Ah, the sea - especially the smell of the sea, a phrase as familiar as the idea that aromas have a visceral power to exhume memories we didn’t know we had ever had and lost.

Smells of all sorts permeate the pages of this book and waft up, creating a synaesthetic connection to people and places in Max’s life. My second-hand paper book added a medley of vague aromas of its own. Not something to read on Kindle (though for me, nothing is).

Scents

This is an intensely sensual book, but not in the usual sense. It’s about the power of one of the senses, smell, in the context of bereaved reminiscence. Max frequently mentions the smell of things. Not all are pleasant, but they colour his memories in a profound way.

Smell and taste are interdependent. Unlike the other senses, it’s almost impossible to describe them except in comparison with other smells and tastes - hence wines with undertones of apricot, accents of peat, and aftertaste of daisies. I think it’s also why it's so difficult to remember, let alone imagine smells at will. One's mind's eye and ear are so much more biddable. Even touch is easier to recall and describe. Banville prompted me to to try, though.

Sit or lie somewhere comfortable, quiet, and dark. Touch is easy: start by noticing what you can actually feel: the curve of the chair, the fabric and seams of your clothes, the warmth of the sun on your skin.

Then remember or imagine touches: the shrill blast of a strong salt sea breeze on your face, stroking the soft silky fur of a cat, the abrasion of warm, wet, sand between your toes.

Now add sights and sounds: the view of the ocean and howl of the wind, the purring of the inscrutable black cat, the colour of the sand and the hiss of the waves coming down on it. You can see and hear and feel it all.

But smell and taste? Much harder. Think of a favourite food (siu mai). You can see it, you can feel its texture, and hear the sound as you bite into it. But can you describe, let alone experience its taste and smell?

Maybe it’s precisely because smells don’t readily convert to similes and metaphors that they are such powerful triggers?

Back to the book...

Narrators: Banville = Morden = Cleave?

“We sought to escape from an intolerable present in the only tense possible, the past.”

Max Morden is barely distinguishable from Alex Cleave in the Eclipse, Shroud, Ancient Light trilogy (Ancient Light reviewed HERE), who is apparently rather similar to Banville. Max and Alex narrate in exactly the same rambling, occasionally introspective, self-centred, curmudgeonly, largely guilt-free, and invariably misogynistic voice. The writing is sweet and sour. And beautiful.

Fluency disguises an underlying inarticulacy in the face of recent and ancient tragedies, where “the cruel complacency of ordinary things” is epitomised by “tight-lipped awkwardness” of furniture, and for the people involved, “From this day forward, all would be dissembling. There would be no other way to live with death.” Even the land is inarticulate: “Marsh and mud flats where everything seemed turned away from the land, looking desperately towards the horizon as if in mute search for a sign of rescue.” And web-toed Myles is literally mute: “Being alone with Myles was like being in a room which someone had just violently left. His muteness was a pervasive and cloying emanation.”

Both narrators are forever questioning their own motives and pointing out the inconsistencies of their memories: “It has all begun to run together, past and possible future and impossible present”. As an art historian, Max is familiar with touching up portraits: “Memories are always eager to match themselves seamlessly to the things and places of a revisited past”

Alex, and especially Max, are trying to write. They both have a problematic daughter, referred to by two names beginning with C. Both had, or fantasised about, a youthful relationship with a mother figure, the similarly named Mrs Grace and Mrs Gray. And in this case, the inadvertent temptress even offers him an apple.

Most importantly, both have past and present tragedies, and revisit the former to understand and cope with the latter.

The ending is rushed (too many events and revelations) and I do not like Max or Alex - to the extent I almost wonder why I like these books: “With women, wait long enough and one will have one’s way” and his reveries are “in the unvarying form of pursuit and capture and violent overmastering”! Nevertheless, Banville’s skill is such that I have some sympathy for them, and I want to know their stories.

Quotes - Smells

* t“My daughter… usually has no smell at all” unlike her mother, “whose feral reek, for me the stewy fragrance of life itself, and which the strongest perfume could not quite suppress, was the thing that first drew me to her.”

* t“In her last months, she smelt, at her best, of pharmacopoeia.”

* t“The cool thick secret smell of milk made me think of Mrs Grace.”

* t“A mingled smell of spilt beer and stale cigarette smoke.”

* t“As I was heaving myself over in a tangle of sheets… I caught a whiff of my own warm cheesy smell.”

* t“She smelled of sweat and cold cream and, faintly, of cooking fat.”

* t“A whiff of her sweat-dampened civet scent.”

* t“Her milk-and-vinegar smell.”

* t“Little animals we were, sniffing at each other. I liked in particular… the cheesy tang in the crevices of her elbows and knees… In general she gave off… a flattish, fawnish odour, like that which comes out of, which used to come out of, empty biscuit tins in shop.”

* tRecently bereaved, new places are “like a wedding suit smelling of moth-balls and no longer fitting.”

* t“Peppermints… the faint sickly smell of which pervades the house”.

* t“The squat black gas stove sullen in its corner and smelling of the previous lodger’s fried dinners.”

* t“The smell in the hall was like the smell of my breath when I breathed and rebreathed it into my cupped hands.”

