The Sea (Man Booker Prize)
by John Banville
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Book Summary Information
Author: John BanvilleEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 2005-11-01
ISBN: 0307263118
Number of pages: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Book Reviews of The Sea (Man Booker Prize)
Book Review: A Meditation on Grief, Loss, and Regret
Summary: 5 Stars
For better or worse, depending on your reading preferences, they just don't make `em like this any more. John Banville's THE SEA, the 2005 Man Booker Award winner, is most certainly not everyone's cup of tea; some might even put him off as bitter medicine whose tortured sentences and exotic phrasings are too difficult to swallow. However, readers who appreciate nice turns of phrase, striking imagery, and multi-layered, deeply thoughtful stories patiently revealed will find much to like in this book. Put another way: those who enjoy writers like the Garcia Marquez of AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH or ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, the Faulknerian Cormac McCarthy of SUTTREE or BLOOD MERIDIAN, the Jose Saramago of THE STONE RAFT or THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JESUS CHRIST, or the David Grossman of SEE: UNDER LOVE, to mention a few, should find rewards aplenty in this short but densely scribed novel. Interestingly, Banville's writing and story-telling style is strikingly similar in many respects to the book that many felt deserved the 2005 Booker Prize - Kazuo Ishiguro's NEVER LET ME GO.
THE SEA is, in essence, an extended elegy narrated by one Max Morden, an aging, self-described dilettante whose wife has recently succumbed to a twelve-month bout with cancer. In response to this loss, Max has returned to live out his remaining years at the seaside resort of his childhood, where he first encountered the Grace family, "the gods" as he called them. Outwardly, the Graces represent everything that the boy Max and his parents were not - money, sophistication, charm, beauty, and the idyllic family life. Young Max undergoes his first sexual awakenings with the Graces as well, via an idealized infatuation with Mrs. Grace (Connie) that is eventually transferred to daughter Chloe. Years later, the aging Max does not simply return to the resort town, he takes a room in the Grace's former home, the Cedars, now converted into a boarding house. Ms. Vavasour, the matronly landlady of the house, assures Max when he first calls that she does indeed remember him from his childhood days there.
As Banville slowly unwinds his story, we learn that Max has much to rue in his life. He is professionally unaccomplished, a dabbler in the arts who writes about them rather than produce them and who has squandered years researching the painter Bonnard for a barely begun treatise for which Max himself admits he has nothing new to say. He is distant from his daughter Claire and realizes that he has lived a comfortable life from his wife's money (inherited from the ill-gotten gains of her scamming father) without ever having done anything to deserve it. Even his relationship with his late wife is revealed to have been cold and unemotional, more an arrangement than a romance with strong hints of affairs on both their parts. Of course, the crux of Max's emotional torment is his boyhood disillusionment over the Graces. What seems to be nothing more than infatuation transformed into arrested development is ultimately revealed to have been much more, more than enough to have scarred Max for the rest of his life.
Max Morden's character in THE SEA comes across as strikingly ineffectual and oddly effeminate, perhaps a product of his upbringing. He is raised primarily by his mother, surrounded by female Graces during the summertime (Chloe's father Carlo is a hairy clown and her twin brother Myles, he of the webbed feet, is a mentally impaired mute), married to Anna, fathered a daughter Claire, and submits himself to the daily ministrations of Ms. Vavasour (who has her own disturbing connections to the Graces). Surrounded by women throughout his life, Max on two occasions turns vituperative, almost misogynistic, once angrily at his deceased wife and once with the ludicrously-named Vivienne Bun. Here the real Max momentarily appears - powerless, unaccomplished, impotent - metaphorically castrated by the women of his life. "I was always a distinct no-one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone" Max claims in what has to be the world's most ambiguous statement of life goals.
Of course, no discussion of THE SEA is complete without mention of the author's wordsmithing. Whether coloring the world blue as he does throughout, penning phrases like "Rooks cawed rawly," "rooks in a raucous flock," and "the bland packed sand," or torturing his sentences with words like crepitant, refection, jeroboam, convolvulus, scumbling, mephitic, cerements, blench, anabasis, crapulent, flocculent, refulgent, horrent, anaglypta, craquelured, and (my favorite) groynes, Banville is ever one to make you pull up short just to admire his sheer dexterity with the Queen's English. THE SEA, too, tells its own admirable story of loss, on many levels.
Summary of The Sea (Man Booker Prize)
The author of The Untouchable (?contemporary fiction gets no better than this??Patrick McGrath, The New York Times Book Review) now gives us a luminous novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory.The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wife?s death, has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child?a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his life without her. But it is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled vacationing family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. The seductive mother; the imperious father; the twins?Chloe, fiery and forthright, and Myles, silent and expressionless?in whose mysterious connection Max became profoundly entangled, each of them a part of the ?barely bearable raw immediacy? of his childhood memories.
Interwoven with this story are Morden?s memories of his wife, Anna?of their life together, of her death?and the moments, both significant and mundane, that make up his life now: his relationship with his grown daughter, Claire, desperate to pull him from his grief; and with the other boarders at the house where he is staying, where the past beats inside him ?like a second heart.?
What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, vividly dramatic, beautifully written novel?among the finest we have had from this extraordinary writer.
Incandescent prose. Beautifully textured characterisation. Transparent narratives. The adjectives to describe the writing of John Banville are all affirmative, and The Sea is a ringing affirmation of all his best qualities. His publishers are claiming that this novel by the Booker-shortlisted author is his finest yet, and while that claim may have an element of hyperbole, there is no denying that this perfectly balanced book is among the writer?s most accomplished work.
Max Morden has reached a crossroads in his life, and is trying hard to deal with several disturbing things. A recent loss is still taking its toll on him, and a trauma in his past is similarly proving hard to deal with. He decides that he will return to a town on the coast at which he spent a memorable holiday when a boy. His memory of that time devolves on the charismatic Grace family, particularly the seductive twins Myles and Chloe. In a very short time, Max found himself drawn into a strange relationship with them, and pursuant events left their mark on him for the rest of his life. But will he be able to exorcise those memories of the past?
The fashion in which John Banville draws the reader into this hypnotic and disturbing world is non pareil, and the very complex relationships between his brilliantly delineated cast of characters are orchestrated with a master?s skill. As in such books as Shroud and The Book of Evidence, the author eschews the obvious at all times, and the narrative is delivered with subtlety and understatement. The genuine moments of drama, when they do occur, are commensurately more powerful. --Barry Forshaw
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