The Sea - Dark Publications

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
In this luminous new novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child to cope with the recent loss of his wife. It is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, gorgeously written novel — among the finest we have had from this masterful writer.

Customer Reviews: Read 30 more reviews...

3 out of 5 stars

The sorrows of play November 18, 2006
41 out of 49 found this review helpful

John Banville finally won the Man Booker prize in 2005 with this beautifully crafted and brief novel (nearly a novella) about the pleasures and sorrows associated with the play of language, memory and secrecy. Although Banville is often considered a literary descendant of Nabokov, with his love of rich mellifluous language and obscure diction, he might be more comfrotably compared to other great Irish writers such as James Joyce and Elizabeth Bowen, who also share Banville's evident pleasure at (and grace with) the pliancy and luxury of words. THE SEA might be an expected, yet disappointing choice for winning Banville the Booker, given that its plot so closely apes the structure of one of the most crowdpleasing of all narrative arcs of highbrow fiction from the last forty years. Here yet again, a disappointed elderly narrator looks back to the magical encounter in childhood that forever fired the imagination but also implicated him (or her) in guilt when it led inevitably to a terrible and deadly error. Banville's is an odder variant of this formula -- which goes at least as far back as L. P. Hartley's THE GO-BETWEEN, and was recently repeated in Ian McEwan's much loved ATONEMENT -- in the fundamental dislikeability of all his major characters, a Banville trademark. This causes the stakes of the life-changing incident, and its effect upon the narrator, to seem much less shattering than in Hartley's or McEwan's novels; the repetition of the formula also makes this novel seem much less fresh than in Banville's other works (which often are similarly concerned with the encounters between cruelty and innocence). But Banville is always worth reading if only for his grace with language and with narrative construction: THE SEA is, as usual, beautifully crafted in every formal sense.

5 out of 5 stars

The beauty of grief September 22, 2006
35 out of 38 found this review helpful

John Banville's The Sea has had such a profound effect on me that I have decided to write my first Amazon review. I picked it up out of curiosity, knowing it had won the 2005 Booker Prize and it has lived up to its prize-winning reputation.

I have rarely, if ever, had the pleasure of reading such beautifully constructed prose. It's almost poetic at times. The words paint an image, meticulously shaded by simile and metaphor, that haunts the reader, much as the memories of the protagonist haunt him. And the sea of the title is a presence on every page, whether it is mentioned in the text or not. At times you can feel the language rolling across its undulating surface. It's this feeling which propels you on.

I found it to be a moving treatise on loss, grief and the way we deal with it. At the same time, it offers a glimpse at the way memories can bend and fracture until one can't distinguish between what one remembers and what one thinks one remembers.

The comparisons to Nabokov's style have been made about Banville for quite some time, but I'll add a comparison to Virginia Woolf here, particularly with To the Lighthouse, based on the vivid descriptions, keen observations and strong internal monologue.

I'd recommend it for fans of The Lovely Bones, as well, for the way it shows a character dealing with tragedy and grief.

3 out of 5 stars

Disappointingly lackluster for a Booker Winner January 21, 2007
20 out of 27 found this review helpful