* t“Smells of exhaust smoke, the sea, the garden’s autumn rot.”

* tRailway “giving off its mephtic whiff of ash and gas.”

* tIn a tree, “at this height the breeze… smelling of inland things, earth, and smoke, and animals”.

* tAn abandoned beach hut, “smelling of old urine”.

* tOn the point of death, “her breath gave off a mild, dry stink, as of withered flowers”.

Quotes - Sea

* t"The waves clawed at the suave sand along the waterline, scrabbling to hold their ground but steadily failing."

* t“Lead-blue and malignantly agleam.”

* t"A white seabird, dazzling against the wall of cloud, flew up on sickle wings and turned with a soundless snap and plunged itself, a shutting chevron, into the sea's unruly back."

* t“The seabirds rose and dived like torn scraps of rag.”

* t“The salt-sharpened light.”

* t“By the sea, there is a special quality to the silence at night… It is like the silence that I knew in the sickrooms of my childhood… It is a place like the place where I feel that I am now, miles from anywhere, and anyone.”

* t“Hearing the monotonously repeated ragged collapse of waves down on the beach.”

Quotes - Memories, Aging, Past, Future

* t“The past beats inside me like a second heart.”

* t“I have been elbowed aside by a parody of myself.”

* t“These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses, it is a sort of homeopathic cure… Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again… But no, that’s not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere.”

* t“The image that I hold of her in my head is fraying, bits of pigment, flakes of gold leaf, are chipping off.”

* t“Happiness was different in childhood… a matter of simple accumulation, of taking things… and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self.”

Quotes - Other

* t"To be concealed, protected, guarded, that is all I have ever truly wanted, to burrow down into a place of womby warmth, and cower there, hidden from the sky's indifferent gaze and the harsh air's damagings."

* t“Rust has reduced its struts to a tremulous filigree.” A gate.

* tThe wink of a new neighbour, “jaunty, intimate and faintly satanic”.

* t“The smile she reserved for him [husband], sceptical, tolerant, languidly amused.”

* t“The chalet that we rented was a slightly less than life-sized wooden model of a house.”

* tFather returns “in a wordless fury, bearing the fruits of his day like so much luggage clutched in his clenched fists.”

* t“Their unhappiness was one of the constants of my earliest years, a high, unceasing buzz just beyond hearing… I loved them, probably. Only they were in my way, obscuring my view of the future. In time I would be able to see right through them, my transparent parents.”

* t“Even from inside the car we could hear the palms on the lawn in from dreamily clacking their dry fronds.”

* t“Despite the glacial air a muted hint of past carousings lingered.”

* t“Beyond the smouldering sunlight there is the placid gloom of indoors.”

* t“Perhaps all life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.”

* t“Light of summer thick as honey fell from the tall windows and glowed on the figured carpets.”

* t“That fretful, dry, papery rustle that harbinges autumn.”

* t“The Godhead for me was a menace, and I responded with fear and its inevitable concomitant, guilt.” But that’s as a child.

* t“Devout as holy drinkers, dipped our faces towards each other… I tasted her urgent breath.”

* t“It was as if the evening, in all the drench and drip of its fallacious pathos, had temporarily taken over from me the burden of grieving.”

* t“The open doorway from which a fat slab of sunlight lay fallen at our feet. Now and then a breeze from outside would wander in absent-mindedly.”

* t"For even at such a tender age I knew there is always a lover and a loved, and knew which one, in this case, I would be.”

* t“A series of more or less enraptured humiliations. She accepted me as a supplicant at her shrine with disconcerting complacency… Her willful vagueness tormented and infuriated me.”

* t“Is this not the secret aim of all of us, to be no longer flesh but transformed utterly into the gossamer of unsuffering spirit?”

* t“A chintz-covered sofa sprawls as if aghast, its two arms flung wide and cushions sagging… Piano, its lid shut, stands against the back wall as if in tight-lipped resentment of its gaudy rival opposite.”

* t“The canned audience doing our laughing for us.”

* t“The polished pewter light of the emptied afternoon.”
“The copper-coloured light of the late-autumn evening.”

* t“Puddles on the road that now were paler than the sky, as if the last of day were dying in them.”

* t“Drowning is the gentlest death.”

See Also The Sea, The Sea

I was strongly reminded of this Banville book (and also his Ancient Light) when I read Iris Murdoch's one from 30 years earlier: the title, setting, the narrator's character and introspection. See my review HERE. Banville is more lyrical, slightly less philosophical, and Morden less unpleasant.


Image source of nose sculpture on a beach at Colmslie Beach Reserve in Brisbane:
http://www.weekendnotes.com/im/002/05...

Originally recommended by Dolors, in relation to The Sense of an Ending. Her review of this is here: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

n  The world is not real until it is pushed through the mesh of language. It is a way of validating reality for myself.n ~ John Banville in Drexel University interview.

There are enough outstanding reviews about this book on GR. I'm neither going to try and elevate myself to that level, nor pretend to know more than I really do. With a lack of literary background and English linguistic skills, I will merely express my simple opinion of an outstanding read. But first, let's get (some of) the accolades for John Banville's word-smithery out of the way.

