Review: The Sea by John Banville

I must confess that I have scarcely ever ventured into this century's literature. To be completely honest, it is seldom that I have even ventured into the latter half of the last century's. My attempts at an acquaintance with new novels have been nipped in the bud by endless bestseller lists featuring books of such abominable quality that I felt the need to retreat to Victorian novels after reading a few sentences. I also happen to have incredibly strong preferences; I can acknowledge that a book is good, even great, but am not touched by it. I inevitably seek books that enchant me, that seduce me. In one way this is a blessing, because I can tell by opening a book to a random page and reading half a paragraph, whether it is the right sort of book, but it is also a curse, as I simply cannot bring myself to catch up with 'classics' unless they are forced down my throat in class. This is why I still have not, to my mother's horror, read 1984, but have read Le Morte D'Arthur three times. However, I feel that it is definitely time to expand my reading horizons and after going through endless lists of best British/English-language novels of the past few years and scanning through numerous books in the library, I settled on The Sea, which drew me by its dense, lush language.

The first thing I have to say is that John Banville (as everyone has noted) recalls no author as strongly as Nabokov. At times, the book seemed like a humiliatingly long caravan of words I did not know ambling along through its rather short length. My vocabulary is not the worst in the world, and I have not had to go running for the dictionary (or now my phone) this often since middle school. However, Banville's clear delight in his choice of words communicates itself to the reader, communicated itself even to me as I miserably scolded myself for my ignorance as I looked up the millionth word I did not know and will probably never remember. He chooses the rarest, most fascinating, descriptive, colourful words imaginable, making everything distant and infinitely interesting. His peacock's tail of a vocabulary serves to make everything he writes about, even the most dreary, depressing, and/or disagreeable subjects, romantic and desirable.

His writing imbues the everyday, the dull, even the disgusting, with a poetry that casts a new light on life. There's the incredible way he describes a remembered game of chase; 'I see the game as a series of vivid tableaux, glimpsed instants of movement all rush and colour: Rose from the waist up racing through the ferns in her red shirt, her head held high and her black hair streaming behind her; Myles, with a streak of fern-juice on his forehead like warpaint, trying to wriggle out of my grasp as I dug my claw deeper into his flesh... another fleeting image of Rose running, this time on the hard sand beyond the clearing, where she was being chased by a wildly laughing Mrs. Grace, two barefoot maenads framed for a moment by the bole and branches of the pine, beyond them the dull-silver glint of the bay and the sky a deep unvarying matt blue all the way down to the horizon.' Banville somehow combines the child's imagination, which makes all thing mythical, with the painter's careful composition, creating a living picture for the reader.

The novel concerns an old art critic, who, in the autumn after his wife's death, returns to a sea-side retreat where he had spent a summer making the acquaintance of the Grace family as a child. The story seamlessly flows (or rather fluctuates) between the narrator's present day life, his childhood memories, and his wife's last days. One of the most compelling parts of the novel is its study of memory, the tricks it plays, what if fills in, what it leaves blank. The narrator frequently corrects himself or argues with himself; '...her hair was pale as the sunlight on the floor at her foot... But wait, this is wrong. This cannot have been the day of the kiss. When we left the picture-house it was evening, an evening after rain, and now it is the middle of the afternoon, hence that soft sunlight, that meandering breeze.' There are observations on the nature of memory; 'Memory dislikes motion, preferring to hold things still...'

And of course, there are the infinitely evocative depictions of emotions and sensations, so delicate and precise that one cannot help being awed by their beauty and veracity. Describing the aftermath of his first kiss, the narrator recalls 'I had a sense of a general, large, soft settling, as of a sheet unfurling and falling on a bed, or a tent collapsing into the cushion of its own air.' It is these stunningly and bizarrely accurate physical metaphors for emotional states and make up a large part of the book's charm.

Even the sexual thought and fantasies, that in the hands of almost any other author would be disgusting, are given a poetic illumination; '...she was at once a wraith of my imagination and a woman of unavoidable flesh and blood, of fibre and musk and milk. My hitherto hardly less than seemly dreams of rescue and amorous dalliance had by now become riotous fantasies, vivid and at the same time hopelessly lacking in essential detail, of being voluptuously overborne by her, of sinking to the ground under all her warm weight, of being rolled, of being ridden, between her thighs, my arms pinned against my breast and my face on fire, at once her demon lover and her child.' The horribly, physically repugnant last moments of his wife's life are similarly coloured with loving beauty; '...she turned her head on the damp pillow and looked at me wide-eyed in the underwater glimmer of the nighlight...I had that paralyzing sensation, part awe and part alarm, that comes over one in a sudden and unexpected encounter with a creature of the wild... I could not think, my mind seemed filled with toppling masonry... Her breath gave off a mild, dry stink, as of withered flowers.'

Overall, I was utterly entranced by the style and strength of the writing, the subject matter and plot was a little predictable, but then I wasn't reading it for the plot. It did what I always crave from a novel; made me look at life, even its most sordid and depressing aspects, in a new and more hopeful light. It's an impressive, gorgeous, and touching piece of work that is sure to stay with me.