I am usually a fan of novels that win the Man Booker Prize, but the 2005 victor has left me surprisingly nonplussed. It is certainly a trim volume that, at 195 pages, moves along quickly and is very well written by John Banville, who has quite a lyrical, beautiful way of phrasing his prose (each word seems carefully chosen for maximum effect). It got on very well in the start, when narrator Max Morden and his wife, Anna, are given the terrible news that Anna has developed a terminal cancer. The scene that Banville paints as they receive the news and return home together, too shocked to know what to say, is heartbreaking and genuine, and it is quite a shame that the rest of the novel fails to follow suit. That is the one moment of raw emotion Max allows in his narration, and the novel suffers as a result. It is hard to feel for Max, a man who seems desperate for our empathy and understanding but equally determined that we should not pity him. So he builds a roadblock of sorts between him and the reader he is telling his story to, just as he builds roadblocks against the people in his everyday life. The end product is a stubbornly impersonal novel that could have done with a more human touch. There are brief, shocking moments when Max's repressed anguish surfaces, as on page 145 when he suddenly, inexplicably rages at his dead wife, calling her despicable expletives and asking "...how could you go and leave me like this, floundering in my own foulness, with no one to save me from myself. How could you." Then, just as quickly as it arrives, the moment passes, and we are left with the sternly unlikable Max that he is so determined to present to us. And unlikable he is, despite my attempts to rationalize his thoughts and actions. He treats his daughter with cold contempt and his derision of her fiance may, finally, have scared him off. He is vain and selfish and scornful. There are attempts by Banville to explain the origin of these traits; Max was born in poverty and grew up desperate to break through the class barrier, and after marrying the wealthy Anna, distancing himself from his mother and changing his name, he is eager to gloat about his successful machinations up the social ladder. There is also the back story of Max's time with the Grace family over one fateful summer as a child. That summer Max first felt the sting of lust and obsession, first on Mrs. Grace and then on her cruel-hearted daughter, Chloe. But the juxtaposition doesn't work because the tragedy of his entwining with the Graces isn't as realistic as the tragedy of his wife's illness and death. Chloe and her twin brother Myles (a mute boy with webbed toes) are inexplicably wicked, and it is difficult to understand the relationship that develops between them and Max. Even a social climber like Max would be hard pressed to put up with their cruelties. Banville also has a curious description of scents; the supposedly alluring odors of vinegar and milk (from Mrs. Grace) and a cheesy tang (Chloe) fall quite flat (do those aromas really pass for sensual?). The build-up to the climax of the Grace arc manages to produce a mild degree of tension, but when tragedy strikes it is disappointingly dull and predictable. It is also off-putting that the tragedy is not accidental but willful. There is, typically of Max, a disconnect with the emotion that he should have been feeling at such a loss and the actions that he takes as it unfolds. That disconnect, as intentional as it may be, is the novel's great flaw, and it makes "The Sea" peter out with a lame whimper instead of the roar Banville was clearly trying for. There is also a "twist" when Max reveals a connection between his past affair with the Graces and his present living situation renting a room in their old summer house -- a twist that is neither dramatic nor surprising. It is also wholly unnecessary because it fails to effect the rest of the story in any way.

As Max looks back at his life he at times seems to be channeling Peggy Lee, asking himself "Is That All There Is?" What is most unfortunate is that the reader ends up asking themself the same question about Banville's novel.

I would recommend another, vastly superior Booker winner instead of this one: Arundhati Roy's spellbinding "The God of Small Things".

1 out of 5 stars

Dull as toothpaste November 16, 2006
14 out of 19 found this review helpful

I bought this book because it had the Booker sticker, a beautiful cover and it was by an Irish writer, all good indicators. The book is 185 pages that seem like 500. It is well written, and knows it is, and unengaging. Here are its basic problems:

1) The main character is totally, completely and absolutely dull and unsympathetic. Who cares about him and his memories of the drowning of someone he had a crush on? He is an unimaginative, cold, self-involved and thoughtless little person but he is not so much so as to be interesting. Sometimes writers who do nothing but write forget that their inner experience just isn't compelling to people who live a life that is engaged with others and with the world.

2) It is well-written but knows it is. There are needless passages which look at themselves and seem say "gosh, that's good writing". These passages come off as precious grad school passages. They describe in manicured poetry the uninteresting thoughts of an uninteresting character.

3) Our experiences are not interesting just by virtue of having them. Beautiful, heart string writing don't make them more interesting, it just says to the reader "I can write". But there are many human stories that are very compelling ...

4) It's a memory, not a story. That's really really a problem for the poor reader.

3 out of 5 stars

Not a crowd pleaser... January 15, 2007
9 out of 11 found this review helpful

My family read "The Sea" for our Christmas book club. Sadly, the discussion about the book was far more enjoyable than actually reading it. None of us like the story, although we give high points to the author's gift for languid prose.

The stream-of-consciousness style (perhaps meant to evoke the tides) rolls back and forth in time, from the author's childhood at the sea, to his present life as a grieving widower. As other reviewers have noted, Max Morden is not a likeable man. Narcissistic, sexist, and self-centered, he seems to be in a state of arrested development stemming back to a traumatic childhood event. I earned no bragging rights by guessing 100 pages in what the event would be... it's really rather obvious.

I think a Freudian could deconstruct this novel better than I could. I'm very curious why it won a prize... was it merely admired by the panel or actually loved?

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