So Doyle has my sympathy – for what it's worth. Besides, it's only natural that a Dublin writer should want to escape Joyce's shadow and feel annoyed at being constantly compared to him. Ulysses is a slog, the Joyce tourism industry is over the top and Joyce doesn't have a monopoly on Dublin. They pilloried Doyle as "foolish", spewed invective about how he wasn't half such a talent as the great JJ, reminded us once again of the latter's deathless genius – and blithely ignored the fact that Doyle was on most counts quite right. Naturally, decent citizens everywhere were outraged. It gets on my nerves," the Sunday Tribune in Dublin reported him saying. It's as if you're encroaching on his area or it's a given that he's on your shoulder. The whole idea that he owns language as it is spoken in Dublin is a nonsense. A few days before the annual Bloomsday celebration in 2004, he had the temerity to suggest that the Dublin Joyce industry is rather tacky, that Ulysses "could have done with a good editor" and that it's annoying for Irish writers like him to be forever compared to Joyce: "If you're a writer in Dublin and you write a snatch of dialogue, everyone thinks you lifted it from Joyce. A few years ago, Roddy Doyle found himself swirling around in a teacup storm.
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