The Sea [Hardcover]

Booker Prize-winning author John Banville presents a sensitive and remarkably complete character study of Max Morden, an art critic/writer from Ireland whose wife has just died of a lingering illness. Seeking solace, Max has checked into the Cedars, a now dilapidated guest house in the seaside village of Ballyless, where he and his family spent their summers when he was a child. There he spent hours in the company of Chloe and Myles Grace, his constant companions. Images of foreboding suggest that some tragedy occurred while he was there, though the reader discovers only gradually what it might have been. Now at the Cedars, he contemplates the nature of life, love, and death, and our imperfect memories of these momentous events.

As Max probes his recollections, he reveals his most intimate feelings, constantly questions the accuracy of his memory, and juxtaposes his childhood memories and his recent memories of his wife Anna's "inappropriate" illness and her futile treatments. Through flashbacks, he also introduces us to his earlier life with Anna and his fervent hopes that through her he could become someone more interesting. "I was always a distinct no-one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone," he says, confessing that he saw her as "the fairground mirror in which all my distortions would be made straight."

More a meditation than a novel with a strong plot, The Sea brings Max to life (such as his life is), recreating his seemingly simple, yet often profound, thoughts in language which will startle the reader into recognition of their universality. To some extent an everyman, Max speaks to the reader in uniquely intimate ways. In breathtaking language, filled with emotional connotations, he captures nature in perfect images, often revealing life as a series of paintings--"a Tiepolo sky," a hair-washing scene reminiscent of Duccio and Picasso. He objectifies his thoughts about memory through Pierre Bonnard's many portraits of "Nude in the Bath," paintings of Bonnard's wife in which she remains a young girl, even when she is seventy years old. Images of the bath and the sea pervade the novel--cleansing, combined with the ebb and flow of life.

Lovers of plot-based novels may find that the lack of external action and the novel's focus on the interior battles of an ordinary man of about sixty fail to engage their interest. Other readers, who may have faced the deaths of family or friends and recognized the limitations of memory, however, may see in Max a kindred spirit to whom they respond with empathy. I have rarely read such a short book so slowly--or reread with pleasure so many passages of extraordinary beauty and import--and I felt a connection with Max that I have never felt before in any of Banville's previous novels. I loved this novel. Mary Whipple

The awarding of the 2005 Booker Prize (by a whisker, it was admitted) to John Banville for his fourteenth novel - he had previously been shorlisted in 1989 for his astonishing stylistic fusion of penitence (for his crimes) and damn-the-whole-lot-of-you indictment (of society in general), “The Book of Evidence” - was, inevitably, considered a controversial choice.
The tone of “The Sea” is in many ways similar to that of “The Book of Evidence”, and of his other fiction in general. It is another first-person narrative, this time that of the ageing art-historian Max Morden, recently widowed (or ‘widowered’, as he himself tentatively suggests), following the death of his wife, Anna, from cancer, and seeking refuge, solace and a clearer understanding of the past, in a seaside village where he used to spend holidays as a child. His only immediate company there is his enigmatic landlady, Miss Vavasour, and the one other guest, the somewhat caricatural Colonel Blunden...
who may not in fact be a retired colonel at all. Who may very well be a total fraud. But then the question marks hanging over both Miss Vavasour and the colonel are small ones in comparison with the increasing enigma surrounding the narrator himself. As he reminisces alternately about the mysterious Grace family, both feared and worshipped during one of the childhood holidays in the same village, and about the meaning of his marriage to the rich Anna, the reader gradually understands that these are only aspects of a far deeper meditation about his own life and increasingly fragmenting sense of identity and personality.
For the whole novel is an anguished, Beckettian meditation on the nature of the self, and it becomes painfully clear towards the end that the narrator, after peeling away successive layers of onion skin, is on the point of discovering what lies at the centre.
The novel deals unsparingly with the tortures of childhood and sexual awakening, through the narrator’s adolescent fantasies about Mrs Grace, and, subsequently, his more immediate involvement with her twins, the precocious Chloe and the mute Myles and also with the complications introduced by sexual ambiguity, and the intermingling of desire and cruelty.
The discovery that things are neither as simple nor as innocent as they seemed recalls the 1984 Booker winner, Anita Brookner’s “Hotel Du Lac”, as does the
consciously fastidious Jamesian precision of the language, which needs to be savoured and read, and reread, aloud. This much is evident from the outset. But more disturbing parallels only slowly come to light: they are with the tragically self-deceiving narrator of another Booker winner, Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Remains of the Day” (1989). For it takes an accomplished novelist to lead his reader to realise that the narrator, whose version of events we traditionally accept (given that it is all we have), has himself been labouring under an illusion, or a series of illusions. This is surely the major revelation of Banville’s “The Sea”, where the complex symbolism of the sea itself, still and moving, one and many, calm and wild, functions as the mirror of the narrator’s tormented psyche.
Banville’s novel is emphatically not for those who want an entertaining story with a happy ending. But it cannot be too highly recommended to readers who still look to the novel as a distillation of life’s deepest and most timeless dilemmas.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It did not revolutionise my understanding of the `the novel'; it did not effect my perception of any history, society or geography; it has not changed my life - and I doubt it will; it is one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I have read. This is such luxurious prose that you can feel it wrapping you up in its stimuli. When reading, your senses seem elevated: I could smell the sea on the drizzle that fell on my face as I stepped off the bus (in London) after reading a twenty-page chunk; I could feel the burn of the brandy in the back of my throat as the narrator drank, and I could feel the sun burning through my eyelids the morning after; no matter what I played on my iPod whilst reading, all I could hear was Vaughan Williams' The Sea.

The plot is just satisfying enough, but it is more a vehicle for Banville's writing which satisfies so much deeper than any plot - this is prose that evokes the poetry of Heaney and Hughes and touches your core, causing your senses and emotions to soar with only the power of a twelve-word sentence.

This book fully deserves the recognition that I doubt it would have received without the Booker.