MISSING IN ACTION!
FIRST BROADCAST 25 December 1965
Down the years, great minds have pondered at length the unsolved mysteries of literature. Did wily Heathcliff, late of wiley Wuthering Heights, murder the brother of his beloved Cathy? Who would Dickens have fingered as the killer of Edwin Drood, if indeed he was killed at all? And, in James Joyce’s inimitable Ulysses (“an oddball romp, 6/10”), who is the enigmatic ‘man in the macintosh’ who looms as 13th mourner at the funeral of Paddy Dignam? Theory upon thesis upon treatise have hazarded an identity for this brooding, brown-coated figure. It’s like UNIT dating for literary wonks. Is he a physical manifestation of grief? Is it Joyce himself, haunting his own story? Anything is possible. As the novel’s sometime protagonist Leopold Bloom muses, peering through the grey air of the graveyard: “Always someone turns up who you never thought of.”