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| The Sea (Man Booker Prize) | 
 enlarge | Author: John Banville
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  83 reviews
Sales Rank: 64841
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 208
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.6 x 6.2 x 1.2
ISBN: 0307263118
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780307263117
ASIN: 0307263118
Publication Date: November 1, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
Incandescent prose. Beautifully textured characterisation. Transparent narratives. The adjectives to describe the writing of John Banville are all affirmative, and The Sea is a ringing affirmation of all his best qualities. His publishers are claiming that this novel by the Booker-shortlisted author is his finest yet, and while that claim may have an element of hyperbole, there is no denying that this perfectly balanced book is among the writers most accomplished work. Max Morden has reached a crossroads in his life, and is trying hard to deal with several disturbing things. A recent loss is still taking its toll on him, and a trauma in his past is similarly proving hard to deal with. He decides that he will return to a town on the coast at which he spent a memorable holiday when a boy. His memory of that time devolves on the charismatic Grace family, particularly the seductive twins Myles and Chloe. In a very short time, Max found himself drawn into a strange relationship with them, and pursuant events left their mark on him for the rest of his life. But will he be able to exorcise those memories of the past? The fashion in which John Banville draws the reader into this hypnotic and disturbing world is non pareil, and the very complex relationships between his brilliantly delineated cast of characters are orchestrated with a masters skill. As in such books as Shroud and The Book of Evidence, the author eschews the obvious at all times, and the narrative is delivered with subtlety and understatement. The genuine moments of drama, when they do occur, are commensurately more powerful. --Barry Forshaw
Product Description
The author of The Untouchable (“contemporary fiction gets no better than this”—Patrick McGrath, The New York Times Book Review) now gives us a luminous novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory.
The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wife’s death, has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child—a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his life without her. But it is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled vacationing family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. The seductive mother; the imperious father; the twins—Chloe, fiery and forthright, and Myles, silent and expressionless—in whose mysterious connection Max became profoundly entangled, each of them a part of the “barely bearable raw immediacy” of his childhood memories.
Interwoven with this story are Morden’s memories of his wife, Anna—of their life together, of her death—and the moments, both significant and mundane, that make up his life now: his relationship with his grown daughter, Claire, desperate to pull him from his grief; and with the other boarders at the house where he is staying, where the past beats inside him “like a second heart.”
What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, vividly dramatic, beautifully written novel—among the finest we have had from this extraordinary writer.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 78 more reviews...
 "Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for leaving it." December 18, 2005
142 out of 146 found this review helpful
Booker Prize-winning author John Banville presents a sensitive and remarkably complete character study of Max Morden, an art critic/writer from Ireland whose wife has just died of a lingering illness. Seeking solace, Max has checked into the Cedars, a now-dilapidated guest house in the seaside village of Ballyless, where he and his family spent their summers when he was a child. There he spent hours in the company of Chloe and Myles Grace, his constant companions. Images of foreboding suggest that some tragedy occurred while he was there, though the reader discovers only gradually what it might have been. While at the Cedars, he contemplates the nature of life, love, and death, and our imperfect memories of these momentous events.
As Max probes his recollections, he reveals his most intimate feelings, constantly questioning the accuracy of his memory, and juxtaposing his childhood memories with his recent memories of his wife Anna's "inappropriate" illness and her futile treatments. Through flashbacks, he also introduces us to his earlier life with Anna and his fervent hopes that through her he could become someone more interesting. "I was always a distinct no-one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone," he says, confessing that he saw her as "the fairground mirror in which all my distortions would be made straight."
More a meditation than a novel with a strong plot, The Sea brings Max to life (as limited as his life is), recreating his seemingly simple, yet often profound, thoughts in language which will startle the reader into recognition of their universality. To some extent an everyman, Max speaks to the reader in uniquely intimate ways. In breathtaking language, filled with emotional connotations, he captures nature in perfect images, often revealing life as a series of paintings--"a Tiepolo sky," a hair-washing scene reminiscent of Duccio and Picasso. He objectifies his thoughts about memory through Pierre Bonnard's many portraits of "Nude in the Bath," paintings of Bonnard's wife in which she remains a young girl, even when she is seventy years old. Images of the bath and the sea pervade the novel--cleansing, combined with the ebb and flow of life.
