Telemachus (TMAC)
reboots James Joyce's
Ulysses
and Homer's
Odyssey
by retelling the Odysseus myth from the POV of the son. Set in Sydney, Australia on Melbourne Cup Day, 1984, it follows a day-in-the-life of two half-brothers, Tom Hallem and Billy Capri, as they confront faltering relationships and careers, underscored by the looming homecoming of their father after 20 years fighting in Asia.
Telemachus
is a novel of Sydney, just as
was a novel of Dublin. Like
, it is steeped in the popular music of its time - Bob Dylan, The Saints, Birthday Party, feedtime, the Velvet Underground, Joy Division, Tactics, the Stooges, Nick Cave, PJ Harvey and David McComb. Tom and Billy are both abandoned sons, like Telemachus, who must try to find their own pathway through life to avoid repeating their father's journey. The outcome of their struggles is retold by an ambiguous third party, Shanghai Dog, as he contemplates the past from exile in China in 2008. One brother is now dead and the other has been left grieving, echoing Tennyson's requiem for Arthur Hallam, "In Memoriam A. H. H."
gives equal weight to the fictive and the theoretical, creating a new class of novel called Technical Fiction. It employs a postmodern method that "puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself," as Jean-Francois Lyotard said, to deny itself "the solace of good forms." Like
,
uses a wide range of literary formats. It reworks
with the same wilfulness as Joyce appropriating Homer. The book also charts new territory to extend the works of Joyce to meet that other pillar of literary Modernism, Marcel Proust.
contains such a wealth of information about Joyce, his works and their literary correspondences, you can read
and never have to struggle through reading
. In this regard, it could truly be called
"Ulysses" for Dummies
.
is a celebration of Sydney - its music, art, literature, seediness and depravity - and a salute to
. This ground-breaking novel is a must for Joyce enthusiasts, all literary theorists, and the Joyce-curious.