An utterly contemporary novel that nonetheless could only have come from a mind steeped in the history of the novel and deeply reflective about what makes fiction still worthwhile. . . . John Banville deserves his Booker Prize.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review.

Banville has a reputation as a brilliant stylist—people like to use the word ‘Nabokovian’ in reference to his precisely worded books. His fourteenth novel, The Sea, has so many beautifully constructed sentences that every few pages something cries out to be underlined.” — The Christian Science Monitor.

[Banville] is prodigiously gifted. He cannot write an unpolished phrase, so we read him slowly, relishing the stream of pleasures he affords. Everything in Banville’s books is alive. . . . He is a writer’s writer [who] can conjure with the poetry of people and places.” —The Independent (London)

After closing the book I was wondering how to express my thoughts on a devoted word-artists and his visions of people and life in general. It will be accurate to say that it is a dark, almost gothic, slow-moving tale of an introverted man's story in the first person narrative. John Banville prefers to write in the first person and says that it elevates the protagonist from an observer of other people's lives to a direct participant who can recall events from his perspective and memory.

An elderly grieving man, Max Morden, recalls his childhood memories, after the passing of his wife. He is lonely, depressed (considers an 'honorable suicide'), introspective, honest with himself, and has ample time to reflect on events that ultimately made him the man he was. But it was the events at their holiday bungalow one fateful year, that inspired him many years later to revisit the place where he was forced to become a man long before nature required him to be one.

The prose is lyrical, often poetical. With brutal honesty, he recalls the events with a dollop of wry, dark humor in between. Since most reviewers approach the novel with an intellectual savoir fair, or academic onslaught, to keep the experience as sterile as possible, a vital component of the tale is missed - the emotional investment of both the characters and the readers.

I read this book subjectively. I was emotionally involved like I was with the other lonely old curmudgeons in novels such as:

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman;
Old Filth by Jane Gardam;
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro;
Major Pettigrow's Last Stand by Helen Simonson;
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page by G.B. Edwards;
And Every Morning the Way Gets Longer and Longer by Frederik Backman;
Our Souls At Night by Kent Haruf;
AND MANY MORE

Honestly, I was amused to see how efforts were made to 'box' this novel into identity and gender politics by readers who were unable to identify it for what it really is: a confrontation of our destiny, our own fears of loneliness, and the old age looming in our future.

Max Morden is in conversation with himself. Therefore, his thoughts and words are devoid of any pretentiousness, or social decoupage. Like our own thoughts and words when we hit our fingers with a hammer, or look in a mirror and despise what we see. We all pretend to be someone we are not until such time when we have to confront ourselves or acknowledge our other side.

All the protagonists in the books mentioned above have one thing in common: lonely old men who are unable to voice their feelings and talk about their hurt and sadness. Misunderstood, they are, and often curmudgeon as a result.

Banville's protagonists are all men. In an interview, he explained that they all forged a new persona for themselves (hiding behind masks) and when a crisis or catastrophe occurs in their lives, they feel exposed and start to look for places, solid ground, to stand on, someplace where they, or some versions of themselves, will be real; where they stop to even in old age feel like delinquent boys. The Cedars was such a place for Max Morden. It was the place where he met his friends, Chloe and Myles Grace, with their parents Carlo and Constance, and their nanny, Rose. It was the place where children used laughter as a neutralizing force to tame terror.

Here are a few quotes from the book in which either his vulnerabilities or sense of humor shows:

The consultant’s name was Mr. Todd. This can only be considered a joke in bad taste on the part of polyglot fate. It could have been worse. There is a name De’Ath, with that fancy medial capital and apotropaic apostrophe which fool no one.

Now inside it the door opened and an elderly young woman appeared and stopped behind the glass and considered me warily.

But Avril, now. Who in these parts would have conferred on their child a name so delicately vernal?

The woman dips her fingertips in the font, mingling traces of tenacious love juice with the holy water. Under their Sunday best their thighs chafe in remembered delight. They kneel, not minding the mournfully reproachful gaze the statue of their Saviour fixes on them from the cross. After their midday Sunday dinner perhaps they will send the children out to play and retire to the sanctuary of their curtained bedroom and do it all over again, unaware of my mind’s bloodshot eye fixed on them unblinkingly. Yes, I was that kind of boy. Or better say, there is part of me still that is the kind of boy that I was then. A little brute, in other words, with a filthy mind. As if there were any other sort. We never grow up. I never did, anyway.

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

What a vessel of sadness we are, sailing in this muffled silence through the autumn dark.

Or I might retire into a monastery, pass my days in quiet contemplation of the infinite, or write a great treatise there, a vulgate of the dead.

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.

Like many famous authors, John Banville used pathetic fallacies to set the tone of the events. It also reflected Max Morden's vulnerabilities and sadness-those aspects of manhood that seldom reach the mesh of language in any form. Outside, a uniformly white sky sat sulkily immobile.

An extremely slow-moving plot is built around a mystery. The denouement comes as a huge surprise. It lead me to the conclusion that the author knew exactly how to play his readers. Like a fiddle. Happily.

