The Sea by John Banville

The Sea’ by Irish novelist John Banville won the 2005 Booker prize in a split decision, much to the chagrin of one of the judges, the literary editor of The Independent, who publicly called its selection “possibly the most perverse decision in the history of the award.” This assessment may have had less to do with the book itself, than with book sales, which tend to rise sharply when popular winners are announced; another prominent critic grumped, ‘The Sea’ “won’t do the Booker’s reputation much good.” The premise of ‘The Sea’ is admittedly unpleasant: the narrator/protagonist, Max Morden, an aging art critic, is grieving the death of his wife Anna to cancer. Though the awful diagnosis and her year-long decline and death are treated in the novel, sometimes graphically, Anna and her fate are completely absent from most of the work. In fact, she is already dead at the opening, and evoked only through flashback. The novel’s focus is Max, his response to Anna’s death, and his attempt to come to terms with it. Part of that attempt is his decision to leave the family home in the city and rent a room in a boardinghouse by the sea, the same house that was, 50 years earlier, rented by the Grace family, whose lives intertwined with the young Max’s. This is no coincidence: ‘The Sea’ is a novel as much about memory as about death and bereavement. For Max, memory is an antidote to loss.

Max Morden’s present is moribund and grief-stricken (in Banville names are seldom random); he stays in his room mostly, has almost no contact with the landlady, Miss Vavasour, or the only other guest, Colonel Blunden (retired), and drinks himself into oblivion most nights. The deep past that he recalls, almost exclusively the events of one summer, by contrast, is teeming with vibrant, sensual life. That summer he had been 11 or 12, his parents had rented a modest chalet neighbouring ‘The Cedars’, the well-appointed house that has now become Miss Vavasour’s boardinghouse, then being let by the Graces, Carlo and Connie, their twin children, Chloe and Myles, roughly the same age as Max, and the children’s governess, Rose, in her late teens. This is the highly eventful summer referenced in the novel’s odd opening sentence, “They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide.” A few sentences later, more ominously, we are told, “I would not swim again, after that day . . . . no, not ever again.” Though for the pubescent Max this was a sensually charged summer rich in epiphanies, and pulsing with sexual awakenings, for the attentive reader the jagged clues of impending disaster will not go unnoticed, even if unfamiliar with the author. If you know Banville, you also know the coming catastrophe is as inexorable as the North Atlantic tide.

But if you like your plot development molasses-slow delivered in a silky smooth style, this novel won’t disappoint. Banville’s self-avowed literary ancestor is Henry James, and the former has inherited the latter’s affection for the perfectly constructed sentence. Readers in a hurry might become annoyed at the more than 2 full pages it takes the narrator to describe his aging face in a bathroom mirror, or bemused that a paragraph-long recollection of absolutely nothing happening except that Chloe “lifts a hand up high to brush a clinging strand of hair from her damp forehead” ends with, “And my life is changed forever.” But those who appreciate the Flaubertian mot juste will be saddened that the novel unravels in just under 200 pages.

The work also speaks to readers looking for more than sound story and exquisite style. Banville’s being heralded “the heir to Nabokov” may be a tad fanciful, but ‘The Sea’ is without question a layered text. The most salient allusions, given Banville’s pedigree, are perhaps to Joyce. I mentioned names earlier, and ‘Grace’, is a pointed reference. “Araby” also gets a nod, with its obsession with young love, and, not surprisingly “The Dead” is echoed repeatedly. But Beckett, and, yes Nabokov, and perhaps even Poe (via Nabokov) are all hovering around Max the narrator, or more correctly, Max the unreliable narrator. Anna is also Annabel Lee in her ‘kingdom by the sea’, and Max one of Poe’s deluded speakers. There may even be a bit of Humbert Humbert in Max (which, we are latterly informed, isn’t his real name): “I padded behind Miss Vavasour with my bag in my hand, like the well-mannered murderer in some old black-and-white thriller.”; “The fact for instance that she did not know that she was later in my affections than her mother, of all people, made her seem almost piteously vulnerable in my eyes.” Despite his somber tone and tragic plot(s), Banville is not averse to adding a touch of Nabokovian playfulness to all the darkness; he is Irish after all. Certainly, Max is not the man he would have us believe he is, and what he represents, via dramatic monologue, as ‘memory’ is just as likely fabulation. The complexities of Banville’s construction of ‘self’ in the novel, even of ‘event’ (remembered? or invented?) and his simultaneous deconstruction of same, result in the very distinct possibility that ‘The Sea’ is at the same time a beautifully-wrought heartbreaking story, and a crafty parody of precisely the kind of novels that are repeatedly short-listed for, and often actually win Booker Prizes.

If there is any truth at all in the latter, it might help to account for Banville’s mischievous expression of pleasure in his acceptance speech that ‘a work of art’ had, for a change, won the prize.

Don’t forget the Library’s Adopt-abook event on Thursday Oct 17 from 5 to 7. There will be a wine and cheese reception and door prizes.