The author of over a dozen novels, including The Newton Letter, The Book of Evidence and The Untouchable, John Banville has been hailed by critics as the heir to Nabokov for his lyrical inventiveness and black comedy. Others prefer to charge Banville with an overzealous use of Roget, describing his work as cold, self-absorbed, and sacrificing substance in the name of style. In a 1997 interview with Beatrice, however, Banville commented that "we move through a blessed world, in which we know nothing except through style, and in which everything is redeemed by style." This philosophy makes navigating Banville's luxurious sentences a necessarily arduous process. The reader is expected to butt heads with the text, engaging in a process of struggle before arriving at insight.

Banville's most recent novel, The Sea, winner of this year's Man Booker Prize, is no exception. On the surface, The Sea seems simple enough—even clichéd. Max Morden, an aging, discontented art historian, returns to Ballyless, the seaside town of his youth, after his wife Anna succumbs to cancer. Max's physical return marks an emotional downward spiral into the memories of a scarred childhood, an unfulfilled career and a middle age that doesn't leave much to be hoped for. Banville maps Max's life like an elegy, moving him through time ("I am losing track of the millennia," Max cries) at the points where he is most emotionally vulnerable. The "simple search of shelter" may be one endpoint for Max but the novel asks a rhetorical question most people don't approach: "at what moment, of all our moments, is life not utterly, utterly changed, until the final, most momentous change of all?"

Whether describing the bodily changes that occur during puberty or reflecting on the possibility of healing after losing one's wife, Max is preoccupied with rites of passage. The reader gets the sense early on that Banville is in the work of training people to read differently, pacing his readers to the meter of his language. This seems, in part, to be an issue of style. But this sometimes-excessive attention to detail points to Max's desire to return to some kind of lost youthful naïveté as a model for experiencing the world. On childhood, Max reflects that "[happiness] was different ... 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 a self." This conception of an accumulated self takes on a different light, however, when we learn of Max's relationship with the Graces, the affluent family that holidayed on the other end of Ballyless. Each member of the family provides insight into how Max's conceptions of identity develop. We watch the self assemble out of his visions of the father's exaggerated masculinity ("fascinatingly hairy," Max observes), his relationship with the mother and his strange rapport with the children.. It is more striking, however, to trace how these conceptions remain with Max on his path to coping with the loss of Anna.

Nonetheless, some critics argue that The Sea is lacking in plot, and reads more as hyper-sensitive inner monologue. As far as a linear plot would go, they are correct. However, the patient unfolding of scenes and the connections Banville makes between the child's view of adulthood, the newlywed's introduction to his father-in-law, a suppressed relationship with a father, and how this affects this person's relationship with his daughter, is sublime. Whatever Banville lacks in dramatic skill, he makes up for in his descriptions—his ability to hone in on the nuance, rather than the sentimentality, of love, loss and death. Shortly after Max returns home with Anna after a visit to the doctor, he observes:

She stood in the middle of the floor in her coat and scarf, hands on her hips, casting about her with a vexed expression. She was still handsome then, high of cheekbones, her skin translucent, paper-fine. I always admired in particular her Attic profile, the nose a line of carven ivory falling sheer from the brow.

Anna has to move on, and in her case, the destination is final. But what is one to do with those moments in between other than take off one's coat and make tea the same way—a continuation of the mundane routine? The sensitivity with which Banville captures this harsh trade-off marks one of the highpoints of The Sea, before a certain roughness enters Max's voice and overpowers the story. This constant state of Sebaldian flux, of reflecting experience without resolve, creates gaps of pathos that recur time and again. Max continuously asks himself questions such as "What do I feel?" or "What do I say?" As the novel progresses, this voice changes severely. Max's tone becomes aggravating, even maddening at his lonelier points toward the very end. Sometimes, Max resorts to grandiosity, dashing to the opposite end of sensitive passages like the one above. He stares into the mirror at one point, reflecting on the "avrilaceous freckles" on his skin, going into a page-long description of the scientific explanation of his condition in Black's Medical Dictionary. He writes: "Roget of Roget's Thesaurus was a physician ..." These observations are Max's point-of-no-return, the moments where he confronts life's prescripted death-sentences by adopting a stance that attempts to reason with the unreasonable. The language becomes too strong for Max (and unfortunately, for Banville) to control fully, and for some pages before The Sea's stunning ending, Max somehow becomes inaccessible to the reader.

Perhaps this is intentional on Banville's part. After all, there is an underlying play between submission and resistance in the "What do I say?" impulses of The Sea. As soon as we locate these moments, however, and we want to connect with Max, he often retreats to language even more frustrating than scientific jargon: descriptions of the people around him that exaggerate the curmudgeon-like elements of his character. I would have liked to empathize with Max as more than that stereotype, nevertheless. Of course Max is the object of loss and trauma and all those awful things, and language becomes a certain kind of defense mechanism to deal with reality, but there are moments when Banville overreaches. A few amusing examples: Max describes his own daughter, Claire, as having "spindly legs and [a] big bum." Her poor love interest gets the simple distinction of being a "chinless inamorato." As for Claire's teddy bears—"slightly repulsive, animate seeming things"—Max pompously reverts to Roman mythology, calling them her " lares familiares."

Banville ends his novel with a fitting metaphor, "walking into the sea," and finally becoming a part of the thing he cannot challenge. And while Max never fully seems to submit to his grief for a large part of this novel—rather, he throws grief on landlady, daughter, teddy bears—one asks if that kind of day-to-day pain, as well as the limited language we have to express it, is all the submission there is.

 

Stephen Narain '08 lives in Dunster House and is an American History and Literature concentrator. He recommends Zadie Smith’s short stories.