I’ve never been to Dublin, but my desire to travel there soon has only been fueled by TIME PIECES, Irish novelist and Man Booker Prize winner John Banville’s delightfully quirky collection of reminiscences of his beloved city. Spanning a lifetime --- from his childhood birthday country to city train trips in the early 1950s, to his contemporary jaunts in the company of a superbly knowledgeable friend who serves as his guide --- it’s both a highly personal tour and a well-informed glimpse of the city’s history, architecture, culture and colorful characters.

In the elegiac chapter that opens the book, the septuagenarian Banville describes in loving detail the nearly unvarying features of the journey that he and his mother took to the city several times on December 8th --- the Feast of the Immaculate Conception --- to celebrate his birthday. Coming from Wexford, “a small town that was smaller and more remote then, sequestered in its own past,” Dublin, a city Banville concedes was a “grey and graceless place” in those days, was for him, despite that, “a place of magical promise towards which my starved young soul endlessly yearned.”

With both tenderness and humor, Banville conveys the admixture of enchantment and tedium that described his emotions on these visits, veering from his joy at the cheap watch (just one of the “time pieces” of this book) he received for a birthday gift, to the “dreary hour” he had to endure while his mother and aunt searched for “hopelessly dull Christmas presents.” Even with that small torture, by the end of this special day we understand full well why he was moved to tears as he stared out the window of the homebound train, “because something was ending, was being folded up, like a circus tent; was becoming, in short, the past.”

"...both a highly personal tour and a well-informed glimpse of the city’s history, architecture, culture and colorful characters.... TIME PIECES is enhanced by some equally idiosyncratic color and black-and-white photographs that create the feel of a compact coffee table book."

To aid him in painting a portrait of the Dublin he experienced as an adult, after he moved to the city in the early 1960s at age 18, Banville turns to his pal Cicero, a man who, “in a lifetime of developing, building and collecting,” has “amassed a great store of arcane knowledge of a hidden city --- hidden, that is, in plain view.”

The two men tool around in Cicero’s car --- a red 1957 MG --- and their excursions provide insights that make up in charm what they lack in clear organization. Banville also seasons the memoir with reminiscences of his parents and other personal stories, including an aching remembrance of his odd, unrequited first love and even a description of the prostitutes who worked the street outside his first Dublin dwelling. (He was not, he’s quick to point out, one of their patrons.)

Upper Mount Street --- which housed the flat of Banville’s aunt, the entire second floor of a Georgian terrace house (that style of Dublin architecture and its postwar victimization in “appalling bouts of officially sanctioned destruction” being one of his recurring subjects), and which Banville later inherited --- was located in an area he refers to as Baggotonia. On the floor below him lived Anne Yeats, the daughter of W.B. Yeats, one of the Dublin literary figures, like James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney (Banville and Cicero shared a lunch with him near the end of the Nobel laureate’s life) who periodically pop into the book’s frame.

As Banville observes, the story of Irish literature is inseparable from the curse of alcoholism. Writing with the casually erudite wit that characterizes the memoir, he notes of McDaids Pub, on Grafton Street, for example, that it was a place where “many a masterpiece was talked into thin air and spirited away by the fumes of alcohol.”

Banville and Cicero wander Dublin’s landscape, making brief stops at places that include cinemas, libraries andcanals. He supplements his incisive observations with material from histories and other commentaries. The pair’s visit to the Dublin City Library and Archive, home to the unimposing head of Admiral Horatio Nelson, blasted from the statue known as Nelson’s Pillar by an efficient Irish Republican Army in March 1966, is typical of an itinerary that won’t match that of the average tourist, something that gives this book its special charm.

TIME PIECES is enhanced by some equally idiosyncratic color and black-and-white photographs that create the feel of a compact coffee table book. The diverse set of nearly 50 images includes everything from stones that were part of the original Abbey Theatre to a “beaded, bearded and fearsomely unbarbered” local eccentric known as the “Celtic Chieftain.” They conclude with a casual shot of Banville and Cicero, taken from the rear of the MG by Banville’s son, that the author wryly titles “The end of the journey, or Thelma and Louise have second thoughts.”

“So much of the world is concealed from us,” Banville writes as his final tour with Cicero reaches its end and the two friends prepare to share a parting glass. That will be a little less true about the heart of Dublin for readers of this refreshingly original book.