Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Life and Death, In Poetry, by the Seaside, 18 Jul 2006
A middle-aged man, Max Morden, returns to a seaside village, a place from his childhood, in a journey of memories following the death of his wife. As the story develops, many secrets unfold, in a dramatic story of life and death and a disclosure that completely changes Max's perception of the events that took place.
The stunning feature of the book is Banville's writing. It is intensely poetic. It is filled with images and nuances. From every word is squeezed the last drop of meaning, suggestion and emotion. With few fragments of reported speech and little quotations, there is no dialogue. Instead we have a soliloquy that conveys the thoughts, feelings and memories of a man coming to terms with bereavement and death.
Don't expect a fast-paced action story. This is a beautiful book, a work of art in which the stories interweave and the scenes are described at a pace that lets them breathe as we are drawn deeply into Max's troubling and painful world. Even through this, there is a sense of optimism and rebirth: the novel is aptly named, for the sea was there at the beginning, will wash clean, and will be there at the end.
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
High art, 8 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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61 of 66 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
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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