These questions aren't posed directly in John Banville's award winning novel The Sea but they are implicit and, for me, quite depressing. There was maybe one, and one character only in this novel who was likeable. The rest were bitter, pretentious, greedy or just plain cruel. No wonder the protagonist Max Morden admits towards the end of the book that, "from earliest days I wanted to be someone else. I was always a distinct no-one, one whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone." He says that this is why he was drawn to Anna, the wife whose death he is mourning throughout the novel.
What, I wondered, could be an indistinct someone? I guess he must mean a fuzzy, fabricated personality -one who appears to be better than they are, one who bears no scrutiny. Anna, Max explains "was the fairground mirror in which all my distortions would be made straight." Now that's a terrifying insight.
Max Morden is a middle aged art historian who allows everyone to imagine he is writing a great book on Pierre Bonnard. In fact he's only finished one chapter, and none of his remaining notes add up to anything original. Now that his wife has died he has decided to recover from grief by revisiting the deep past. So he takes a room in a holiday town where he used to go as a child - a room in the same house that was rented by the Grace family, who left an indelible impression on the young Max. It was in this house that he first experienced sexual desire, "a rapturous lovesick grief" and in this town where he first encountered death- a tragedy from which he has never recovered, and which isn't explained til the end of the book.
Returning to this town which has changed very little in the intervening years, Max feels he has "at last arrived at the destination to where, all along, without knowing it I had been bound, and where I must stay, it being for now the only possible place, the only possible refuge for me."
But why is this a refuge? Why, on the heels of his wife's death must he relive such painful episodes from his childhood? Could it be because childhood was the last time he was authentic, or felt anything deeply?
The past, and what the past means, and how a child's imagination allows him to invent or imagine a promising future - is central to the novel. Banville writes about Max picturing his future self - "not so much anticipating the future as nostalgic for it, since what in my imaginings was to come was in reality already gone. Was it actually the future I was looking forward to or something beyond the future?"
During his wife's illness, the past provides refuge - memories of their early courtship - because once she has received her terminal diagnosis they can no longer be honest with each other. Leaving the doctor's office with bad news "we walked out into the day as if we were stepping on to a new planet, one where no one lived but us."
On the sentence level The Sea is truly masterful. From the very first pages I was fully immersed in a world of childhood seaside holidays. Take this description of Max's first encounter with Myles Grace. "A boy of my age was draped on the green gate, his arms hanging limply down from the top bar, propelling himself with one foot slowly back and forth in a quarter circle over the gravel...As I walked slowly past, and indeed I may even have paused, or faltered, rather, he stuck the toe of his plimsoll into the gravel to stop the swinging gate and looked at me with an expression of hostile enquiry. It was the way we all looked at each other, we children, on first encounter..." Several paragraphs later, Banville seems to read my mind. "Plimsoll," he writes. "Now there's a word one does not hear any more, or rarely, very rarely."
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| my cozy place to read |
I've made this little book nook in my library/bedroom, and last Sunday I sat reading The Sea and looking out of the window, with my greyhounds sleeping at my side. It was a little slice of heaven, so why did I come out at the end of it feeling unsettled?
It's because the process of reading this novel was an act of unmasking. The protagonist, who from the beginning of the novel you trust and sympathize with, became a person capable of gratuitous cruelty, one without much depth or emotional intelligence. A person with no real present. A person who was not living in the present. It is the past for him which "beats inside me like a second heart."
And what a past it was. The Grace family with whom he'd been so enthralled turn out to be quite unpleasant people. Max's first sexual feelings are for Mrs Grace who for some unknown reason "was at once a wraith of my imagination and a woman of unavoidable flesh and blood, of fibre, and musk and milk."
Then there are the twins who are his own age - Chloe and her brother Myles "like two magnets but turned the wrong way, pulling and pushing." The twins enjoy hurting each other. Chloe is a nasty, cruel and capricious person and being in a room with Myles, we are told, "was like being in a room which someone had just violently left."
Finally, by the end of the novel when everything has unraveled, the past is revealed as not so much a refuge as a distraction from the miserable and intolerable present and the still more bleak looking future.
Am I glad I read this book? Well, I will say this. I'm impressed with Banville's ability to craft beautiful sentences. But the whole of this book, for me at least, did not add up to the sum of its parts.
#banvillethesea #theseanovel
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