Audio Books: Ulysses, it is often said - usually by people who haven't read it - is meant to be read aloud. But imagine what it must be like to do the reading. Close on 270,000 words, including chunks of Latin, Greek, Spanish, and languages of Joyce's own invention, writes Arminta Wallace.
A plethora of literary styles and parodies, jargon by the bucketload and a multitude of Dublinisms. It's definitely not a task for the faint-hearted. Then there's the business of "voice", always a tricky one with audio. Certain readers fit certain writers like a glove: Simon Callow and P.G.Wodehouse spring to mind, or Stephen Fry and J.K. Rowling.
The voice of Joyce, though? What sort of voice could possibly suit this wayward modernist masterpiece? Calm and measured? At times, certainly. But it's also drunken, lewd, gleeful, ironic, off-the-wall, too smart for its own good - and goodness knows what else besides. No pressure then, Jim Norton?
"Recording Ulysses took two weeks," the actor writes in an essay reproduced on the CD-Rom version of the final disc of this 22-CD unabridged set. "From 9 a.m. to late. But it was a labour of love. It was really hard work but it was also very exciting - when it wasn't terrifying."
Norton has already clocked up an impressive track record in Joyce material for Naxos audio, having read the Dubliners stories and an abridged version of Ulysses. His father had a grocer's shop on Grafton Street - how Joycean is that? - and he was a boy soprano who continued to sing until his voice broke at the age of 17, so he understands the way in which music acts as an integral, unifying force in Joyce's writing, and can burst into a melodious bar or two at the drop of hat.
The addition of snippets of carefully chosen musical material has always been one of the strong points of Naxos's audio recordings, and this one excels itself in that regard, with Love's Old Sweet Song, bits of Don Giovanni, Jerusalem and all the rest popping up in appropriate places.
The packaging is attractive and sensible, eschewing shatter-prone plastic in favour of sturdy cardboard; the labelling is orderly and lucid - if you never listened to any of it, but just studied the track-by-track synopsis, you'd know more about Ulysses than most - and the extra CD-Rom material, which includes Joyce's famous schematic plan for the novel, first published in 1930 by Stuart Gilbert, is meaty and worthwhile.
But if you never listened to any of it, you'd be missing something very special indeed. In a performance which makes the word "virtuoso" sound like faint praise, Norton is never short of inspiration. But it is his delightfully human characterisation of Leopold Bloom that makes this a recording to treasure, as distinct from just an exercise in worthiness. Marcella Riordan's cool, understated Molly is also a joy. The result is compelling, moving, entertaining - even, after all this time, shocking. It is an awesome tribute to an awe-inspiring work of fiction.
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist.
Ulysses. By James Joyce, read by Jim Norton with Marcella Riordan, Naxos Audiobooks. 22 CDs, 22 hours and 22 minutes, unabridged. €100