The Sea

John Banville

Dec 2007 · Sold by Vintage

About this ebook

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An “extraordinary meditation on mortality, grief, death, childhood and memory" (USA Today) about a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside to grieve the loss of his wife. 

In this luminous novel, 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.

Ratings and reviews

One thing about these introspective authors, when they write in the first person: You get the impression that they are writing about themselves. They must be, to a certain extent. In this story, the protagonist is a fellow named Max Morden. Banville knows the fellow down to the color of his boxers. It's remarkable how much effort Morden, Banville's alter ego, must necessarily put his life world in terms of witty and pertinent similes and metaphors. Banville, through Morden, is excellent and colorful at these. He admits himself, Max does, at one point, that he says everything in terms of some other thing. There's so many rays of sunshine coming through so many windows and falling on the floor like so many polygons, rhomboids, boxes, and indecipherable shapes, it got to be tedious to me as a reader. Nonetheless, though he errors to excess in some of his similes and metaphors, he will keep you interested in an otherwise mundane story, even if you know absolutely nothing about Banville's native country, Ireland, where most of this takes place. It's too bad that Max aka John must always be thinking of his next simile, because it leaves the author little time for giving up thinking, just contemplating without thought. He seems always looking out for his next publication, his next book, his next triumph, and never really has time to just be himself, whatever that is. Oh, Morden is humble enough. He considers himself only a minor writer, not a real expert or professional. Or so he says. But is the humility real? No, because his creator is a well-known author with many awards, prizes, favorable reviews, many books written, and in the face of all that, humility would be, as Banville might say in a typical understatement, out of place. Oh, yes, he's mastered the understatement (Litotes) to a high degree. The tale reeks of death. Max is right in the middle of it, having to cope with it all in the best way he can, by writing profusely, it seems, and this book is the upshot. Max insists he's a dilettante, but he's a virtuoso of a dilettante, since he has taken the time and effort to tell us all about his life, from his early teens until the end, when he ends up in a hospital after a drunken spree on the beach. And he has such a good vocabulary and is so good at similes and metaphors. But he does seem a bit self-centered; but I imagine any first-person narrative make it's teller seem thus. Many, many folks will find this book excruciatingly boring, since there's little action. Max is garrulous, too, but he knows how to surprise you and keep you interested, if you like to read.

Instructions for reading The Sea: keep your dictionary handy ("velutinous" wasn't even in mine).Go slowly. Be prepared to go from hating to loving this book.

Great

About the author

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. The author of thirteen previous novels, he has been the recipient of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. He lives in Dublin.