John Banville’s prize-winning ‘The Sea’ a true gem
“It is nice to see a work of art win.”
That was Irish author John Banville’s reaction when his novel “The Sea” won Britain’s Man Booker prize this fall. No false modesty there – which is fine, since “The Sea” is nothing to be modest about.
The book is a gem – of the ocean, one might say. For the sea, in this case, is more than just a title reference. It is a presence on every page, its ceaseless undulations echoing constantly in the cadences of the prose.
This novel shouldn’t simply be read. It needs to be heard, for its sound is intoxicating:
“Down here, by the sea, there is a special quality to the silence. I do not know if this is my doing, I mean if this quality is something I bring to the silence of my room, and even of the whole house, or if it is a local effect, due to the salt in the air, perhaps, or the seaside climate in general. … It is dense and at the same time hollow.
Our narrator, 60ish Max Morden, is dense and hollow as well.
Max’s wife, Anna, has just died, a year after being diagnosed with cancer, and Max has taken himself to a seaside resort where his family vacationed during the summer when he was a child. The Cedars, the house he is staying in, was inhabited then by the Graces – Connie and Carlo; their twins, Chloe and Myles; and Rose, their governess.
The Graces were well-to-do bohemians, altogether different in class and style from Max’s own quarrelsome, working-class mother and father.
Max, though a self-described “second-rater,” has a gift for ingratiating himself with his socioeconomic betters. The Graces soon made him a part of their family circle. Anna, only child of a wealthy and flamboyant wheeler-dealer, invited him to marry her, giving him “the chance to fulfill the fantasy of myself,” which is how he ended up “a man of leisurely interests and scant ambitions.”
Max’s narrative alternates between a particular summer of his childhood and the year of Anna’s dying, for “it has all begun to run together, past and possible future and impossible present.” Mostly, it is about his life among the Graces, who are – at least as seen through the prism of Max’s childhood memory – a grotesque ensemble.
The mystery surrounding them – and why Max has thought of them after all these years – has something to do with Rose, the governess, and is only partially solved in the last few pages.
“The Sea” is quite carefully plotted, though it may seem as if nothing much happens. But that’s only if you think the ordinary affairs of human lives are essentially uneventful. Paid attention to – and Max is nothing if not attentive to detail – they are anything but.
There are no car chases here, of course, or gunshots or karate chops. But there is the excitement of Banville’s prose. Here is Max climbing a tree:
“Up I went … up and up, hand and instep, instep and hand, from bough to bough. The climb was exhilaratingly easy, despite the foliage hissing in scandalised protest around me and twigs slapping my face, and soon I was as near the top as it was possible to go. There I clung, fearless as any jack tar astride the rigging, the earth’s deck gently rolling far below me, while, above, a low sky of dull pearl seemed close enough to touch.
Or how about the “flame … shivering in its own consuming heat,” or the “greenish twilight after rain, with a wedge of wet sunlight in the window”?
At once limpidly beautiful and hauntingly sad, “The Sea” really is a winning work of art.