The Sea (original 2005; edition 2006)

Disappointing. ( )

Transferring the books on my spreadsheet to Goodreads

I found it tiresome at the beginning. Nothing I write now hasn't already been written by numerous book reviewers, but I'm here just to reiterate. Banville weaves multi-clause sentences, and pontificates on details and background of the details, and then the psychic importance of those backgrounds. If that's the type of sentence you enjoy reading then you'll like this novel. But I found it tiresome, especially since the old adage "show don't tell," was severely ignored here. There's little plot, or action for most of the novel, and virtually none until about 120 pages in. We know his name, we know he used to hang out with some upper class kids, and we know his wife is dying (or dead already, depending on which paragraph you're reading). But that's really it. There isn't a lot of action.

I found some adverbs lazy even, something like, the "so and so were unimaginably bright." Really? Unimaginably? I'm not saying that sentence actually existed in the novel, but it's on par with some of the things he wrote. So either that sentence was lazily crafted or there's a deeper reason for it's seeming laziness. It's clear he's trying to employ some literary technique to show Max's faulty, and failing memory, but I still feel like some sentences were empty beyond excuse.

But towards the end the story does build, the last bit of it all, redeemed a lot of the novel for me. Since it was so short it was really only required to need one movement, and it delivers on that one movement. It reminds of the Foals's song "Spanish Sahara," a song that I like. So there, 3 stars. ( )

When my wife died suddenly in 1998 from a cerebral aneurysm, one of the things that I did in the wake of her death was to begin to reconnect with people and places that had meaning both for us as a couple and for me alone. In many cases, I ended up returning to places from my own childhood and reconnecting with people whom I had not contacted for years. Both the process itself and the actual reconnections to past places and friends helped me cope with the loss. It also activated memories that I had either forgotten or had feared I would be unable to recall.

John Bayville’s The Sea is a story that mirrors in some measure my own journey in grief. For Max Morden, the journey to his past was certainly more focused. Following his wife’s death after a long illness, he returned to the seaside town where his family had vacationed in his youth. And his reawakening memories swirled around a family, the Graces, he had met during a single summer when he was around 11 years old. For Max, mystery and tragedy were deeply embedded in his youthful past.

While there are clear differences in Max’s and my returns to our pasts, Max’s emotional responses to working through grief were similar. At one point, toward the end of the novel, Max reflects:

There are times, they occur with increasing frequency nowadays, when I seem to know nothing, when everything I did know seems to have fallen out of my mind like a shower of rain, and I am gripped for a moment in paralyzed dismay, waiting for it all to come back but with no certainty that it will.

That feeling I know well.

I more generally read fiction to open up new horizons for me, new worlds—to help me see and understand with the eyes of others the world around me. The Sea, however, was a far more personal adventure: in a sense, it was a return to old worlds along already trodden roads. I understood much of Max’s inner turmoil and disengagement from the people around him because it all rang true for me in my circumstances.

Apart the story thread, Banville’s language is elegant and often lyrical. Here Max describes a moment when he and the Graces are at the beach:

The sand around me with the sun strong on it gave off its mysterious, catty smell. Out on the bay a white sail shivered and flipped to leeward and for a second the world tilted. Someone away down the beach was calling to someone else. Children. Bathers. A wire-haired ginger dog. The sail turned to windward again and I heard distinctly from across the water the ruffle and snap of the canvas. Then the breeze dropped and for a moment all went still.

Banville fills his novel with the kinds of descriptions that pull the reader directly into the story, seeing, hearing and smelling with the protagonist.

Banville, as Ted Gioia emphasizes in his review of The Sea, also builds his story with words that will send most readers to a dictionary: assegais, horrent, cinereal, knobkerrie, prelapsarian and mephitic (Gioia's selection). It is that use of an elegantly mature vocabulary that seems to off put many readers. He is clearly in his selection of words not an Ernest Hemingway. But he is a different type of stylist than Hemingway. While Hemingway in his classic novels and short stories uses a sparse, tightly-constructed prose that hints at greater depth and meaning (his so-called “iceberg theory”), Banville brings everything to the surface, leaving the reader submerged in a world of profound emotion and surprise tightly controlled by the author. Reading The Sea is not effortless.
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The Sea, winner of the 2005 Booker Prize, reminded me Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending. They’re both short, dull books about old men reflecting on their childhoods. Maybe that’s all you need to write about to win the Booker. Barnes’ is in any case the stronger book, dealing as it does with the unreliable nature of memory itself. Banville’s The Sea is an unremarkable novel following an elderly art critic as he returns to the seaside holiday house of his childhood after the death of his wife from cancer. The Sea is told in a fragmented style, jumping back and forth between his childhood and his wife’s slow death and his present existence in solitude on the Irish coast.

Sometimes I read an acclaimed book and don’t enjoy it, which was the case with The Sense of an Ending, and I feel like the fault is mine – that I missed something, or that I wasn’t smart enough to appreciate it. Not the case with The Sea, which is boring, plain and simple. It’s mostly blather about Max’s boyhood crushes and sexual repression expressed in tiresome, pretentious prose:

One moment she was Connie Grace, her husband’s wife, her children’s mother, the next she was an object of helpless veneration, a faceless idol, ancient and elemental, conjured by the force of my desire, and then something in her had suddenly gone slack, and I had felt a qualm of revulsion and shame, not shame for myself and what I had purloined of her but, obscurely, for the woman herself, and not for anything she had done, either, but for what she was, as with a hoarse moan she turned on her side and toppled into sleep, no longer a demon temptress but herself only, a mortal woman.

I suppose Banville gets points for realism – reading The Sea is exactly as entertaining and enlightening as listening to an old man pontificate at length about sexual memories from his childhood. There’s also an unlikely ending to his childhood tales, a boring twist, and a non-climactic climax as where gets drunk on the beach. And I often wonder why authors who write in such overwrought prose style, and who insist on seeing deep portents in every glance and comment and plastic bag flying down the street, don’t stick to poetry.

On a final note, this was shortlisted alongside Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, which is the far superior novel. A shame, but neither the first nor the last time the Booker committee made a terrible decision. ( )