Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir
by John Banville, with photographs by Paul Joyce
(Hachette Ireland, €24.99)
The cold grey city in which his ‘dark brother’, Benjamin Black, sets his novels was a ‘place of magical promise’ for the young John Banville. Every year on December 8 – his birthday – his family would take the train from Wexford to Dublin to do their Christmas shopping.
The wristwatch his mother would buy him in Clerys always ceased to work properly by the following February. As the train home pulled out of the station the little boy would press his face against the grimy windows to hide his tears, already looking forward to the next visit to Dublin.
His first home in Dublin was the flat in Upper Mount Street where Black has since settled his troubled pathologist Quirke. In the evenings Banville would sit for hours at the rain-flayed windows – they reappear in his fiction – watching the prostitutes on the cold pavement below. On his way home from a party one evening he encountered a young prostitute smoking by the railings in Merrion Square. They talked briefly. Yes, she replied when he asked her whether her father knew what she was doing.
He grew up in a censorious age, during which self-appointed guardians of morality would scissor out of library books words and passages they deemed offensive. Thousands of books were banned and yet still circulated, thanks to people like the open-minded Wexford librarian who slipped young Banville a copy of Alberto Moravia’s Two Women (La Ciociara, 1957)
Difficult
Banville writes candidly about himself. He was pleasant enough company as a child, but ‘young and heartless’ in his adolescent years, difficult for his mother to deal with. He deeply regrets not taking more of an interest in his home town: poor and provincial as it was in the 1950s, Wexford was not without its charms.
The icy precision of his novels might suggest otherwise, but Banville is a gregarious fellow. The book is dedicated to the developer Harry Crosbie in whose roadster the two go for merry jaunts around Dublin. Crosbie hints at a plan to reconstruct the facade of the original Abbey Theatre – it burned down in 1951 – from the fragments which decorate the garden in Killiney of City Architect Daithi Hanly .
Banville recalls another close friend, the liberal Catholic broadcaster Sean Mac Reamoinn, who once replied to Banville’s enquiry about his health by comparing himself to a census: “Broken down by age, sex and religion.” Such witticisms are among the many delights in this moving, affectionate memoir.