Lovers of plot-based novels with snappy dialogue may find that the lack of external action and the novel's focus on the interior battles of an ordinary man of about sixty fail to engage their interest. Other readers, who may have faced the deaths of family or friends and recognized the limitations of memory, however, may see in Max a kindred spirit to whom they respond with empathy. I have rarely read such a short book so slowly--or reread with pleasure so many passages of extraordinary beauty and import--and I felt a connection with Max that I have never felt before in any of Banville's previous novels. I loved this novel. n Mary Whipple
The Beauty Of Language November 27, 2005
79 out of 82 found this review helpful
Once in a while a novelist totally captures the reader with his exquisite, finely wrought language. John Banville in THE SEA, the recent winner of the Booker Prize, is just such a writer. If you are not careful, you will be so taken by the beauty of his words, that you may miss the nuances of meaning so important to fitting all the parts of his story together.
The narrator is Max Morden, an Irishman who a year after the death of his wife, returns to a town by the sea where he spent his summers over 50 years ago and fell under the spell of the Grace family, composed of the mother, father and twins: Chloe and Myles, a strange young lad who has never spoken. In a style reminiscent of Proust, Thomas Mann, Henry James and the best of Edmund White, Banville's narrator goes from the summers in the past to the recent "plague year" of his wife's terminal illness to the present where he rents a room in the Cedars, where once the Graces lived, and is now inhabited by the mysterious Miss Vavasour, the current landlady, and her only other tenant, the Colonel.
You can open the book to almost any page and read beautiful, poetic language. On our memories of our youth: "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 and I had scanned each other, like soldiers in the field, watching for what was to come." Or on Banville's description of the sea: "Down here, by the sea, there is a special quality to the silence at night. 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."
I would have been content if this novel had just been about Morden's musings on first love, the inexactitude of memory, the taking care of and losing in death of a wife far too early, the mild sorrow of what he might have done differently-- he opines that if Bonnard, the artist whom he is attempting to write about, didn't have all the answers then neither should he: "Why should I demand more veracity of vision of myself than of a great and tragic artist? We did our best, Anna [his wife] and I. We forgave each other for all that we were not." Many a decent writer would have let it go at that. Banville does not. In the last few pages of this small novel, he delivers at least three body blows that the reader-- at least this one-- was not prepared for. Looking back, I see that the writer does drop clues along the away about the possible ending. Read carefully or Mr. Banville will take your breath away.
 Not just disappointing, mostly downright bad December 10, 2005
26 out of 34 found this review helpful
It's hard to fathom how this book was not only nominated for but won a major book prize. Its legion of amazon.com devotees is equally inexplicable. Banville's flaws are consistent throughout and never let up long enough to enjoy his few strengths (sensual details, the moderately interesting subplot about Max's daughter, a few accurate observations about the fickle nature of love, life, death). There are contrived, forced mataphors from the first page to the last. The narrative is plotless, then at the conclusion it becomes so twist-driven and interconnected, so revelatory and 'plotty', as to be all but laughable. Despite some nice passages and consistently interesting language, the book as a whole is a failure. Banville needs to put down the thesaurus and write a story. His attempts at erudition are often flat and transparent. This is a hackneyed wannabe W.G. Sebald novel. There are stock characters and cliches abounding throughout. The mute child. The alcoholic writer (which is mentioned on all of about ten pages and carries no pervasive influence throughout the text, yet it is supposed to be an important quality of the character narrating the novel). The tired and unoriginally presented flashes back and forth. Mourning a loved one and one's own past. The loneliness of aging. 'Sites of memory'. The list goes on and on. A throughly frustrating failure of a book. This guy had the gaul to call himself serious literature, and to subtly suggest the Man/Booker has been rewarding suspect work over the last few years? This is nothing but tepid introspection shot through with a spatter of nicely evoked images and pretty words. Even the title reeks of pretension. Avoid it. Over-hyped. Barely publishable-level writing, much less award-winning quality.
