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Banville's magnificent new novel, which won this year's Man Booker
Prize and is being rushed into print by Knopf, presents a man mourning his
wife's recent death-and his blighted life.
"The past beats inside
me like a second heart," observes Max Morden early on, and his return to
the seaside resort where he lost his innocence gradually yields the
objects of his nostalgia. Max's thoughts glide swiftly between the events
of his wife's final illness and the formative summer, 50 years past, when
the Grace family-father, mother and twins Chloe and Myles-lived in a villa
in the seaside town where Max and his quarreling parents rented a dismal
"chalet." Banville seamlessly juxtaposes Max's youth and age, and each
scene is rendered with the intense visual acuity of a photograph ("the mud
shone blue as a new bruise"). As in all Banville novels, things are not
what they seem.
Max's cruelly capricious complicity in the sad
history that unfolds, and the facts kept hidden from the reader until the
shocking denouement, brilliantly dramatize the unpredictability of life
and the incomprehensibility of death. Like the strange high tide that
figures into Max's visions and remembrances, this novel sweeps the reader
into the inexorable waxing and waning of life.
Book review
Although I have only read three of
John Banville's novels, I can understand why `The Sea' won the Man Booker
Prize. The writing is both mystical and enlightening. And the novel is
aptly titled. The first sentence refers to the day the gods departed on
the strange tide and ends resonating the novel's first paragraph: the
essential strangeness and yet welcoming familiarity of the sea, which,
during the course of the novel, becomes metaphor for life, death, yearning
and love.
Max Mordan, beyond middle age, made sadly old by the long and painful
death of his wife Anne, returns to the resort town of his childhood where
he spent two weeks every summer with a father who would later desert them
and a mother who could never forgive. Though not entirely clear, the
seaside town seems to hover somewhere between England or Ireland. It is
clannish self-serving and self-contained redolent with all vices of the
fifties, sustained by prejudice: a caste system in which the inhabitants
are divided between renters and owners, and those, who like the Graces,
stayed in hotels and those like Max, who didn't. But who instead shared
three shabby rooms, a chemical toilet and paraffin stove.
Max and Anne
both of them large, big-boned, and sensitive, have one thing in common --
each other. Looking back like a drowning man Max sees his life reel by and
tells us that what sustained the marriage was the commitment they made
their relationship that they could be anything they wanted.
While part of the novel deals with their relationship it also weaves in
the relationship between the Grace twins: Chloe and Myles. The two gods
Max envied and so desperately wanted to emulate.
Years later, Max would return with his daughter Claire and a tearful
scene concerning her own awkward relationships. Another time he would
bring Anne. Therefore following her death is seems both natural and
predictable that he would return. The Cedars rooming house as bereft and
nondescript as ever but where Max had first met Grace family. This is what
Max wants. What he needs to remember, and in time, relive. The place he
has never forgotten, where one summer long ago he became part of a tribal
and sexual initiation that had ended in tragedy. And where, another young
woman, much like Max had never quite belonged either.
Author introduction
Irish novelist
John Banville was born in Wexford in Ireland in 1945. He was educated at a
Christian Brothers' school and St Peter's College in Wexford. He worked
for Aer Lingus in Dublin, an opportunity that enabled him to travel
widely. He was literary editor of the Irish Times between 1988 and 1999.
Long Lankin, a collection of short stories, was published in 1970. It was
followed by Nightspawn (1971) and Birchwood (1973), both novels.
Banville's fictional portrait of the 15th-century Polish astronomer Dr
Copernicus (1976) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction)
and was the first in a series of books exploring the lives of eminent
scientists and scientific ideas. The second novel in the series was about
the 16th-century German astronomer Kepler (1981) and won the Guardian
Fiction Prize. The Newton Letter: An Interlude (1982), is the story of an
academic writing a book about the mathematician Sir Isaac Newton. It was
adapted as a film by Channel 4 Television. Mefisto (1986), explores the
world of numbers in a reworking of Dr Faustus.
The Book of Evidence (1989), which won the Guinness Peat Aviation Book
Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction, Ghosts (1993)
and Athena (1995) form a loose trilogy of novels narrated by Freddie
Montgomery, a convicted murderer. The central character of Banville's 1997
novel, The Untouchable, Victor Maskell, is based on the art historian and
spy Anthony Blunt. Eclipse (2000), is narrated by Alexander Cleave, an
actor who has withdrawn to the house where he spent his childhood. Shroud
(2002), continues the tale begun in Eclipse and Prague Pictures: Portrait
of a City (2003), is a personal evocation of the magical European city.
John Banville lives in Dublin. His latest book The Sea (2005) won the
2005 Man Booker Prize. In The Sea an elderly art historian loses his wife
to cancer and feels compelled to revisit the seaside villa where he spent
childhood holidays. |
