Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir by John Banville
Hachette Ireland £24.99 pp215
The narrators of John Banville’s novels tend towards misanthropy, solipsism and the same patrician hauteur he affects in his public persona. In Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir, we encounter a man less caustic than his fictional creations — and from a humbler background than his lordly language and insistent classicism might suggest. Yes, Banville does employ the phrase “the lower orders” with telling frequency, but his aristocratic pretensions seem almost touching when we read of the “plain people” he comes from, in the sleepy town of Wexford. Even as a young man, Banville confesses, he was “a snob with nothing to be snobbish about”.
This handsomely published evocation of the Dublin he has known since the 1950s is his second book of non-fiction, following a short work on Prague from 2003. Now a septuagenarian, Banville reminisces about his relationship to the city while exploring its history and architecture. He summons the ghosts of Dublin past, from Admiral Nelson (for whom was named the pillar blown up by the IRA in 1966) to the writers of a slightly earlier generation than himself: Flann O’Brien, Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan. Observing these sozzled penmen staggering in and out of McDaids pub, the young Banville felt only “mild disdain and a measure of arrogant compassion”. Banville belongs to that literary generation for whom Dublin is incontestably James Joyce’s city: references to the nation’s most scornful intellect-in-exile pepper the book. Irish writers, Banville notes, never simply emigrate; they always “live in exile”.
The memoir opens with a remembrance of the blissful childhood day trips to the city the author made with his aunt and mother every winter, on the pre-dawn train from Wexford. This section, the book’s strongest, is enriched by reflections on time, memory and a question that fascinates Banville the artist: “When does the past become the past?” The textures here are of the same shimmering, luminous material as his novels.
Present-day chapters place Banville in the passenger seat of a vintage car, on jaunts around the city with his friend Cicero — in reality, the property developer Harry Crosbie — who boasts an inexhaustible fund of Dublin lore. A trip to Killiney Bay — “compared, for grandeur and beauty, with the Bay of Naples, and rightly so” — segues into a history of the Abbey Theatre, whose original walls are housed in a residence there. A wistful section on Baggotonia — the picturesque area around Baggot Street and a certain stretch of the Grand Canal (“the loveliest aquascape I know of”) — provokes musings on the callousness of youth, and philosophical digressions.
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Banville insists that, as an artist, he is not interested in what people do, but in what they are: “It’s as legitimate for the artist to address the question of being as it is for the philosopher.”
A fictioneer by dint of long habit, Banville cannot resist novelising his past, describing in rich, sensuous detail scenes it’s difficult to believe wouldn’t have been obliterated by time. At its worst, the results are cloyingly ornate prose and a Victorian soppiness. The remembrance of an unrequited love for a girl called Stephanie is drenched in mawkish, saccharine language — the elderly author restaging his past as Hollywood melodrama, with orchestral flourishes.
Though mellowed by age Banville the Bilious, Irish writing’s great anti-vulgarian, does make a few welcome appearances. Admiring of Dublin’s colonial architecture, he is vividly derisive of the city’s newer edifices. O’Connell Street “had its heyday in the 1950s, before it was turned into a replica of one of Las Vegas’s dingier outlying neon strips”. At “the foot of the admittedly unlovely Eden Quay” we encounter “the truly hideous Liberty Hall, a truncated steel and glass tower topped with a crinkled metal flange resembling a giant waffle”.
As Banville follows the thread of memory, we are led through a much-changed city, and indeed a lost, strange world. In the “spiritual tyranny” of bygone Ireland, a middle-aged woman forsakes the harmless magazines that are among her life’s scant pleasures, on the order of a priest. Gay people are casually ridiculed; women are not allowed to order pints in a pub; and “nice” girls never go anywhere without an escort, “except to confession”.
Mention must be made of Paul Joyce’s atmospheric photographs, of which there are several dozen to supplement Banville’s reminiscences. For those who know Dublin, or dream of it from afar, there will be much in Time Pieces that is delightful. Rich with lived experience and the pining for things past, in more sense than one it is a book John Banville has been waiting his whole life to write.