Beautiful book about life and death November 7, 2005
18 out of 20 found this review helpful
John Banville has produced an incredible book in "The Sea". Here he has a person Max Morden who has returned to the coastal town where he spends his holiday to confront his ghosts. He has lost his wife to cancer. Everywhere around, the language protrays the death initially beautifully. He cannot be rid of it. It is a sense of longing and trying to cling to the past, which can be addictive. The passion with which he describes his wife is wonderful, he leaves to image his wife and relationship that he would have had with her. The prose in the book is outstanding. His memories of sex, summer, sadism, status-anxiety and cinemas are patched-together fragments, wrought cliches of high European culture sourced in Freud, Proust and Nabokov. The author calls himself an autodidact. The book is laden with traces of Beckett and Dostoevsky and is a pleasure to read for the way the story is portrayed. It is sad that a lot of criticism about the book has been made, including one reviewer saying that it is beautifully written but has little story. I, for one found this better than a number of Booker winners, including the last few.
As in all cases, he remembers another family from his past when he was very young, the Graces, who he thinks are very glamorous, he is torn between life and death. The complete landscape is an anatomy of life and death and is beautifully portrayed. The book is an incredible one, though sad at times. It shows the variety and depth of the author and how deeply he describes scenes to make us see the analogies between the scenes and the moods of the person. This is one of the best novels of the year and a pleasure to read. Some of the best parts of the book are where he compares the changes that happened in the world, specifically with marriage. In his time, he had no problem with marrying his wife despite all the pros and cons that he faced. The present day world prefers taking partners. Now he has a beautiful paragraph that says partners used to refer to someone you dance or to a person you have a business with, how did it come to refer to someone you love. After all it is true that the amount of committment one has for a business or for a dancer is much less than that for a person whom one has married to. The other place that will break your heart is where his wife when she is ill starts to tell that there where times in the past when they were human and used to hate each other, implying that they are not human anymore. One relishes the story as much as the way it is portrayed. To put it in the author's language, this is no quotidian book and every chapter has uniqueness that one would go back and reread.
 Doesn't Strike Home All the Way May 25, 2006
18 out of 18 found this review helpful
_The Sea_ is quite a bit like Virginia Woolf's _To the Lighthouse_ in conception & also in its relatively prolix use of language. As in Woolf's masterpiece, "Several times on every page the reader is arrested by a line or sentence that demands to be read again," as _The Sunday Telegraph_ says. I found this to be true in the first half of _The Sea_ as I grew used to Banville's distinctive style. By the second half of the book my interest began to wane in Max Morden's itinerant consciousness, no matter how extraordinary Banville's way with words. Either I was not in the mood for a relatively pretentious old man's often sexual stream of consciousness (which, believe me, I am definitely open to) or something is missing in Banville's equation. It could well be a combination of the two. I find that what _To the Lighthouse_ has that _The Sea_ doesn't is soul. One is never far from passion with Woolf, whereas in Banville it seems Morden is in the midst of a lifelong search for something to be passionate about. Again, this could be gripping, but in Banville's hands it ends up seeming like so much finely-wrought blather by the end.
And the end is about as overwrought and predictable as high modernist style gets. I think I've read more or less the same ending in maybe five or so other novels. Not as "innovative" as some would have you think. Some critics and writers complained when Banville won the Booker, saying something like a book this difficult shouldn't win a major award. That piqued my interest, 'cause sometimes the more difficult the better. It's not its difficulty that should have held it back from the Booker; it's more like the fact that the life ebbs out of it by mid-point. A novel like that should never win a major award and there were plenty of novels last year that managed to keep life in their pages through to the end.
One of the highlight reviews anticipated a view like mine, and I can acknowledge that this book could be someone else's cup of tea, specifically someone who has gone through the death of a significant other. Still, though I've never lost a significant other to death, I know a writer can do a lot better than this. We only get to certain parts of Max Morden's psyche, not what Robert Olen Butler would call his "white hot center." I can't help but think that this has something to do with Banville's use of his skills.
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