Memory: The sight of butter oozing through the pinprick surfaces of a Marietta biscuit sandwich; the smell of Sweet Afton on the upper deck of a crowded city bus; the feel of the metal dial of a black Bakelite telephone - these are just some of the Proustian "touchstones of memory" that Michael Cronin uses to conjure up the intimate textures of daily life in the recent Irish past, writes Liam Harte.
To read this thoughtful, stylish and witty book is to experience multiple epiphanies of recognition as Cronin explores the ways in which mundane objects and activities articulate our identities and define our social relations at particular historic conjunctures.
Time Tracks at once gestures towards and shies away from autobiography. It is perhaps best described as a lyrical blend of personal reflection and cultural analysis in which the author sifts through the minutiae of everyday experience, as a means of both evoking "a remembered life" and probing the contours of Irish modernity. Certain commodities and social practices, from getting out "the Good Cups" to getting a haircut, are endowed with a kind of national specificity and scrutinised for what they reveal about changing social habits, attitudes and aspirations. Thus, tea is seen as "the great leveller", coffee "the talisman of progress" and the ubiquitous mobile phone a token of our collective "dream of connectedness".
The author himself emerges as an artful bricoleur, deftly arranging fragments of autobiographical memory to create a "Bildung-story" located in a specific place and time. This time/space dialectic clearly fascinates Cronin and elicits many suggestive insights about the ways in which urban spaces are profoundly constitutive of narratives of the self. With a poet's skill, he weaves these insights around his beguiling central conceit, that of Dublin as autobiographical text. City-centre pubs are thus read as chapters of a biography, each holding "a fragment of your story", while bus numbers encode "love's mnemonic":
A glimpsed 33, watching the 45 pull out and the 79 swing into a corner and a name comes out from under the cover of time and the dream life of memory empties out fragments of floral wallpaper or a Simon and Garfunkel record sleeve or the sudden opulence of a full six-pack resting unsteadily on a walnut-effect Formica table.
Yet for all its vivid specificity, Time Tracks strives towards typicality in the way it continually collapses personal biography into collective history. Throughout, Cronin elides the gap between individual and social memory by translating his private recollections into emblems of a shared past. One realises with a jolt that the word "I" never appears. Instead, the second-person point of view ("you") invites readers to submerge their memories in a common narrative of belonging, one that pre-dates the social realignments caused by globalisation and multiculturalism. There is a sense, therefore, in which Cronin is effectively remembering a whole generation's past on its behalf, giving voice and shape to the ineffable autobiographical narratives that lie buried in the forgotten details of daily lives.
Yet even as one surrenders to this warm embrace of collective remembrance, one is mindful that homogenising forces are at work, and that other people and places produce very different narratives of "the documentary years of Southern unemployment and Northern violence". This leads one to wonder if future writers will be able to recreate the contemporary "Irish everyday" with such confidence in the representativeness of their memories, or whether, as Ireland becomes ever more ethnically and culturally diverse, Cronin's collectivising "you" will necessarily fragment into a proliferation of remembering "I"s. None of which is to diminish the authenticating power and emotional integrity of Time Tracks, but rather to acknowledge its inflection by the very processes of memory, modernity and change that it so eloquently illuminates.
Liam Harte lectures at the Academy for Irish Cultural Heritages on the Magee campus of the University of Ulster
Time Tracks: Scenes from the Irish Everyday By Michael Cronin New Island, 151pp. €12.99.