an anomalous genre, originating not from the Hispano-Moorish section of the population which spawned sarif as a distinct form, but from the purebreed Western Celts.