So yes, it is a brilliant winner of the Man Booker Prize(2005). A literary piece of art. Perhaps written to impress the aficionados, although Banville doesn't need anyone's approval or admiration to succeed. He is outspoken and to the point in both his personal life and novels. But it is also a deeply humane story if you want to skip an academic analysis and delve into the core of the characters. Subjectively.

There is (a highly successful) evil darker persona, says Banville, behind the writer Benjamin Black. (It's a joke, in case anyone missed it). Benjamin Black is Banville's alter ego - his other personality, who uses an economy of words to seduce his thousands of fans with gritty, grizzly crime novels.

Banville is compared to Kafka and Dostoevsky. Wikipedia describes his writing style as Recognised for his precise, cold, forensic prose style, Nabokovian inventiveness, and for the dark humor of his generally arch narrators, Banville is considered to be "one of the most imaginative literary novelists writing in the English language today." He has been described as "the heir to Proust, via Nabokov."

I rest my case. An unforgettable experience: both the novel and the author. And his style.

PS. These interviews shed more light on John Banville as a writer, gentle romantic, and human being.

1) n  Arts Lives -Being John Banville Part 1n;
2) n  Arts Lives -Being John Banville Part 2n;
3) n  episode 95 - John Banville - part 01n;
4) n  episode 95 - John Banville - part 02n.

2.5*

Winner of the Booker Prize 2005

After his wife dies, Max moves back to the seaside town where he used to spend his summer holidays as a child. This trip becomes the perfect opportunity to remember his past and rummage through the traumatic events of his childhood, which marked his life.

I had mixed feelings about this novel. The plot is nothing new but the writing is special. Unfortunately, too much so that it felt unnatural and overwritten. It gave me the impression that the novel was written with the thesaurus opened permanently for consultation. Many readers thought the writing was exquisite while for me, it was a distraction. I had serious problems following the phrase to its conclusion and when I reached the end of the paragraph I sometimes had no idea what I was reading about, was it the present, the past, what character the author was writing about etc. Bear in mind I am writing this while I am slowly savouring Proust, the champion of sinuous phrases. It somehow does not bother me there. Yes, I need to re-read phrases, sometimes in two languages, but oh, the joy when everything makes sense. I did not feel the need to make much of an effort here, as the writing did not speak to me. Oh, the plot was also uninteresting for the most part.

I recommend this novel to people who love long, complex descriptions, who do not shy away from using the dictionary and who ravel in darkness of the soul.

The Miasma of Self-Regard

This brief note is in two parts: the first I wrote when this novel was younger, and Banville hadn't yet written detective fiction.

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?

This second paragraph was added after years of Benjamin Black novels, and even, as of 2020, new hybrid novels.

And yet Banville can wrote propulsive, plot-driven fiction, as his detective novels demonstrate. So this is a complex problem. If there is a limitaion to the plotlessness of books like "The Sea" it is a lack of distinction between kinds of stasis, motives for torpor.

And last: the problem of self-absorption is also a difficult one. I do not mind writers who ignore their readers, who write as if plausible readers do not exist. (Writers like the Joyce of "Finnegans Wake" or the Schmidt of "Bottom's Dream.") But I am insulted by writers who are cocooned in self-regard. (Writers like the late Bellow or Vila-Matas.) The self-regard in which Banville wraps his prose is evident in interviews and lectures, and it even spills into his Wikipedia page, which I would like to propose is either written by him, or by the kind of reader who has helped create his self-absorption. (Note the headings, as of 2021: "Crime and punishmen," "Diet and conduct toward animals," "The Nobel Prize.") I can't see through the swaddling to the coddled interior.

I wish to thank my wonderful friend Seemita, who is truly an amazing reviewer, for inspiring me to read this book.

"The silence about me was heavy as the sea."

Silence. It is a special kind of language. The language of the dead, of those long gone, of the forgotten, the misunderstood, the hurt, the mad and, sometimes, the content. What do they tell me? What does silence tell me? What does it tell Max Morden? It tells him a story. The story of his life. It embraces him, caresses him, whispers to him of everyone and everything lost. He holds on to it. It is his only companion, his only friend, the lover that will never tire of him. It is his secret path to a better world. The world of the past.

“To be concealed, protected, that is all I have ever truly wanted, to be hidden from the sky’s indifferent gaze and the harsh air’s damagings. That is why the past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, shaking off the cold present and the colder future”

Yet, he discovers that silence has been his companion his whole life. He knows and understands it like he has never known and understood anybody, including himself.

“I have come to realise how little I knew her. I know so little of myself, how should I think to know another?”

Has he walked into it for so long as to not be able to understand the world around him? Has he truly wanted to? It is often easier to let go of the truth, dispose of it like of unnecessary, heavy and unattractive object and create another version of it, "new reality"

“Which is the more real, the woman reclining on the grassy bank of my recollections, or the strew of dust and dried marrow that is all the earth any longer retains of her?”

