A crowning work
BOOKER WINNER John Banville’s novel is one of the saddest stories Philip Marchand has ever read, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing
rish novelist John
Banville’s The Sea, a
tale told by one Max
Morden, widower, art lover and alcoholic, is one of the saddest stories I’ve ever read, and that’s saying something — the lonely protagonist of J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man, which I reviewed just last week, was not exactly a ray of sunshine, either.
Don’t let me discourage you from reading the novel. If the old saying is true, that a sour old man is a crowning work of the devil, it is still interesting to find out how the work was accomplished. Max begins his account by summoning in memory his 11year- old self at an Irish seaside resort, and his fascination with the Grace family, upper- middle class renters of a house called The Cedars. The family consists of Mrs. Grace, her husband Carlo, the twins Chloe and Myles ( roughly the same age as Max) and a governess named Rose. The young Max is attracted to the Graces partly as a means of escape from his own bickering parents, who rent shabby accommodations suitable to their working- class status. “ From the start I was bent on bettering myself,” he says, recalling his attempts to manage the Graces’ elaborate cutlery. But this social climbing is soon combined with erotic fascination. He has a huge crush on Mrs. Grace, which is eventually transferred to her daughter. These feelings are tainted, however, by something unwholesome in the Grace household. Hints of cruelty and perversion and even diabolism emerge from Max’s language.
Carlo Grace, for example, is first glimpsed giving the young Max a “faintly satanic” wink. The same man is later described as presiding over his family like an “ old grinning goat god.” Chloe and Max torment Rose and then run away “laughing like demons.” Max himself imagines possessing Mrs. Grace like a “ demon lover.” Later, with Chloe, he experiences a “ series of more or less enraptured humiliations.” This is not the innocence we associate with puppy love. From time to time Max, now in late middle age, interrupts his childhood memories with reflections on the present. A new
Iwidower, he has returned to The Cedars — “ Being here is just a way of not being anywhere,” he explains — to assuage his grief with brandy. Also at The Cedars is a starchy hostess, Miss Vavasour, and another guest, a retired colonel whom Max consistently describes in the most contemptuous terms. It is only late in the novel that the reader begins to suspect that the colonel is a much more sympathetic character than Max has let on. But Max is an aesthete, abundantly endowed with a quality psychoanalysts term “ocular malice.” In Max’s world, most things look disgusting and smell worse. A harmless tea bag is “ vile,” like “ something a careless person might leave behind unflushed in the lavatory.” Give Max credit, however — he directs his malicious gaze inward as well as outward, developing, as he puts it, “ a crawling repugnance of my own flesh.”
His self- contempt is more than skin deep. Instead of being the art scholar and critic he had once imagined, he calls himself a man of “ scant talent,” living off the fortune of his wife. “ In my life it never troubled me to be kept by a rich, or richish, wife,” he insists. “ I was born to be a dilettante.” But there is no disguising the self- loathing when he describes his intended book on the painter Bonnard as “ a notebook filled with derivative and half- baked would- be aperçus.” The irony is that the man of scant talent talks like a man of great talent — which is understandable, given that John Banville has poured all of his own gift for observation and metaphor into Max’s creation. A description of a wild wind “ thumping its big soft ineffectual fists on the window pane” is a good example. Max’s metaphors and hypersensitive descriptions, however, have a sinister tendency to reduce nature to artifice and human beings to objects, as when he describes Mrs. Grace’s “ gentle snores” as “ the sound of a small, soft engine trying and failing repeatedly to start.” The tendency may not be surprising in a narrator who can observe that “ things endure, while the living lapse.” The question of memory is trickier. Max would also seem to have a brilliant power of recall, recreating the smell and look of scenes long past in incredible detail. He seems to exist in what he calls “ the historic present.” Eventually the reader suspects that Max is busy not so much recalling but constructing the past, like a painting on a canvas that he keeps working over. He simply ignores any boundaries between past and present, reality and imagination. At one point he attempts to remember sounds at the seaside, “ flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard in the distance.” Then he pulls himself up with the reflection that he’s never actually heard a gun fired. At another point, in the present, more or less, he attempts to describe the appearance of an oldfashioned woman — “As she twittered on I pictured her in bombazine, whatever that is.”
I don’t know what bombazine is, either. Evidently it’s something Max has read about and remembers vaguely. Why is he going on like an author carelessly verging into cliché and second-hand imagery, using gunshots as similes when he’s never heard them, or clothing a woman in something he’s never seen? He’s not remembering, he’s writing up memory. The reader is thus served notice — rely on this unreliable narrator at your peril. A sudden twist at the end of the narrative, a sudden revelation of a huge mistake of perception on Max’s part, underlines that peril. Yet the reader feels enormous interest in what’s going on, and enormous sympathy for this beleaguered narrator, despite all the questions about the narrative itself. We see a man who is real for us. We see a man who blames his deep unhappiness on an “ indifferent world,” on “ polyglot fate,” but who is really the product of a human failure to love. Star literary critic Philip Marchand’s new book is Ghost Empire: How the French Almost Conquered North America (McClelland & Stewart).