2005 - The Sea

John Banville was the surprise winner of the Booker Prize in 2005 with his lyrical novel The Sea. Literary pundits had put their money on Julian Barnes’s Arthur and George walking away with the prize or a repeat Booker success for Kazuo Ishiguro andNever Let Me Go.

No-one was more surprised than the Banville at his success, particularly because he felt that two of his earlier books were more like the “middle-ground, middlebrow work” that he felt judges tended to choose. By contrast he considered The Sea to be more of an “art novel”. It was a comment which ruffled more than a few feathers among the literary elite.

Banville’s description of The Sea as an ‘art’ novel could be considered a strange term for a novel that relies on the well-used device of a character returning to a place that played a significant part in his earlier years. But that simplified version of the plot doesn’t to justice to a novel that is a richly textured and patterned meditation on the nature of memory and loss and of the bitter-sweet nature of first love.

In The Sea, the widowed art historian Max Morden returns to the seaside village where as a young boy on the verge of adolescence, he once spent a family holiday. It’s a trip that is at once an escape from the traumatic loss of his wife but at the same time an opportunity to confront a dramatic event that occurred during that summer seaside sojourn. The nature of that event is held back from the reader until the closing pages of the novel, not because Banville is planning a big dramatic reveal but because his real interest is the process of recollection. Morden’s odyssey into his past takes place through a series of vignettes which reveal his relationships with his father, his wife and his daughter. He recalls also the Grace family who also holidayed in the same resort and whose allure he found impossible to resist.

This is a tale that sucks you in; that takes you along meandering lanes of memory only to suddenly detour to a different time and place and then unexpectedly switch direction yet again to bring us back to the here and now. Banville has been compared to Beckett though at the 2013 Hay Festival he told the audience his favourite authors are Henry James and Georges Simenon (though not the Maigret novels he was at pains to emphasise).

Reading The Sea is a hypnotic, mesmerising experience largely due to Banville’s mastery of the atmosphere-laden sentence. The opening of the book is tantalisingly enigmatic:

They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. All morning under a milky sky the waters in the bay had swelled and swelled, rising to unheard-of heights, the small waves creeping over parched sand that for years had known no wetting save for rain and lapping the very bases of the dunes. The rusted hulk of the freighter that had run aground at the far end of the bay longer ago than any of us could remember must have thought it was being granted a relaunch. I would not swim again, after that day. The seabirds mewled and swooped, unnerved, it seemed, by the spectacle of that vast bowl of water bulging like a blister, lead-blue and malignantly agleam. They looked unnaturally white, that day, those birds. The waves were depositing a fringe of soiled yellow foam along the waterline. No sail marred the high horizon. I would not swim, no, not ever again.

Someone has just walked over my grave. Someone.

With an opening like that, I was hooked. And I hope you will be too. This was the first Banville book I had read. I know it will not be the last.

Athena K's Review - The Sea

I really thought I would enjoy The Sea.  I have a high tolerance for descriptive character driven novels where almost no action occurs.  I really enjoyed The Gathering - see! I like depressing Irish writing about death and memory.  And Banville has such a way with words!  I found myself looking up a new word on my iPhone dictionary app (which is free, and yes, I am a nerd) on every other page - I can't remember the last time my vocabulary was challenged so much.  And Banville always always chooses exactly the right word, which results in a vivid description of a thing or a place.  This book is full of tiny moments of great loveliness, and arresting descriptions of very ordinary things.

Then why didn't I love it?  The beautiful words and images just washed over me, leaving almost no impression at all.  I think the key issue for me was Banville totally failed to make me feel emotionally invested.  The main character is a boring man - he even admits it himself!

... the congeries of affects, inclinations, received ideas, class tics, that my birth and upbringing had bestowed on me in place of a personality.  In place of, yes.  I never had a personality, not in the way that others have, or think they have.  I was always a distinct no-one...

And I have to say the "big reveal" at the end, was a yawn.  The fact that it involved a character who was almost never described or discussed made it feel like a bad mystery novel - how were we supposed to know that person was whodunnit when the author never talked about them!

At least for me, beautiful prose alone ultimately falls flat.  I need some more personality.

Lorraine's Review - The Sea - 2005

Max Morden is awash in grief over the death of his wife Anna and he returns to a place from his childhood – Ballyless, a coastal town. There he had first encountered love and loss and the novel intertwines these memories with descriptions of his family life and the last year with his wife. His memories of childhood are imprecise but he was enraptured by the twins – Chloe and Myles Grace who were there in the summer when he was a young boy of about ten or eleven.
Although the novel is brief (195 pages) it is a demanding book to read.

I tried hard but found that I was not interested in the characters and did not engage with the writing.

