Description
For the young John Banville, Dublin was a place of enchantment and yearning. Each year, on his birthday — the 8th of December, Feast of the Immaculate Conception — he and his mother would journey by train to the capital city, passing frosted pink fields at dawn, to arrive at Westland Row and the beginning of a day's adventures that included much-anticipated trips to Clery's and the Palm Beach ice-cream parlour.
The aspiring writer first came to live in the city when he was eighteen. In a once-grand but now dilapidated flat in Upper Mount Street, he wrote and dreamed and hoped.
It was a cold time, for society and for the individual — one the writer would later explore through the famed Benjamin Black protagonist Quirke — but underneath the seeming permafrost a thaw was setting in, and Ireland was beginning to change.
Alternating between vignettes of Banville's own past and present-day historical explorations of the city, Time Pieces is a vivid evocation of childhood and memory — that 'bright abyss' in which 'time's alchemy works' — and a tender and powerful ode to a formative time and place for the artist as a young man.