The Sea

Book Review

John Banville

Max Morden is an odiously tiresome character, all self-absorbed and vainglorious. He has come to a familiar seaside town, shortly after the death of his wife, to mourn his loss and to relive the events of a summer long-gone, which he spent by the sea in the company of the Grace family and his friends, the twins Chloe and Myles. He books a room in The Cedars, the same house where the Grace family resided all those years ago, and re-lives his traumatic summer, interspersing his memories with flashbacks of life with his wife.

The Sea does not have much plot to speak of, and Max is so detestably self-absorbed that it is hard to warm up to him, or to the novel. Banville does write gorgeous prose, but in this novel it seems to be set adrift, floating on its own away from the rest of the book. The TurboBookSnob was not pleased that this novel won the 2005 Booker Prize.

“'You live in the past,' she said.”

I was about to give a sharp reply, but paused. She was right, after all. Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, the will butting its blunt head against the world's wall, suchlike, but when I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given over to the simple search for shelter, for comfort, for, yes, I admit it, for cosiness. This is a surprising, not to say, a shocking, realization. Before, I saw myself as something of a buccaneer, facing all comers with a cutlass in my teeth, but now I am compelled to acknowledge that this was a delusion. To be concealed, protected, guarded, that is all I have ever truly wanted, to burrow down into a place of womby warmth and cower there, hidden from the sky's indifferent gaze and the harsh air's damagings. That is why the past is just such a retreat for me. I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that. And yet.”