Which is more real? The past or the present? And when we cannot find refuge in the past, the present is painful, the future unattainable, unimaginable, where is the sanctuary? Is it within us? What does lay within us besides ourselves? Those whom we refuse to let go of? Max believes that no one is truly gone as long as they are remembered. “And yet people do go, do vanish. That is the greatest mystery of all” Duality. Ambiguity. Isn’t it part of us all, of everything that surrounds us? We die, yet, we go on living. Time passes, nobody can escape change. “At what moment, of all our moments, is life not utterly, utterly changed, until the final, most momentous change of all?” Yet, time is still. Our memory always brings us back to what we thought we’ve left behind. “The past beats inside me like a second heart”. And the more we walk within the realms of our own minds, the more we realize that we are like the sea. Ambivalent. We are cruel and merciful, placid and tempestuous, generous and harsh, known and mysterious. But unlike it, we are boundless.

"The waves before me at the water’s edge speak with animate voice, whispering eagerly of some ancient catastrophe, the sack of Troy, perhaps, or the sinking of Atlantis…I see the black ship in the distance, looming imperceptibly nearer at every instant. I am there. I hear your siren’s song. I am there, almost there."

Our minds, our pasts, are territories we explore, yet, there is so much that is left unexplored. What do they eagerly whisper to us? What song do they sing to us? What is revealed, what is left concealed? Are we ready to take that chance? Are we ready to immerse into the depths of the dark and mysterious past, are we ready to face the cold and painful present, do we dare hope for the obscure future? Who are we, what stories do we have to tell, and to whom do we tell them? Sometimes silence is the only one that listens. Sometimes that’s enough. And sometimes it is not. ”There is a special quality to the silence at night”

Read count: 1

P.S. The whole time while reading the book and then, while writing my review, I was listening to The Cure's "Lullaby". I think it fits perfectly

The past beats inside me like a second heart.
*
But then, at what moment, of all our moments, is life not utterly, utterly changed, until the final, most momentous change of all?
*
We fought in order to feel, and to feel real, being the self-made creatures that we were. That I was.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? We did our best, Anna and I. We forgave each other for all that we were not. What more could be expected, in this vale of torments and tears? Do not look so worried, Anna said, I hated you, too, a little, we were human beings, after all. Yet for all that, I cannot rid myself of the conviction that we missed something, that I missed something, only I do not know what it might have been.

Reread review, 10/'23:

As indicated below, I read first this almost 8 years ago, while my sister was in a coma, with a 50/50 chance of survival - so NOT the most optimal of circumstances (she survived and is fine). But I always thought this deserved a second chance - and am happy to say it lived up to my shadowy remembrance of its greatness.

It's very similar, in tone and plot even, to Julian Barnes' fellow Booker winner, The Sense of an Ending, so together I think of these as rather quintessential 'Booker books'. Banville's prose, even on the sentence level, is really exquisite, and although at first glance it might seem as though he wanders a bit plot-wise, by the final page you are astonished at how much control he is exerting over the proceedings, with every 'clue' meted out at just precisely the correct moment.

After the reread, I watched the 2013 film adaptation, the screenplay of which Banville wrote himself, starring the formidable Ciarán Hinds and film goddess Charlotte Rampling. At a brisk 80 minutes, the film lacks the complexities and nuances of the book, but is still a fairly good adaptation and well worth watching on its own merits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDICu...

Original review, 1/'17:

4.5 Because I took an unconscionably long time to read this in the midst of winter holidays and a family health crisis, I wasn't really able to give it the full concentration it richly deserves, so I hope to return to it one day with a clearer mind. However, there is no mistaking Banville's glorious prose, and I fully intend to also read other of his works in the near future.

In The Sea the protagonist, Max Morden, is an observer in the truest sense of the word. The narrative is a journey through his eyes and thoughts. And through his memory. Memory is where the power of this novel lies, as he reminisces, we discover who he is and how his relationships developed. The memory novel that Banville handles here, coupled with what I can only assume is a love of the English language, results in a richly prosed narrative full of minute details and descriptions that gets my brains churning with admiration:

Now it was Chloe’s turn to draw her knees up to her chest – is it a thing all girls do, or did, at least, sitting that way in the shape of a zed fallen over its front? – and hold her feet in her hands.

But Banville’s skill goes further. Max seamlessly shifts through time back to his youth, his first crush on his new friends’ (the twins Chloe and Myles) mom: Mrs Grace. He watches her like a hungry owl watches a field mouse. He observes the stubble of her armpit, he sees the crevice in her underwear when she lies back and her legs lift up and her skirt parts way, he admires her breasts… these are the coming-of-age desires of a boy hitting puberty. And they are real. And natural. And just like that, like many of us are wont to ponder on the strangeness of desire and sexual transference, Max, we later learn on his next revisit to his past memory, is now interested in the daughter: Chloe. The shift from the unattainable mother figure to the more age-appropriate girl is complete.

Much of the novel juxtaposes the memory of his dying wife Anna with the memory of Chloe, his happier, innocent, youthful first love. The problem is that his wife became a secondary character that I did not feel much for. At times, I felt she was a burden to Max at his old age, being terminally ill. The passion of recounted scenes concerning Anna was a far distant emotional surge compared to Chloe’s. In this way, I came to dislike Max. He was after all another grumpy old man feeling sorry for himself and appreciating his past more than his present. But is that not one of the functions of a memory novel?

