Beautifully written but tediously plotted, I struggled with whether to give this 3 stars or 4. I ended up knocking off a star because in the end my ratings are based mostly on how much I enjoyed a book, and while I can appreciate the aesthetic and literary qualities of The Sea, the bottom line is that it bored me.

Banville is one of those authors who makes art out of every sentence, and if you enjoy that sort of writing, you can immerse yourself in it and enjoy each and every word. However, I found him to be an almost but not quite perfect craftsman; his writing is not self-conscious in that pretentious way some self-styled "literary" authors get, but here and there some of his sentences were forced, like a painting where you can see the brush strokes if you look closely.

The more fatal flaw, for me, was that the story moves so very slowly, and it's a story that could easily be condensed to one page. Do you like introspective meandering by a middle-aged man who's wasted his life and now is holding each and every one of his regrets up to the light to examine it? Do you want to read about a man who turns into a washed-up alcoholic after his wife dies, and the most important thing that ever happened in his life happened when he was thirteen? Then you'll enjoy the beautiful, literary prose with which Banville delves into every nook and cranny of his protagonist's psyche, and he does illustrate every character in marvelous, sometimes breathtaking detail. His writing skill is enviable, but I'm one of those nikulturny readers who thinks storytelling is important too. This isn't a book you read to be entertained, it's a book you read so you can talk about it in book clubs and brag about how you read a Man Booker Prize-winner.

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.)

I just have to say it: it's all semiunremarkable until page 170 or so (this book, like many in the modern canon, such as “Amsterdam,” another Booker winner, is short in that bittersweet sort of way—perilously malingering, at 200 pages, between being almost a novel, but not quite a novella)—the plot ebbs and flows (ha) through an ocean of profound memories. The narrator chronicles, basically, two points in his life which left him devastated. His first ever, and his latest, all revolve around the sea, its massiveness & its depths, its personal mysterious allure. He meditates on the last one of these presages of death, that looming event itself, so final and sad—and the end really is like dynamite. I can only compare it to “Everyman” by Philip Roth, even “The Death of Ivan Ilych” in its management of such a theme which is, at first glimpse, frankly, droll & overdone. The poetry which had been glimpsed at before creates a lasting impact on the reader at its speedy conclusion. The tedium and clichéd tactics become very much negligible once the ending gets there. Here is a paramount example of how the ending makes the book.

The middle-aged narrator, Max Morden, is dealing with the trauma of the recent death of his wife. He is also looking back on a childhood summer by the Irish seaside. He had spent time with the Grace family, and he is still trying to mentally process some of the events that occurred.

This was a very introspective novel about life, death, love, and haunting memories. John Banville writes beautiful literary sentences, but the book did not capture my interest until I was nearing the end. I'm not going to rate it with stars because I appreciate the author's lovely prose although it wasn't the right book for me.

Fiquei fã das capacidades literárias de Banville, ainda que o livro não me tenha convencido totalmente. O livro é curto, ficamos a saber muito pouco sobre os personagens, ainda assim e sendo o foco do livro as memórias, o mais interessante acontece nas descrições dessas, em especial dos sentires evocados pelas memórias, sentires que nos dizem de que somos feitos, porque somos assim e não de outra forma.

"Tudo aquilo que realmente sempre desejei foi sentir-me defendido, protegido, resguardado, refugiar-me numa toca de tepidez uterina e ficar acocorado lá dentro, escondido do olhar indiferente do céu e das asperezas do ar agreste. É por essa razão que o passado constitui para mim um refúgio, que regresso a ele ansioso, a esfregar as mãos para afastar o frio do presente e o gélido futuro.”

"Antes da doença de Anna, suportava a minha existência física com uma repugnância amistosa, como acontece com a maior parte das pessoas — que suportam a sua existência física, não a minha, claro! —, necessariamente tolerante face aos produtos da minha humanidade tristemente inelutável, os diversos eflúvios, as eructações, o corrimento, a caspa, a transpiração e demais emanações comuns, incluindo aquilo que o Bardo de Hartford designa, de forma singular, por 'partículas das partes baixas'."

Real Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: When Max Morden returns to the coastal town where he spent a holiday in his youth he is both escaping from a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma.

The Grace family appear that long ago summer as if from another world. Drawn to the Grace twins, Chloe and Myles, Max soon finds himself entangled in their lives, which are as seductive as they are unsettling. What ensues will haunt him for the rest of his years and shape everything that is to follow.

John Banville is one of the most sublime writers working in the English language. Utterly compelling, profoundly moving and illuminating, The Sea is quite possibly the best thing he has ever written.


