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JOYCE STUDIES: TERENCE KILLEENreviews Finnegans Wakeby James Joyce Edited by Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon, Houyhnhnm, Vol 1, 38pp, Vol 2, 493pp. €300

JAMES JOYCE’S last work, Finnegans Wake, is certainly the most ambitious literary effort that the 20th century produced. An attempt to tell a comic universal history in a largely private language, it requires of its readers an unprecedented openness to an experience of vertiginous, heady, multi-linguistic word play, without the usual resources of linguistic familiarity, let alone such normal props as plot, character and narrative, to sustain them. Everyone who confronts Finnegans Wakeknows literally what it means to have reading difficulties, understands the challenge and can experience the triumphs when comprehension begins to glimmer. In that sense, at least, the work is highly democratic: we are all equally at sea when first confronted with it. Whether we want to rise to that challenge is another matter: those who do so can, as their reward, eventually experience something prodigiously funny, rich and strange, and endlessly fascinating.