Banville has engrossed me with this story probably because Max is as objective as one can make such a character to be, considering the desires and crushes being discussed. It is not clinical objectivity, but a character who knows what he likes and what he desires. And his healthy skepticism of people in general made with those hawkish observations redeems him somewhat in my eyes:

Love among the big people. It was strange to picture them, to try to picture them, struggling together on their Olympian beds in the dark of the night with only the stars to see them, grasping and clasping, panting endearments, crying out in pleasure as if in pain. How did they justify these dark deeds to their daytime selves? That was something that puzzled me greatly. Why were they not ashamed? On Sunday morning, say, they arrive at church still tingling form Saturday night’s frolics. The priest greets them in the porch, they smile blamelessly, mumbling innocuous words. The woman dips her fingertips in the font, mingling traces of tenacious love-juice with the holy water. Under their Sunday best their thighs chafe in remembered delight. They kneel not minding the mournfully reproachful gaze the statue of their Saviour fixes on them from the cross. After their midday Sunday dinner perhaps they will send the children out to play and retire to the sanctuary of their curtained bedroom and do it all over again, unaware of my mind’s bloodshot eye fixed on them unblinkingly. Yes, I was that kind of boy. Or better say, there is a part of me still that is that kind of boy that I was then. A little brute, in other words, with a filthy mind. As if there were any other sort. We never grow up. I never did, anyway.

For Max, the sea and death are synonymous. With the most tragic and moving parts of the novel taking place at the sea. And while in his youth the sea was a source of trauma, one that affects Max even though he may be oblivious to it, the very same sea will relieve him at the end. It is a powerful allegory of the hold the two women have on him.

As I stood there, suddenly, no, not suddenly, but in a sort of driving heave, the whole sea surged, it was not a wave, but a smooth rolling swell that seemed to come up from the deeps, as if something vast down there had stirred itself, and I was lifted briefly and carried a little way towards the shore and then was set down on my feet as before, as if nothing had happened. And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world’s shrugs of indifference.

Banville has constructed a beautiful memory novel with an interesting, unlikable protagonist. My only reservation is that Anna was not explored in more depth, with some of the intensity with which Chloe was, so that their contrast and their effect on Max would have been clearer. But the novel is worth reading for the prose alone.

How have I missed John Banvlle? He was totally unknown to me. Months ago I read a review of Mrs. Osmond which peaked my interest. Since that book was unavailable at the library I thought I'd try an older Banville book, hence, The Sea. This was a disappointment turned into a wonderful surprise.

Banville is just the kind of author I love.He is a master of language. So many sentences are so beautifully contructed you want to read them over and over. I often think when I read authors of Banville's talent, "I have seen that or I have felt that, but I couldn't express it so adequately."

As I read this book I couldn't help but notice similarities to Julian Barnes' A Sense of an Ending and The Only Story. The writing also reminded me of Ian McEwen, although I can't recollect a McEwen novel with a similar theme. Is it just that all the above authors are older, from the U.K. and express ideas so well, or is it something more? Do I love the writing of all three because being of a similar age I ponder and reflect on the same concerns - the authenticity of memory, disappointment in the adult self, regrets, youth, and mortality to name just some? Regardless, I will read Banville's other books and figure it all out (or not).

I have a confession to make. The real reason I read this book was not because it won The Man Booker, but because it lost to Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, one of my favorites in The British Literature genre. Interestingly enough, The Sea immediately reminded me of another of Ishiguro's, The Remains Of The Day (which did win The Man Booker for a different year), in that both are a philosophical reflection on life by a man in his later years with some secrets to reveal, a few repressed scenes to be discovered, past loved ones to be viewed from new angles, memories to be replayed with flourish, relationships past, present, future, to be over analyzed.

However, unlike The Remains Of The Day, as well as other similar titles which I feel have been able to engage the reader dramatically more, Banville's "winner" (I feel that Ishiguro should have won) failed to really hold my interest throughout. Sure, a few times I felt as if I might be with Morden by the sea in his little Chalet, with him as he unclandestinely watched Constance Grace, a woman more than twice his age with youthful desire, accompanying him as his love was then transferred to her daughter Chloe Grace, enduring the pain with him as the young version of himself was forced to learn about not only grief, loss, but also life when he witnesses death, as he married Anna, a rich socialite whom changed his entire way of life; their years together reflected their class differences, as he became isolated from his family, friends, etcetera, & finally during his last year with Anna, watching her die.

The most elegiac passages were those defining emotions as our narrator went through Anna's slow death, the terminal illness that brought them closer together yet forged them further apart. Sadly, these passages were a small percentage of the pages.

The narration could have been more polished; it was told in flashbacks, transitioning arbitrarily, without much cause, in the middle of a scene, only to switch back a few paragraphs later in the same seemingly random way. There was an idea behind this, of course; our narrator was reflecting on not only his life but the fascinations of memory. As he says many times, memory is fallible. I appreciated this as a most astute studies of the neurosciences, but in this situation, the result was more negative than positive.