My Review: The experience of reading Banville is akin to the experience of going to a whole museum dedicated to Renoir or Monet: At first, the awestruck lip-smacking chin-drooling moaning of readerly joy:

They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. All morning under a milky sky the waters in the bay had swelled and swelled, rising to unheard-of heights, the small waves creeping over parched sand that for years had known no wetting save for rain and lapping the very bases of the dunes. The rusted hulk of the freighter that had run aground at the far end of the bay longer ago than any of us could remember must have thought it was being granted a relaunch. I would not swim again, after that day. The seabirds mewled and swooped, unnerved, it seemed, by the spectacle of that bowl of water bulging like a blister, lead-blue and malignantly agleam.

(p3, Picador hardcover edition)

This gorgeous, sumptuous repast, this unsettling, foreboding atmosphere, this unbearably tense muscle in the brain MUST be leading to some cathartic, catastrophic release! There is a great change coming, there is something to contrast this soft and lovely tone, this unsettling beauty, this pastry cream in a pool of custard frosted with whipped cream with. Well, now:

Could we, could I, have done otherwise? Could I have lived differently? Fruitless interrogation. Of course I could, but I did not, and therein lies the absurdity of even asking. Anyway, where are the paragons of authenticity against whom my concocted self might be measured? In those final bathroom paintings that Bonnard did of the septuagenarian Marthe he was still depicting her as the teenager he had thought she was when he first met her. Why should I demand more veracity of vision of myself than of a great and tragic artist?

(p218, Picador hardcover edition)

And there it is, the catharsis. Sorta kinda, anyway. As much as you'll be getting, so take it and like it. There's a backstory to the catharsis, but it's all written in the ever-so-much of a writer's writing, and like the sugary sweetness of Renoir and Monet, in large doses it simply doesn't wear all that well. One longs for a smudge of dirt on the painting, or a misplaced modifier in the sentence, or even no modifier at all. But no. No indeed, there is no surcease, and therefore there is surfeit.

Now if the assembled company will pardon me, I am off to eat plain zweiback, drink tap water, and stare at a blank wall for a while, until my senses are defatted.

Фантастичан стил! Суморно и болно, али тако обично, без великих речи и патетике. Банвил ми је откровење ове године.
Петица као кућа.

Max Morden returns to the scene of a childhood event that has haunted him ever since. He is melancholic after the death of his wife and wants to make sense of his life. He turns to alcohol for solace.

The book flits between the long ago summer and episodes in his life with his wife. As it slowly unfolds we see the wooing and wedding of his wife and her fatal diagnosis and descent into death. Simultaneously we see the events of the boyhood summer and the beginnings of a first romance, together with infidelity and intrigue amongst the grownups - events that he does not fully understand.

The return to the house where much of the tempestuous summer occurred rakes up old ghosts but sheds not a lot of light.

I liked the pace and language of this book, it's gentle probing of old and new wounds - and I was impressed by the ending, which surprised and delighted even as it perpetuated the fog of misunderstood memories

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

Max Morden had met once gods. They came in the guise of Grace family. Father, noisy lecherous satyr. Mother, oozing sensuality indolent goddess, will become his first erotic fascination. And twins. Chloe, very mature for her age, feisty girl with rather strong personality and Myles, shy and impish boy. There was Rose yet, nanny or governess, a sad nymph holding a secret in her heart. They rented at the seaside a summer house, called The Cedars.

And now, half a century later, widowed and lonely Max is in that place again. He’s a man who never had a personality, not in the way that others have, or think they have. I was always a distinct no-one whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone as he disarmingly admits. He takes a room in the Cedars but memory plays tricks on him. Everything has changed though seems to be the same and invariant. It’s naivety to expect even prospect of return, isn’t it ?

Only the sea appears to be unchangeable.

What is he looking for here ? Alleviation, calm, death, answer, missing piece of the puzzle ?

This memorable summer, painted with golden sun and inky shadow, creates the first plan of the novel. Just then Max had gained this sad knowledge that there is always a lover and a loved and which role he would be playing in that act.

There is another plan as well also given in flashbacks. It concerns Morden’s marriage, illness and finally death of his wife. These two plans are mixing alternately with his present stay at the seaside. Such is the nature of memory that one recollection leads to another gradually unveiling more and more from our past and showing intimate image of our life. The sea then, with its tides, is a record of that process, coming to terms with loss, dismantling of memory, family, love, past .

Banville’s prose, perfectly fitting in with the gray and cold ubiquity of the sea, is elegiac and poetic. And concluding paragraph is profoundly purifying.



