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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
High art, 9 Jan 2006
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.
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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
' ASH ON AN OLD MAN'S SLEEVE...., 5 Feb 2006
....is all the ash burnt roses leave.'
This fine book, the fictional memoir of Max Morden, is so beautifully written that it leaves the reader nostalgic for the time when the style and wording of a book was as important, if not more than, the plot. It is such a pleasure to trace Max's life with his late wife, Anna, and the sub-plot of his memories of the Grace twins, Myles and Chloe. The characters are delineated with a fine brush and the descriptions of the scenery and the houses have one standing in them looking around and admiring.
'Light of summer thick as honey fell from the tall windows and glowed on the figured carpets.'
In the description of Anna's father's house, there is a Gatsby like resonance as also in the description of her father with his beautiful silk shirts 'from Charvet in cream and bottle-green and aquamarine', though not in his figure.
It isn't all soft gentle memories, though. The photographs which Anna takes in the hospital are just as carefully decribed as the house or the silk shirts and they are horrifying in the intricate care taken to describe each suppurating wound or misshapen limb.
The denouement is surprising but not a shock as we have been warned by hints and by balances that something happened which makes Max return to the Cedars,possibly to expiate something or to come to terms with a haunting memory?
'The past beats inside me, like a second heart.'
John Banville is a master craftsman and this is a brilliantly written book. Do buy it and allow yourself the sheer pleasure of a stunning piece of work.
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60 of 65 people found the following review helpful:
Another masterpiece from Banville, 24 Aug 2005
By A Customer
"The Sea" is a profound meditation on time, loss, memory and longing. Once again, Banville introduces the slightly effete, cultured, late middle-aged male character with a taste for alcohol and a dyspeptic view of the world that we recognise from previous Banville novels. Max Morden has lost his wife to cancer and retreats into a world of nostalgia and a longing for the simplicities of the past, but the past with its lost innocence and simpler relationships carries its own tragedies, and the constant presence of the sea at the edges of the narrative is a metaphor for the unknowability of the forces that shape, and occasionally end lives.Banville's prose is at his most luminous in "The Sea"; I frequently paused to re-read passages and phrases which captured an essence so accurately or described an image or a feeling with such beauty and aptness that I was left wondering how these effects could be created with mere words. Banville's work has clearly been influenced by Proust, most obviously in this novel about memory and lost time, but unlike most authors for whom this is true, the comparison with Proust is not an unfavourable one. There is also the strong influence of Samuel Beckett running through all of Banville's work, particularly in the extended interior monologues that constitute his novels (even the occasional passages of dialogue are refracted through the perception of the narrator, so that they become part of his interior thoughts). However, more than in previous novels, the sense of Beckett-esque detachment is moderated by the sense of loss and yearning that permeates the novel, and which makes Max Mordern a more human and sympathetic character than his predecessors in Banville's other novels. "The Sea" is a rich, rewarding and beautifully evoked novel that resonates with the reader. We are fortunate to have a writer of Banville's calibre - and the comparisons with Proust and Beckett are, for once, appropriate for a living writer - working at the height of his powers and producing books of this quality.
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