Elegant use of language, every word chosen with cre. ( )

The greatest joy is happening to read about the world as you yourself see it and feel it. For me, John Banville provides that experience to a tee. His writing is perfect. He bathes the everyday and the ordinary in an extraordinary light - lifting people and objects to their fullest potential in such a way as for the reader to truly appreciate and marvel at them and their existence.
Another tale of forbidden love and ill-matched lovers. Again, like the other Banville novels I have read, it is bleak and stormy but there is beauty and humour in the darkness.
I found the narrator and protagonist of this story, Oliver Orme, at first rather unlikeable. But I warmed to him through his playful self-deprecating explanations and descriptions. Although done in a very self-conscious and purposeful way, this side of his character outweighs the selfishness and you can't help but empathise with his reasonings and torments.
Polly - his mistress, his lover, his best friends wife - is loveable and charming in her girlish and unassuming way. I could understand how Oliver came to fall in love with her from the sense of feeling her character projects.
Surprisingly for me, I was slow to take to this book. I think my concentration was off. But once I was in, I was in. And I didn't want to get out. ( )

“I’m tired of the past, of the wish to be there and not here,” John Banville writes, and yet the book oozes its history. These are the dusty figures of midnight wanderings. The artist as a thief, and a far less subtle one than Siken's The War of the Foxes imagines. John Banville's novel is one of self-reflection and regret, the slow slip into complacency that we all eventually fall into and the wondering over whether there is another way. Is all art thievery? Is it possible to get something we desire without it losing its lustre? For that matter, what do we truly want? One person I spoke with heard me say John Banville's name and replied in a huff "Oh, that pretentious boor." Yes, to some he would be just that.

This is the story of Olly Orme, a painter and petty thief who has lost his inspiration to paint but gained his best friend's wife. The narrative begins with him having sequestered himself in his childhood home to avoid both his mistress and his own wife and reminisce over his own history. Slowly, the writing moves away from this focused plot to instead focus upon the intricacies of art and language itself. Why should we be shackled down by our own expectations? Why can't we show things as they truly are, but instead as we want them to be? Or in showing things as we want them to be are we truly showing them as they are? These heady thoughts tangle with the plot until the ultimate focus of the reader is on the words, the melody, the rhythm of the story itself.

The book was difficult to get through for me, but it was beautiful. I didn't enjoy it quite as much as The Sea, for to me The Sea is a true masterpiece and I enjoyed its more subtle approach. All the same, Banville is a glorious writer and one that I would recommend without hesitation to anyone looking for something a bit more difficult. I would caution, however, to focus more on the poeticism of his writing than much else. ( )

I could sketch out a group portrait of the four of us, linked hand in hand in a round-dance. Or maybe I’ll bow out and let Freddie Hyland complete the quartet, while I stand off to one side, in my Pierrot costume, making melancholy strummings on a blue guitar."
This first person reflective account details the narrator's, Oliver Orme's affair with his good friend's wife Polly. The event then causes ripples through the four friends as described in the sentence above. Orme merely narrates the circumstances and does so with marvelously detailed sentences. Here the writing is the star, the plot merely an device to display it. ( )

At first glance this book's starting point is not promising - a mid-life crisis novel told by an unsympathetic, unreliable and self-pitying narrator, but Banville is too good a writer to be limited by cliche.

The narrator is Oliver Orme, a painter who has stopped painting and a petty thief, looking back at a series of events triggered by an affair with his friend's wife. Banville shows a painterly eye for detail, he is an expert at capturing moods and emotions, and there is plenty of dry humour. It is not always an easy read - Banville's classical education is often evident and some of the vocabulary is arcane* (though always deployed with precision).

Perhaps not the best place to start with Banville, but a stimulating and enjoyable read.

* I made a list of the words I looked up (in a few cases these were vaguely familiar but I wanted a precise definition): asportation, autochthon, bibelot, bleb, borborygmic, claustral, consistory, cullion, finical, foulard, glair, haruspicate, hypnogeny, imbricated, instauration, jorum, losel, oxter, phthisic, seriatim, soughing, volute ( )