There is a line of argument that institutional archives are ‘structurally spectral’, to use Verne Harris’ phrase, that their function is deconstructive and hauntological. That 'Lucia' is not a biography of Lucia Joyce is stated at the start. It’s all fiction, deduction, adduction, supposition—with no access to evidence, what else could it be? Arguably, Lucia is a manuscript within ‘Lucia’s’ archives. The uncovering of ‘Lucia’s’ sarcophagus—and the writing of the book—is presented in a series of excavation passages, and in one, the narrator performs ‘what I could of the ceremony of the opening of the mouth’. This is an encapsulation of an aim of the book, a search for the voice of a dead person. Herein, though, lies a complication. Every archive contains the absences of the disenfranchised. Even if Lucia seeks to symbolically ‘open the mouth’ of the dead ‘Lucia’, there are no words of hers there, only what has been said of her. Had she been able to haunt, to disrupt, would she have presented herself in the same light?

Lucia has unrelenting grimness. ‘Lucia’ as the passive subject of ritual is a keynote—we start with her funeral, where she is almost invisible. There is close, even mesmerizing, focus on rituals to which she is subject, and in this there can be seen an abstract of the sort of brutal and dehumanising world where such rituals could have a religion or doubtful science as a patina: slapping at the menarche, near-fatal water treatments for mental health, a number of options for abortifacients. Some episodes are hinted at but not described, like encounters with various men with their scratchy stubble and their hurried response to a step on the stairs. Some, like the terrible episode with the rabbit, are compellingly detailed.

It is a matter of record that Lucia was placed in an institution when her mental health had collapsed. It is a matter of rumour that she was sexually abused. Had she not been ground to dust before and after death, would Lucia, a creative person, a talented dancer, have chosen these graveclothes? Would she have elected to present herself so exclusively in the shattered and shattering prism of abuse? In fact, there is a recurring sense that, in fact, it is the men of the Joycean milieu that are the focus of this uncomfortable, twisted, and inspired paean to brutality discreetly indulged.

At the same time, Lucia is a work of great assurance and brio. If silencing a voice with much to say creates a vacuum, chimeras are born. Pheby presents these impressively well, often as existentialist riffs, using fairytales, or questions framed (a la Cruiskeen Lawn) as catechisms. One or two might not quite swing, but most are excellent, some inspired. In one excavation passage, the narrator states that ‘Lucia’ ‘has gone to the next life friendless and I will be her friend.’ This brings to the foreground a tone that dominates the novel: indignation that Lucia endured such things. This echoes the scene of the opening of the mouth ceremony which includes the blessing ‘may you emerge vindicated’.

To create a monument of words, however nuanced, to relentless dehumanisation places its victim in explicit postures. It degrades the perpetrators by criticism, but without restoring dignity to their victim. But the contribution of dignity, and fulfillment of the statement of intent—‘I will be her friend’—is arguably achieved by ‘Lucia’ being the inspiration for and focus of a work of such exceptional and striking creativity. ( )

This novel tells the story of Lucia Joyce, daughter of James, and someone who led an extraordinary and troubled life. She was a dancer, who took on a small role in a Jean Renoir film. She was friends with Samuel Beckett (with whom she may have had a short affair), had a relationship with Alexander Calder (who was teaching her drawing) and was treated by Carl Jung, but was diagnosed with schizophrenia in her late twenties and spent much of the rest of her life in institutions, until she died at the age of 75.

There is a controversial theory that Lucia was sexually abused by her brother as a child: Pheby picks this up in this book, as well as including similar mistreatment by her father and many other men she comes into contact with. He tells her story elliptically: many of the chapters are told from the point of view of unnamed men, and you have to watch out for the one sentence or reference which tells you how their lives intersected with Lucia's. But in almost every story there is something about the general cruelty of the world to the powerless, reflected in but much larger than Lucia's own life.

The chapters are also interleaved with a short story about an archaeologist discovering an Egyptian tomb, which appears to have been desecrated before it's been sealed. He concludes that this is because the dead woman in the tomb was believed by her family to have been cursed, and so they didn't want her to have the usual protections in the afterlife. This is a reference both to the family's destruction of papers relating to Lucia Joyce, and to Pheby's own efforts in writing this book.

So it's all very clever. And I do think in principle it's possible to write a clever book about someone who is treated appallingly without losing a sense of that person as a human being (for example, The Clocks In This House All Tell Different Times which is similarly a 'clever' book about an abused child, which doesn't forget the person at the centre of the story). But I don't think that Lucia does that.

That is troubling in a human sense. But after a while it also started to make the book a bit boring. As I started each new chapter I knew that it would be about someone who is treating other people badly, but told through that character's self-justification. I knew that there would be one detail which was really gross, but told in the same bloodless way as the rest of the chapter. And I knew that the whole thing would appeal only to the intellect and not the emotions. ( )

Here is one of a string of books I've read lately that exquisitely accomplish what they set out to do, and yet leave me feeling dissatisfied and troubled.

I'm wondering why this novel was something Pheby felt compelled to write in the first place. Over and over again I read about horrific abuses being done to Lucia Joyce, written from the point of view of a man who is abusing her, including her brother and her father and her passing-lovers and her caregivers at the institution. It's a disturbing experience.

And I'm not sure how I feel about the absolute requirement put on the reader to research and to understand the swirl of fact and rumor surrounding Lucia Joyce, if you want to make any sense at all of what is written here. For instance, at the beginning there is a scene of a man burning letters. I get the idea of someone being erased, but it's all very oblique without the context, without knowing that Lucia Joyce's letters and papers were destroyed by the Joyce estate.

Most of all I'm troubled that Lucia Joyce is silenced in this book just as surely as she was in life. Pheby has talked in interviews about his moral choice to not act as a "ventriloquist" for Lucia--he felt that would be disrespectful to her, especially since he is a man. But the result of his moral choice is the sense that Lucia Joyce has no inner life or agency at all.

So I fully admire the exquisite craft of this novel, while at the same time wondering if I should have let the novel into my head at all. ( )