SOURCE: Pratt, William. Review of The Star Factory, by Ciaran Carson. World Literature Today 73, no. 4 (autumn 1999): 749-50.

In the following review, Pratt concludes that Carson took a big risk with The Star Factory and failed.

A Ulysses for Belfast? Ciaran Carson tries hard to make it work, but he isn't Joyce and Belfast isn't Dublin. The fact that The Star Factory is more autobiographical than fictional is a major difference from Joyce's novel; Carson does, however, make use of many Joycean techniques, such as bilingual punning and catalogues of names (“Sometimes I am in religious awe of the power of names”), describing excretory functions in detail, and quoting at length from newspapers or books, with special fondness for dictionaries (“Chambers's entry for spunk is worth quoting in full”). The result is not so much hilarity, as in Joyce's parody of Homer, but bewilderment; why is he doing...