As for the twist on the last several pages, it was useful in answering a few of the prominent wonderings regarding the story, but not all of them. Again, ambiguity is good, but not like this; the most important questions regarding the story's very premise (the double suicide/death he witnessed that one summer so very many years ago) are left unanswered.

Banville is, no doubt, a master of language, placing words together like a puzzle that makes everything sound so much better than I could. But in between all of the lyrical passages, there was a fluff, sometimes still beautiful, but often meaningless. I am not one that dislikes literature in this style, where many words are used to tell little, but I feel Banville could have done it better... I was left with, "Yes, this is beautiful writing, you paint elegiac pictures of the seaside, but what does it mean? So what?" The characters, I suppose, were relatable but never loveable.

--- Trigger warnings: rape, sexual violence, death

On its face, The Sea by John Banville is the story of Max Morden, a sixty-one-year-old widower mourning the death of his wife, Anna. But about half-way through I have come to think of this as the story of someone who mourns his own life, and who recounts the childhood memories that have formed him into who he is.

I 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. I know what I mean. Anna, I saw at once, would be the medium of my transmutation. She was the fairground mirror in which all my distortions would be made right.

The question I am left with now, anyway, is precisely the question of knowing. Who, if not ourselves, were we? All right, leave Anna out of it. Who, if not myself, am I? The philosophers tell us that we are defined and have our being through others. Is a rose red in the dark?

After fifty years and the death of his wife, Max Morden has come back to the beach resort of his childhood holidays where he met the Grace family – the twins Chloe and Myles, and the parents Carlo and Connie –, when he was eleven years old, and who in a profound way have shaped the man he was to become. He has come back to the demons of his past, the happenings which made him who he is.

Who is Max Morden? Well, to be absolutely frank, he is a misanthropic, sexist, and horrible human being. He belittles his daughter and leaves her alone in her sorrow of losing a mother, selfishly seeing only his own sadness and loss. He is obsessed with what he perceives as his daughter's and other women's ugliness in appearance. (Needless to say, he describes himself as “smooth and not unhandsome – I am being modest”.)

As I understand the story and the character of Max, a lot of resentment towards women and women's bodies come from his relationships to Chloe Grace and her mother Connie. In a strikingly honest moment during a picnic with the Graces, he describes being aroused by Connie's adult tanned body, her black swimsuit, and being titillated by her inner thighs. Living in fear of sin, he at once blames Connie for his arousal, calling her a “demon tempress”. His own lust is at once turned on its head, and he frames himself a victim of a woman's sexuality (bear in mind: Connie Grace did nothing to tempt him. Her only 'fault' here is having a body.)
Max then falls in love and begins a relationship of tentative sexual contact with Connie's daughter Chloe, who is the same age as he is. She mistreats him physically and mentally, beating him and pressuring him to intimidate and beat other boys on the beach. In one scene, just after he helps Chloe and her twin brother Myles beat another boy he comes to a realisation:

I had the urge of running after him and put a hand on his shoulder, not so I might apologize or try to excuse myself for helping to humiliate him, but to make him look at me again, or, rather, to make him withdraw that other look, to negate it, to wipe the record of it from his eye. For I found intolerable the thought of being known in the way that he seemed to know me. Better than I knew myself. Worse.

The summer turns solemn when Max mistakenly thinks that Rose Vavasour, the Grace’s nanny, is having an affair with Carlo Grace. He confides this to Chloe, who in turn confides this to her twin brother Myles. The two of them commit suicide by drowning in the sea. Max Morden still, after these many years, bears this dull burden. (Banville may have chosen the name Morden because it means 'to murder' in German. He alludes to this logic in a similar case of Anna's doctor being named Mr. Todd, nicknaming him Mr. De'Ath, because, as Max points out, Tod is the German word for 'death'.)
Upon his visit to the beach resort he meets Rose Vavasour who tells him that it was not Carlo she loved but Connie. Max is stunned, realizes his mistake and its consequences. He barely recovers his equanimity, and feels the burden of death the same way as he did when he walked into the hospital after his wife died, as if he is “walking into the sea.”

Whether or not Max Morden ever changed since that summer fifty years ago, whether, as he says, Anna helped him correct the distortions of his personality, we do not find out. Yet we do know that after Anna's death, he is the same boy he was before.


I have to say, I really struggled with his book. I came into it confident that I would love it. I just finished You Don't Have to Say You Love Me by Sherman Alexie, a personal and emotional account of grief and loss, so I was ready to get stuck into Banville's account. And I did not care for it. At all.
There are some honest, raw and vulnerable passages about dealing with grief:

Have I spoken of my drinking? I drink like a fish. No, not like a fish, fishes do not drink, I drink like one recently widowed – widowered? - a person of scant talent and scanter ambition, greyed o'er by the years, uncertain and astray and in need of consolation and the brief respite of drink-induced oblivion.

Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere.

I cannot bear the way she looks at me these days, all tenderness and daughterly concern, her head held to one side in just the way that Anna used to, one eyebrow lifted and her forehead wrinkled solicitously. I do not want solicitude. I want anger, vituperation, violence.

