Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir

John Banville

Hachette Books Ireland, £24.99

Reviewed by Alan Taylor

WHEN,” asks John Banville, at the outset of this flaneuring memoir, “does the past become the past? How much time must elapse before what merely happened begins to give off the mysterious, numinous glow that is the mark of true pastness?”

Struggling to come up with a satisfactory answer, Banville, who is 70, suggests that the present is where we live while the past is where we dream. In that regard, Time Pieces, an extended essay complemented with evocative black and white photographs taken by Paul Joyce, is a sensual and discursive meander through the novelist’s childhood and youthful, lustful manhood.

Banville is not of course a real Dubliner, hailing as he originally does from Wexford. But like countless of his countryfolk, Dublin – “the opposite of ordinary” –was where he always yearned to go, a place of “magical promise”, as Moscow was for Irina in Chekhov’s Three Sisters.

As fans of the thrillers of Benjamin Black, Banville’s crime writing alter ego, may appreciate, the Dublin that first imprinted itself on his imagination was that of the 1950s and 60s. In those “grey and graceless” days it was still possible to spy the likes of Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan and Flann O’Brien dragging themselves out of McDaid’s and other howffs and shuffling up Grafton Street before it was “pedestrianised”, a word Banville rightly abhors as much for its sound as for what it implies.

One of the many pleasures of this book is the appearance of such characters and the anecdotes and wisecracks they inspired, invented and patented. One such was Sean Mac Reamoinn, a diplomat and journalist. “I’m like the Census,” he once told Banville, “broken down by age, sex and religion.” Another was John MacGahern who, after his novel The Dark was banned by the Catholic Church, lost his teaching job and was forced to seek work in England. It was not so much the book that had got him into trouble, he was told, but the fact that he had married a foreigner, a Finn, “while here at home the women’s tongues are hanging out for a man”. To which MacGahern replied: “Well, they weren’t hanging out in my direction.”

Accompanying Banville on his peregrinations is a fellow known as Cicero, whose knowledge of Dublin is second only to Joyce’s – one of several Irish writers who “never merely emigrated” but “went into exile”. Cicero, as Seamus Heaney remarked to Banville, is “a great man for the plans”, a mover and a shaker, a meeter and a greeter. Together, he and Banville explore parts of this garrulous, bibulous, scurrilous city unknown to the tourists queuing for a glimpse of the Book of Kells in Trinity College Library.

I suppose one must take Banville at his word and accept that Cicero is a real person, though I have my doubts. Could he be a convenient, imaginary sidekick, like Chapman is to Keats in Flann O’Brien’s fantastical tales? As the pair move around the town, Old Dublin, which revelled in its eccentricity and delighted in its extraordinariness, slowly gives way to its modern incarnation. Not so long ago women were only allowed to order half pints in bars. Likewise, the pernicious influence of the Catholic Church is on the wane. Mercifully, too, the Troubles that benighted the North and impacted on the South – 34 people, many of them young women, were killed in Dublin and Monaghan in IRA bombings in 1974 – are part of the dreamy, ghastly past.

Like everywhere else, Dublin is changing, becoming like everywhere else. Banville’s Dublin is populated by shades; his Aunt Nan, whose flat she allowed him to share; a girl called Stephanie, who allowed him to kiss her, “dryly, chastely”; Christy Brown, who was able to write only with the toes of one foot. Like publishing lunches, like “suspenders and post-prandial cigars”, they are things of the past, though here they live on in matchless prose and ageless monochrome.