I wanted to find this novel lackluster after reading that its author, John Banville, made snooty comments after he won the Booker Prize that the Booker usually goes to “middlebrow” novels. Unfortunately, it’s actually very good, with beautiful prose and packing a real emotional punch despite being less than 200 pages long. ( )

Wonderful, beautiful study of identity and memory, the transitory and elusive nature of both, and how relationships--and the death of those relationships--influence them. Banville uses the surface narrative of a man dealing (or not dealing) with his wife's death to explore deeper philosophical themes. ( )

I'm beginning to conclude that literary prize winners these days are judged on the obscurity and multisyllabic qualities of their vocabulary. This guy knows a lot of words. He can write a beautiful sentence, but then it is followed by many dull paragraphs. I made it through part 1, but part 2 appeared to be exactly the same, and I gave up the plod. When did having an actual story-line go out of fashion, or rather, when is it coming back? ( )

This is a book to savour for its language. It has an affecting plot too. Max Morden returns to the seaside village where he had a childhood holiday. He's dealing with the recent loss of his wife, and finds himself confronting a drama, long suppressed, from that long-ago holiday. He made friends with the much more advantaged twins Myles and Chloe, who are not exactly the run-of-the-mills kids next door. This is a book about grief and lost love, to read slowly, and to become as haunted by as Max himself is by his memories. ( )

A book written in the abstract that won a prize (2005 Booker) given in the abstract.

The title gives everything away: this book is about the sea itself, making details like plot and meaning irrelevant. Told in 1P POV, the main character is bravely unlikable: a misogynist needing the approval of women, a crude child who abused animals and wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed when it came to other people who became an art historian, possibly seeking a place of beauty to hide from his own ugliness. No hero’s journey here: not so much a meditation as a rumination on memory as a fragile and eroding support pier amid ever-changing and indifferent tides.

The style (and this book is about style as the substance) can be both annoying in literary overkill and sweetly rewarding in lush prose: perhaps a reflection of life itself. None of the characters are all that interesting; like us, they are there and then they are not. I was excited to read this work right from the first paragraph, which was stunning, an unbelievable lesson on craft on so many levels. Ultimately, the book did not deliver for me. The thrill of the stylistic endeavor eventually waned and while I wanted to be carried off into the depths, everything stayed on the surface too much.

Two things prevented me from agreeing with the Booker Prize selection. 1) I’m too old — if I had read this book in my twenties, even my thirties, I would have been incredibly impressed. But any reasonably well-read person over, say, 45, has seen this overall or at least desired effect done before, with greater meaning. I did love how the narrator states outright that exact details really do not matter; 2) however much I truly enjoyed specific passages, appreciated how hard the author was working on my behalf, the book simply didn’t stay with me enough, and that is a final test for me. Kazuo Ishiguro's “Never Let Me Go” was shortlisted that year and probably would have won if “The Remains of the Day” hadn’t won previously.

It’s still a win for literature as art, as a novel presented on the same plane as a painting, but on an emotional level strangely vacant. Possibly that was the intent, as we’re all just flotsam anyway. ( )