But I cannot stop to wonder as to the motivation of Max Morden. Why does he go back to remember the summer of fifty years ago? Certainly it is not to confront his demons. He lacks the emotional maturity to actually face his past. He recounts the stories, he drowns in the memories, yet why does he do it? To know, to feel his motivations would have greatly improved this novel. As it stands, it is an account of someone who – I feel – does not seem genuine in the sense that he is not a real human being. Max Morden, and in extention this novel, is going nowhere in terms of insight into the inner workings of his soul. To my mind, in consequence, this novel has no soul.


Oh, and one last thing, can we just briefly mention a certain sex fantasy real quick:

The thought of all that tensed and tensely quivering naked flesh, untrammelled save by the marmoreal folds of a robe or a wisp of gauze fortuitously placed – fortuitous, perhaps, but fully and frustratingly as protective of modesty as Rose's beach towel or, indeed, Connie Grace's swimsuit – glutted my inexperienced but already overheating imagination with reveries of love and love's transgressions, all in the unvarying form of pursuit and capture and violent overmastering.

Wow! Now that was the most nonchalant mention of a rape fantasy I've ever seen. To hell with you, Max Morden.

4,5*

Perdi-me. Vejo tudo confuso. Por que razão me atormento com estas ambiguidades insolúveis, não elaborei raciocínios sofísticos que chegassem? Deixa-te em paz, Max, deixa-te em paz.

Há autores que se esmeram no início de um livro, prendendo ou encantando o leitor logo nos primeiros parágrafos. John Banville está nos antípodas e, em ambos os livros de ficção literária dele que já li, remata-os com frases finais simplesmente perfeitas.
Ainda que não pertença à “Cleave Trilogy”, encontrei várias semelhanças entre “Eclipse”, a primeira parte da trilogia, e “O Mar”. Enquanto naquele um homem de meia-idade volta à casa onde cresceu, que também servia de pensão, numa fase conturbada da vida também devido à relação crispada com a mulher e a filha, neste livro, Max, depois de ficar viúvo e não tendo um relacionamento muito próximo com a filha, regressa à casa de hóspedes onde passou umas férias inesquecíveis e traumáticas quando era miúdo.

Quando Miss Vavasour me deixou no quarto que a partir daquele momento passava a ser o meu quarto, atirei o casaco para cima de uma cadeira, sentei-me na beira da cama, inspirei fundo o ar cediço e abafado e senti que andava a viajar há muito tempo, há anos, e chegara finalmente ao destino para onde, durante todo o tempo, sem o saber, me dirigia e onde devo ficar, já que é, por agora, o único lugar possível, para mim.

Pretendia ler John Banville para a Irish Readathon do mês transacto, mas desisti da minha primeira opção, “O Livro da Confissão”, por não estar com paciência para tanta misantropia. Mal sabia eu que o protagonista de “O Mar”, além de ser também um narrador capcioso, nada tinha de cativante. E ainda que de início pareça em profundo sofrimento pela morte da mulher, no final, até nisso me é difícil empatizar com ele, pois tem mais pena de si próprio, pelo vazio da sua vida, pela falta de rumo, do que propriamente pela perda recente.

Pensava em Anna. Obrigo-me a pensa nela, faço-o como um exercício. Está enterrada em mim como uma faca e, no entanto, começo a esquecê-la. O quadro que guardo na memória começa já a esboroar-se, pedacinhos de pigmentos, pequenas partículas de folha de ouro vão-se desprendendo, quebradiços. Será que um dia a tela vai ficar vazia? Cheguei à conclusão de que a conheci muito pouco, isto é, que a conhecia de modo muito superficial e insuficiente. Não me censuro por isso. Talvez fosse melhor assim. Terei sido demasiado indolente, demasiado desatento, demasiado ensimesmado? (...) Mas esperem, não, não é bem assim. Não estou a ser sincero – para variar, dirão vocês. A verdade é que não nos queríamos conhecer um ao outro. Mais, o que nós queríamos era precisamente isso, não nos conhecermos.

E embora afirme o contrário, Max é um diletante.

Seja como for, trabalho não é bem a palavra que eu usaria para aquilo que faço. Trabalho é um termo demasiado vasto e demasiado sério. Os operários trabalham. Os adultos trabalham. Para nós, os medíocres, não existe uma palavra suficientemente modesta que seja adequada para descrever o que fazemos e como o fazemos.

Sem ser propriamente ambicioso, o seu objectivo de vida desde muito novo é a ascensão social e o bem-estar proporcionado pelo dinheiro.

Mas quando olho para trás vejo que a maior parte da minha energia foi sempre desperdiçada na simples busca de protecção, de conforto e, é verdade, tenho de admitir, de comodidade. (...) Tudo aquilo que sempre desejei foi sentir-me defendido, protegido, resguardado, refugiar-me numa toca da tepidez uterina e ficar acocorado lá dentro.

Não se deixem iludir pela primeira frase da sinopse da edição mais recente. “O Mar” é o oposto de luminoso. É turvo e tumultuoso.

Afinal não passamos de pequenos botes de tristeza a vogar num silêncio lânguido por entre as trevas outonais.