I do not remember well that day when the gods departed. But I know where I can find them now. They remain incessantly like insects caught in a drop of resin, like the blades of grass trapped in the amber. They possessed for good this mythical land, that distant Arcadia of my childhood. And I believe that still have the key to that land.

I myself have lived near the edge of the sea for almost half a century, but I will never again regard the sea the same way after reading John Banville's The Sea. This is one of those rare books where you will keep coming back to its first line: "They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide."

The place is Ballyless, a hardscrabble coastal town with some cheap "chalets" in which dwell the lower classes, including the family of Max Gorner, the book's narrator. Nearby is a seaside cottage called The Cedars in which Max sees a young family, the Graces, move in with their twin children, Chloe and Myles, and a governess named Rosie. As Max says:

So much of life was stillness then, when we were young, or so it seems now; a biding stillness; a vigilance. We were waiting in our as yet unfashioned world, scanning the future as the boy [Myles] and I had scanned each other, like soldiers in the field, watching for what was to come.

Max is drawn to the Graces, at first to the wife, Connie, and then to Chloe. There is a glitter to their lives that is missing from his rather dysfunctional family. Their table is set with high-class gadgets that leave Max both curious and a bit anxious.

We skip forward (for the time, at least -- the story keeps returning to The Cedars for fresh insights) to Max's marriage to Annie. It is a successful marriage, with Max living the life of a dilettante, presumably working on his grand project of a book on the French painter Bonnard, but actually spending Annie's money in modest comfort. This comes to an end when she is diagnosed with cancer. Most of what we hear about Max's marriage is Annie's long slow fade-out.

After Annie's death, Max returns to The Cedars as a lodger. It is now a boarding house of sorts with Miss Vavasour, the manager, the Colonel, and himself. But we keep rubber-banding back to the Graces and to Annie's death. Banville never really lets go, like a dog relentlessly chewing a bone.

But what a bone it is! This is the first book I have read by Banville, and, God willing, it won't be the last. The Irishman is a master stylist who keeps coming back to his scenes like a pointillist painter putting new touches on his various canvases. One suddenly comes upon passages such as this:

My life seemed to be passing before me, not in a flash as it is said to do for those about to drown, but in a sort of leisurely convulsion, emptying itself of its secrets and its quotidian mysteries in preparation for the moment when I must step into the black boat on the shadowed river with the coin of passage cold in my already coldening hand.

Excuse me while I adjust my facial expression, as I seem to be gaping.

No one ever said that Banville is a cheery writer. The scene where, after his wife's death, he stands in front of the mirror shaving at The Cedars and commenting about the strangeness of his aging face, is one of the most somber scenes in recent literature. And then, at the very end of the book, there are several shocking surprises which left me stunned, but which I hesitate to divulge. In the end, it could all be summarized with Max's exclamation, at one point, "What a little vessel of sadness we are, sailing in this muffled silence through the autumn dark."

I really thought this was going to be a special book for me to read, and it just wasn’t. This book is narrated by Max, a man with childhood memories of time spent by the sea, with a family that greatly influenced him. Max has recently lost his wife, and goes back to the place by the sea where the childhood memories took place.
This is the longest short book I’ve ever read, I had to stop and look up words in the dictionary, continuously. It’s probably just me... there are many beautiful reviews for this book.

“The autumn sun fell slantwise into the yard, making the cobbles bluely shine, and in the porch a pot of geraniums flourished aloft their last burning blossoms of the season. Honestly, this world.”

The longer I pause before writing anything about this book, the more I think I should read it again, before writing anything at all.

Suddenly I think I know what Chloe was thinking when she went into the water that day (and Myles followed, as he always did). Yes, I do.

The Sea gains more stars the more I ponder it. With time, I almost forget how furious I was at the constant need for my dictionary. Was this some Old Etonian joke? Then (ha ha) he pretends to forget the name of the very common Duputren’s contractures as he describes them in the Colonel’s hand.

But then I am charmed with another detail about the Colonel:
“There is a spread too that he prepares himself, he calls it slap, khaki-coloured goo involving anchovies, curry powder, a great deal of pepper, and other, unnamed things; it smells, curiously, of dog. ‘A great scourer for the bag.’ he says. It took me a while to realise that this bag of which he often speaks, though never in Miss V’s presence, is the stomach and environs. He is ever alive to the state of the bag.

All is forgiven when the narrator, curmudgeon that he is, reminds of my beloved father who would say things like: “I think God is angry at me because he knows I don’t believe in him.” ARB

“I do not entertain the possibility of an afterlife, or any deity capable of offering it. Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.”