BOOK REVIEW: ‘Time Pieces’ by John Banville

OPINION:

TIME PIECES: A DUBLIN MEMOIR

By John Banville

With photographs by Paul Joyce

Knopf, $26.95, 212 pages

The acclaimed and accomplished Irish writer John Banville, who is probably best known in America for his crime novels written under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, has won about every prize the literary world has to offer, from the Man Booker to the Franz Kafka Prize, and is mentioned as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Stylistically, he has been compared to Joyce, Beckett and Nabokov, but he told one interviewer he thinks of himself as a disciple of Henry James. Not bad company to keep.

Mr. Banville has a reputation for being quirky and outspoken, but you’d never know it from reading “Time Pieces,” his love letter to Dublin, which he began visiting at age six on his December 8 birthday.

Enhanced by the truly lovely photographs of Paul Joyce (also a film-maker who once collaborated with Samuel Beckett), the book records the author’s late life visits to a series of special places in Ireland’s most special city.

Not just accompanying Mr. Banville, but acting as a guide and mentor is his friend Cicero (not otherwise identified), who, writes that Banville, ” knows a Dublin that few others are aware of or have forgotten ever existed. He can tell you the pub to go to in the North Strand where on the wall of the lounge bar you will find a chart of all the lighthouses in Dublin Bay, along with their signaling sequences. He can tell you where chunks of the demolished Nelson’s Pillar are to be found, and the whereabouts of the head of the Admiral himself.”

Their first stop is to see “the disassembled but carefully preserved frontage and side wall” of the Abbey Theatre, Ireland’s National theater.

Next, the duo moves on to the writers and artists Dublin neighborhood known as Baggotonia, and from there to see: Mount Street, Nelson’s head or what’s left of it, Phoenix Park and eventually to the still-hard-to-find Iveagh Gardens, where the author recalls one of his many (unrequited) youthful loves.

Not surprisingly, the main pleasure of “Time Pieces” is not found in vicariously visiting these spots but in reading the author’s descriptions of them and his many asides. What is it about these Irish writers and their love for the English language?

Whatever it is, it’s infectious.

For example, the author tells us, as they begin their private tour of Dublin, “It is a May morning of luminous loveliness. The sunlight glows through a delicate muslin mist, the soft air is fragrant with the smell of lilac, and out over the tawny reaches of Sandymount strand the pale sky shines and shimmers like the inner skin of a vast soap bubble. Cicero and I, a pair of devil-may-care old dogs, are motoring southward in his little red roadster “

On hearing that his Aunt Nan, with whom he had lived for a while, has died, Mr. Banville regrets not having spent more time with her: “Forgive me, dear old aunt; forgive the young beast that I was, and that I regret to say I have never quite ceased to be — I am old now, or oldening, at least, but one’s inner monster stays forever young.”

And later, he castigates himself again, writing “What a prissy and purblind young man I was, a snob with nothing to be snobbish about.”

This being a book about Ireland by an Irishman, there is, of course, plenty of humor. He repeats the comment made by James Joyce’s father when told his son wants to marry a girl whose last name is Barnacle:

“Well, she’ll never leave you.” Or, “I recall a journalist colleague telling me how at a late-night session in a Donnybrook pub [a friend] had risen, regretfully to leave while there were drinks still on the table, saying, ’Well, I’m off home now to put my feet up before a roaring wife.’”

What makes their peregrinations about town even more enviable is that they make them in a 1957 MG, Cicero’s “little red roadster.” (The next-to-last of the book’s 49 photographs is a shot from the rear showing the two older gentlemen sitting in the MG, at the end of a country lane that faces a body of water. The caption reads, “The end of the journey, or Thelma and Louise have second thoughts.”)

Their tour of Dublin over, they stop for a drink at a pub, Mulligan’s on Poolberg Street, when, writes John Banville, ” who should come in — no such thing as a coincidence — but my eldest son, my firstborn on his way home from work, and has stopped in for a pint, just like my father used to do, all those years ago, in another world, in another age.”

Of Dublin, Mr. Banville once wrote that James Joyce “had seized upon the city for his own literary purposes and in so doing had used it all up” Thankfully, not quite.

• John Greenya is a Washington writer.