The Sea really bugged me. I've never read another John Banville novel, so I don't know whether this one is typical of his writing in general, but nothing irritates me more these days than a writer who has considerable gifts at his command who writes novels that function as elegant window displays for the considerable gifts at his command. The plot of the book, such as it is, finds middle-aged Max Morden retiring to a rented house by the sea, near the "chalets" where he spent his boyhood summers, to mourn his wife's death and think about the past. The first person account intercuts Max's memories of his wife's final months with his memories of a "significant" summer he spent by the sea, during which he became fascinated with the Graces, a family a rung or two higher on the social ladder than Max himself. I put "significant" in quotation marks, because I can't for the life of me figure out what's significant about Max's relationship with the Graces, other than the opportunity it affords Banville to display his considerable gifts, and -- what's worse -- I can't even fathom what's significant about his wife's death other than the opportunity it affords Banville . . . well, you get the idea. The premise of the novel seems to be "Hey, look at me, everybody, I'm the 'heir to Nabokov.' The back of the book says so. And besides, my book is filled with Beautiful Prose." The linking of Banville's name with Nabokov on the back of the book does Banville a considerable disservice. I kept expecting withering satire and a devastating prose style (Banville is good, but he's not that good), and all I got was the narrator's tendency to pepper his recollections with big, bloated words."Character-driven" novels are not of themselves a bad thing. Perhaps my favorite novel of the last thirty years (Gilead) relies more on character than on plot. If you're going to rely on character, however, you'd better make sure your characters are at least one, and preferably all, of the following: a) sympathetic; b) compelling; c) more than merely a place marker for inflated, if not particularly profound, ruminations on the Big Questions.One of Banville's passages may illustrate what bothers me most about this book. In the passage, Morden describes the photographs his terminally ill amateur-photographer wife has taken of fellow hospital patients -- all of whom have, apparently cheerfully, consented to expose their scars, wounds, and afflictions for the sake of . . . photographic immortality? . . . the gratification of their exhibitionist desires? . . . the betterment of mankind? I got stuck, as I read this passage, trying to figure out why the people in the photographs had agreed to present their private suffering in so public a fashion. Then I realized they were props, placed on stage to be rearranged and remarked upon, to give the leading man something to do while he wows us with his method acting. Oh, come on, one might object, isn't Yorick's skull a prop? Of course, but it's not merely a prop. We admire Hamlet's ability to make him live again, but that's just it. He makes him live again. Nobody really lives in Banville's novel, including his narrator, and perhaps that's not surprising in a novel that is mostly about death. What's more surprising, though, is that, for all his lovely style, Banville leaves us with very little impression that anyone in this book ever really has lived.In the book's final passages, Max Morden likens the moment of his wife's death to a moment in his childhood when he had been lifted up by a suddenly surging sea, carried toward shore a bit, and then set down again. It was, he says, "as if nothing had happened. And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference." That's what it feels like to read
Reading John Banville is like taking a long, sumptuous bath. In my book, he is one of the finest prose stylists alive. The man can write. His language and sentences are gorgeous.I’d like to say Banville is a marvel at describing characters but in fact he’s a marvel at describing everything, from a breeze to a rain barrel:“It was a wooden barrel, a real one, full-size, the staves blackened with age and the iron hoops eaten to frills by rust. The rim was nicely bevelled, and so smooth that one could hardly feel the joins between the staves; smoothly sawn, that is, and planed, but in texture the sodden grain-end of the wood there was slightly furry, or napped, rather, like the pod of a bulrush, only tougher to the touch, and chillier, and more moist. Although it must have held I do not know how many scores of gallons, it was always full almost to the brim, thanks to the frequency of rain in these parts, even, or especially, in summer.”The narrator is pretending to write a book about the painter Bonnard and here is one of my favorite passages from The Sea, which surely brought to mind the sumptuous bath of language:“In 1927, Bonnard bought a house, Le Bosquet, in the undistinguished little town of Le Cannet on the Cote d’Azur, where he lived