The Sea by John Banville

Despite its relatively small size (just over two hundred pages, double spaced paragraphs) The Sea proved to be a bit of a challenge to plough through. Admittedly, I found the mesmeric prose soporific, but if I had cared more about the characters, the effect might have been different.

The Sea is a tale of a summer during youth and a bereavement, told by an aged man. Returning to the place of numerous childhood summer holidays, Max is seeking a ghost or two, invoking memories, both recent and distant, of two significant episodes of loss.

Oddly, for a novel with death and love lost at its core, it is surprisingly unmoving. Max is both sentimental and supremely cold, veering between accounts of heightened emotions and dispassionate, self deprecatory remarks that belittle his experience and the memory of those he professes to love and cleave to.

Banville clearly has a masterful way with words, but sparkling prose isn’t enough to win me over. Max’s story fails to provoke even conflicted feelings, despite his piteous situation and how this contrasts with his instinct for self-preservation.

2005 - The Sea by John Banville.

The Sea is a brilliant book. I don't think it can be matched for the quality of its poetic prose or the cleverness of its imagery both sharp and subtle. It arouses intense feelings of nostalgia, loss, impatience and relief - it's really quite extraordinary.

Max Morden has lost his beloved wife Anna, and he isn't coping well at all. He's a middle-ranking art historian and he's supposed to be writing a book about Bonnard (a French artist), but he's not getting anywhere because he's wallowing in grief and old memories and alcohol.

His memories revert to childhood. When he was a child he went on holiday to the 'chalet', the cheap part of a holiday village, where he met the Graces, middle-class and socially a step above him and his deserted mother. He becomes a part of their household at The Cedars, playing almost daily with twins Chloe and Myles. He falls in love, as eleven year old boys do, first with the rather slatternly mother (fat, vague, drinks too much) and then with Chloe, fumbling with her at the beach and at the pictures. Disaster strikes when Rose, inept au pair/governess to the twins, catches Max fondling Chloe's budding breasts at the beach and they have a blazing row, culminating inexplicably in Chloe swimming out into an unusually high tide, followed by mute, web-toed and probably intellectually-disabled Myles. They both drown.

The memory of this event is so strong that when Anna dies, Max goes back to The Cedars to grieve. As in Marion Halligan's The Fog Garden, he seems to become lost in memories, overwhelmed by the loss of Anna and the twins. In what passes for life in Miss Vavasour's boarding house, there are some acutely funny descriptions of The Colonel, Miss V and her awful fat friend 'Bun', but the general tone of the book is of unbearable pain and loss, culminating in Max getting so drunk that he knocks himself out at the beach. He has to be rescued ignominiously by the Colonel, and is finally carted off to be rehabilitated by his daughter, Clair, and her droopy boyfriend, Jerome. Ghastly as this ending seems, in the context of what's gone before, there seems to be some hope because Max begins to plan escaping to paint in Paris.

It is a wonderful book, richly illuminating in its portrait of grief unresolved. It also shows Max's painful agonies about which class he belongs to (still an issue in England!) and how needlessly lives can be wasted. Clair has probably left it too late to have either children or the career as an art scholar that she could have had. It is a very moving book, but I loved reading it.

I was on holiday in Italy when I read The Sea, and hated having to leave the book behind. I bought a new first edition when I returned home and had it autographed by Banville when he visited Melbourne!

I finished reading it and journalled it (on scraps of paper, brought home in the suitcase!) in Monterchi, Tuscany, on 20.10.2005.
Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers

The Sea - Sharon's Review

Title: The Sea

Author: John Banville

Rating: 5/5

I've come to the conclusion that Irish authors (the ones I've read, at least) are the most poetic prose writers on the face of the earth. Writers such as John McGahern, Colm Toibin, and Sebastian Barry have left me mesmerized by the shear beauty of their words - words that flow like a river and take me willingly along with them on whatever journey they are going. I'm adding John Banville to that list today after finishing his Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The Sea.

The Sea is told in first person by one Max Morden, an aging art critic/historian who, after the death of his wife Anna, returns to the place by the sea where he spent his childhood summers. It is here that he reflects on the people and incidents that shaped his life. We as readers join him as he reveals his thoughts on life, love, death, and the experiences of childhood that can take a lifetime to understand. Max tells of his summers when his parents rented a "chalet" - more or less a shack and on the lowest rung of the village pecking order. Higher up in that order was Cedars, a house that was rented out by the week or by the month. Max's involvement with Cedars begins when he meets the Grace family - parents Carlo and Connie, teenager Rose, and twins Chloe and Myles. It is with this family that Max becomes aware of adult feelings of lust and love, beginning with his infatuation with Connie Grace and eventually transferring to Chloe.

"Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self." (pg. 108)

Max intersperses his childhood experiences with adult experiences from his relationship with his wife Anna, as they come to grips with mortality via her battle with cancer:

"The truth is, it has all begun to run together, past and possible future and impossible present. In the ashen weeks of daytime dread and nightly terror before Anna was forced at last to acknowledge the inevitability of Mr. Todd and his prods and potions, I seemed to inhabit a twilit netherworld in which it was scarcely possible to distinguish dream from waking, since both waking and dreaming had the same penetrable, darkly velutinous texture, and in which I was wafted this way and that in a state of feverish lethargy, as if it were I and not Anna who was destined soon to be another one among the already so numerous shades...On all sides there were portents of mortality. I was plagued by coincidences; long-forgotten things were suddenly remembered; objects turned up that for years had been lost. My life seemed to be passing before me, not in a flash as it is said to do for those about to drown, but in a sort of leisurely convulsion, emptying itself of secrets and it quotidian mysteries in preparation for the moment when I must step into the black boat on the shadowed river with the coin of passage cold in my already coldening hand...Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it." (pgs. 71-72)

Max's story is not necessarily dependent upon plot nor place, so if you enjoy plot-driven stories you might find this a little tedious. Instead, the dramatic force of the story lies in the emotions derived by Max from his experiences by the sea, both at Cedars and at home with Anna, and his recounting of them as an older adult looking back at his life.

I urge you to read this book. Banville's writing is breathtakingly beautiful. The book is only 195 pages, but it took me as long to read it as a 300+ page novel. I wanted to savor every sentence.

Trevor's Review of Banville's The Sea

Overall, I felt really let down by The Sea. Banville had some fabulous, even profound, sentences in this book. I admit that I was transfixed much of the time, if only by the beauty of the prose. Furthermore, the atmosphere Banville created was great. In the end, it just didn't do it for me. It felt like a lot of beauty but without much substance to hold on to.

The story held great promise. After his wife dies, Max Morden, now getting fairly old, goes back to a seaside town where he holidayed as a child. What follows is a mesh of the present and the past, in often beautiful prose. He recalls one particular summer when he met Chloe Grace, a young girl who helps him out of innocence and introduces him to loss.

However, I really didn't enjoy the passages about the past. The most evocative and emotional parts for me were when Max reflects on his late wife. I wanted to spend more time here, but the book (as I remember it) focuses mostly on the tragic past, and it almost felt like it was that way because of the tremendously traumatic, almost sensationally so, summer. More for shock than for what it added to his understanding of his current plight. The present was more subtle, more real, and sadly more remote.
2 stars out of 5.

The Sea by John Banville

This review was originally posted on my blog in February 2006

The winner of the Man Booker Prize 2005, The Sea was nominated as the February read for a group I am in, and given that I am supposed to be co leading the discussion, there was an assumption that I would actually read it!! However, a few of the other people read it before I got to it, and to say that the response was not overwhelming is a fair comment. I therefore kept on putting it off until I could do so no longer, thinking that I wasn't going to like it either, but it actually wasn't too bad.

If you want a crisp outline of the plot, I probably can't do that. In effect this is the story of a man who, in dealing with an extremely pivotal point in his life, is looking back to another pivotal point years earlier.

If you want likeable characters... I don't think I can give you that either. The main character Max is an art historian, and there are lots of references to artists and classic literature to show this to us. The other main characters are Anna his wife, who's role in the book is as a catalyst, and the Grace family, Mr and Mrs Grace and their two children Myles and Chloe.

Do you want lots of actions, lots of events? Hmmm....nope, not much action either. Lots of introspection and memories. Over half way through I was still struggling to figure out what the book was about.

Having said that, whilst The Sea is a meandering trip through two events in a man's life, the writing is beautiful, with many descriptions and evocative word pictures. By the end of the book I was engaged, and was even reading it while waiting for the lights to change on my drive to work. I had however figured out the two big secrets early on, leaving just one that I didn't realise before time.

One of the main reasons that this book was nominated was because last year we read Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and I thought it would be fun to compare a book that was nominated with the eventual winner. It will be interesting to see what others thought! I also read the 2004 Man Booker winner, Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, and wonder if maybe I am not cut out for fine literature as this book didn't blow me away either.

Overall, not bad, but I would like a Pulitzer or Booker or other major prize winner to really draw me in, and hold me there, and blow me away. Maybe the next one will.

The Sea - 3M's Review

The Sea
by John Banville

2005, 195 pp.

2005 Booker Prize

Rating: 2




This was not my cup of tea. I don't need an exciting plot to enjoy a book. I don't mind older men looking back on their lives. In a similar vein, I loved Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, although I hated Roth's Everyman. This was closer to Everyman.

Max is a widower that is overly sensitive to smells who is grieving (I guess?) over his wife. He calls her the "c" word and admits he really didn't know her because he preferred not to know her.

Not one character in the book was likable. I guess I was lucky this was short.