Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir by John Banville (review)

In Dublinese, using a word that is much more warmly embracive there than here in America, John Banville’s Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir is a “lovely” book; it is also lovely in the more ordinary sense that it is beautifully produced and its photographs by Paul Joyce evocative of time and place. Banville, a “blow in” from Wexford—though, as he fondly recounts here, his annual childhood visits to his aunt in the city were the highlights of his growing up—arrived in the metropolis in the early 1960s when he was eighteen. The memoir makes little reference to Banville’s writing life, his years as a journalist, or his struggle to get published. His earliest experiences in the city of his dreams are very ordinary, indeed surprisingly so, even as Banville indulges an ongoing preoccupation with how memory gloriously transforms the banal past.

Banville’s young persona is engaging, neither totally innocent nor self-righteously defiant—just a young man finding his way. His musings on the modest lives of his parents, and his regrets over his careless ingratitude toward his aunt are moving, as are his brief references to Anne Yeats (once his upstairs neighbor) and her strange mother, the poet’s widow. He spends many pages recounting his first love (unrequited) for a Protestant girl from an eccentric Anglo-Irish family, but this is never reduced to an angry, despised Catholic from the lower classes meeting his social betters, but is rather touchingly naive, even if later, when he sees her with her real boyfriend, a member of her own tribe, the latter is described as walking like—horror of horrors!—the remote, ascetic de Valera.

Banville is a transitional figure. He passed the first third of his life in the repressive era of church dominance (the John McGahern run-in and job loss are recounted in some detail), spent his middle years in the more liberated but unsettled atmosphere of the late twentieth century, and is now a dweller in a new Ireland that is often barely recognizable. Banville makes a couple of swipes of his own crozier at John Charles McQuaid, archbishop of the metropolis and guardian of its stultifying morality, and references a few wayward clergy even in those days, but his recollections and wanderings through the city are largely benign. If the footnoted anecdote about the Jesuit from Belvedere who referred to Joyce as “not one of our successes” is dated, it is an anecdote redolent of Banville’s mid years in the city.

Banville admits that Joyce has “done” Dublin so completely that there is hardly anything left for those who come after him. He admits, too, that he has little stake on the Baggot Street area (Baggotonia) where he lived with his aunt for a time, inasmuch as Patrick Kavanagh and Thomas Kinsella have laid claim to the bridges and benches and the very night air there. But he does stake his own quiet claim to what is left, in particular to the elusive (in every sense of the word) Iveagh Gardens. The Phoenix Park gets extended coverage also, as do the Georgian houses of Banville’s beat (with Maurice Craig supplying much of the history), and there is an expected lamentation over the brutal destructions of the 1970s as modern Ireland was ushered in without concern for the architectural glories of its colonial past. One might say Banville believes in art in all its incarnations. Still, in celebrating the latter, he does not pass over the poverty and suffering of many of the city’s inhabitants.

In spite of the abundance of metaphors describing earth and sky and the people and buildings that inhabit them, Banville makes no claim to being unusually observant: “So much of the world is concealed from us,” he says at one point about some stonework routinely unnoticed. And it is only after an archivist in New York has scanned a database of some twenty million photographs for a suitable cover for one of...