with Marthe, bound with her in intermittenly tormented seclusion, until her death fifteen years later. At Le Bosquet she developed a habit of spending long hours in the bath, and it was in her bath that Bonnard painted her, over and over, continuing the series even after she had died. The 'Baignoires' are the triumphant culmination of his life’s work. In the 'Nude in her bath, with dog,' begun in 1941, a year before Marthe’s death and not completed until 1946, she lies there, pink and mauve and gold, a goddess of the floating world, attenuated, ageless, as much dead as alive, beside her on the tiles her little brown dog, her familiar, a dachshund, I think, curled watchful on its mat or what may be a square of flaking sunlight falling from an unseen window. The narrow room that is her refuge vibrates around her, throbbing in its colors. Her feet, the left one tensed at the end of its impossibly long leg, seem to have pushed the bath out of shape and made it bulge at the left end, and beneath the bath on that side, in the same force-field, the floor is pulled out of alignment too, and seems on the point of pouring away into the corner, not like a floor at all but a moving pool of dappled water.” I was well aware of Banville’s powers going into this book, and the fact that this one won the Booker Prize made me hope it would be the best. But for all its beautiful ruminating, I would have appreciated a tiny bit more plot. And I felt that the narrator asked me to plunge too quickly into sympathy with him with his “ah me”s and other emphatics on the first pages. Not that they were huge on plot but I found Athena or The Book of Evidence superior to The Sea. Athena had its dark mystery, The Book of Evidence its blunter, more ironic dark. I think the Booker folks were afraid, having let some other Banville beauties go by, that if they didn't give this one the Booker Prize they might not see its ilk again. (In a similar case, Ian McEwan won the Booker for "Amsterdam," which had to be one of his worst books, in my opinion.)
What do You think about The Sea (2006)?
“Elegiac” is one of those literary adjectives, having to do with death. You get your fill of that with this one. Hell, the main character is named Max Morden, so what do you expect? Unfortunately, the better written an elegiac novel is, the sadder it seems. Banville, it’s fair to say, is a writer’s writer. This one got him a Booker Prize, so, lit cred out the wazoo, right? (I love playing the lowbrow in the face of such splendid erudition.) Actually, I can see how highbrows might value The Sea for its craft. It had sentences with lots of commas and a discernably tuneful cadence. It was structured well, too, switching often among settings: his boyhood summers in a seaside town, obsessed by young love; his last year with his charming, though human, wife; and his visit again to the sea as an older man with his memories and a bottle. The atmosphere was dense in a foggy sort of way.I’m debating between 3 and 4 stars. When I think back, maybe it was a little too lyrical for my taste (which surprised me because I don’t remember feeling that way with the other Banville book I read, The Untouchable). At some level, I could appreciate the pain and the verity, but I’m not sure I really wanted to. Three it is.
—Steve
The Sea is one of those rare books that I not only gave up on, but actually sold to a second-hand shop afterwards. Booker Prize winner, highly lauded in rec.arts.books and a handful of internet forums that I frequented in those days, and a pastel pastiche of hyper-pictorial pablum. Frankly, I don't remember a whole lot of this very brief excursion into Banvillea other than the endless, and I do mean endless descriptions and depictions of the sky—the shape and color of the clouds, whether it was enlivening or forbidding, whether wind-swept or barren, stark blue or multi-hued. Meanwhile, what passed for the story itself advanced, to no seeming purpose, the poncy reminiscences of a thoroughbred arsehole about his relationship with his empty space of a daughter. Normally I will be quite indulgent in allowing the author ample room in which to run up a full head of story steam—but this particular book, shuffling its feet and lazily whistling whilst running out one bit of sky puffery after another—got under my skin in record time.
—Szplug
What does it mean to be able to write so gorgeously -- to be apparently incapable of writing normally, like an ordinary novelist, and to perennially attract clichés like 'lush,' 'beautiful,' 'mesmerizing,' 'virtuouso' -- and yet be hopelessly, permanently incapable of giving a novel drive, impetus, force, tension, forward movement: and to know that you never can, and to make a virtue of that fault, constructing books that seem to require lassitude, torpor, mulling and meditation, and then, perhaps because of your fame and the insulation it produces, to be unaware that readers can see that for what it is, and not even take pleasure in its desperation?
—Jim Elkins
