toppled statues of ourselves - on reading john banville's the sea

What if being yourself means being a less interesting, less moral, less ethical and less sympathetic person than you'd prefer to be.  What if it means drastically lowering your standards and expectations? What if being you means being someone you don't particularly like or respect?

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."

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

character is fate in the mayor of casterbridge

An impetuous, headstrong man doubles down on his worst decisions.  By the time he regrets it,  it's much too late, so he makes up for his mistakes out of obligation. And so his life becomes a form of penance.

This is in essence the arc of Michael Henchard, the protagonist of Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge.  Henchard is fated and flawed but somehow  he's still sympathetic.  Maybe it's because we recognize his behavior - or might have met someone like him.   His forceful personality leads you to believe he is capable of greatness.  But instead he's a spectacular failure.  Why?  Because "the momentum of his character knew no patience."  What a brilliant  description of character is that!

The novel begins with a famously shocking scene: Henchard selling his young wife Susan (and their baby daughter) at a country fair.  He's drunk, of course -so it all starts off with a provocative drunken observation that men should be allowed to sell their wives when they tire of them.  But the joke gets carried too far and somebody steps forward. Susan accepts the man's offer and then disappears, along with their baby daughter Elizabeth Jane.

After this, Hardy wastes no time getting into the heart of the story.  Fast forward in Chapter 2, fifteen odd years later to the return of Susan and her grown daughter Elizabeth Jane, making their way to Casterbridge, where they discover that Henchard has moved up in the world and now become mayor.

Yes, suspension of disbelief is most definitely required. But one of the things that makes this novel so fascinating is the way in which Hardy switches up conditions and circumstances, playing them out with different results, depending on the characters.  Both Susan and Henchard's former mistress Lucetta pursue Henchard to Casterbridge, for example, and both try their luck at  holding him to his obligations, with different results.

Henchard subsequently wrongs one woman in order to honor the other. Then his employee, friend and rival Donald Farfrae does precisely the same sort of thing with Elizabeth Jane and Lucetta.

You sense a kind of fever building up - in the episode with a loose bull they encounter on a walk, for instance. Hardy suggests here that it doesn't matter who the man or woman happen to be in a given encounter. What matters is the high emotion at play,  which inclines the relationship to become sexually or romantically charged.

Impulse plays a major role in many of the plot twists.  Hechard sells his wife on impulse. Henchard and Farfrae become business associates on impulse. And Elizabeth Jane becomes engaged in Lucetta's household, also purely on impulse.

Meanwhile although Farfrae's temperament is the exact opposite of Henchard's, he experiences exactly the same kinds of opportunities and setbacks. Farfrae shows himself to be more admirable because of his morality and even temper. Thus he ends up trumping Henchard, inhabiting his home, marrying his mistress, winning the love of Elizabeth Jane and achieving professional success, while Henchard falls into emotional and financial ruin.

You find yourself wondering if Henchard will ever do the right thing and get rewarded for it.  The answer is - no, he never will.  He tries to do the right thing often enough, but since he does it out of obligation - he's never rewarded for his efforts. His life becomes a kind of penance for his impulsive and rash behavior.

The roles of the women in this novel are also fascinating.  For a start, look at Susan Henchard (Newson).  She's supposedly simple and naive, admitting that "foolishly I believed there was something solomn and binding in the bargain" when she was sold to Newson.  But is she really so simple?  After all she's clever enough to leave Newson when it seems prudent, and then to disguise the true identity of her daughter in order to protect her.  She also writes anonymous letters in an attempt to match make her daughter and Farfrae.

Elizabeth Jane in contrast to Henchard is circumspect and restrained - and in spite of her strong feelings for Farfrae she "corks up the turmoil of her feeling with grand control."  She is loving to Henchard when he least deserves it and always carries herself with dignity.  She reflects at one point that "What she had desired had not been granted her and that what had been granted her she had not desired."

To take it a step further, Elizabeth Jane loses Farfrae because she doesn't declare her love.  Lucetta's experience is precisely the opposite.  She declares her love for Henchard, makes a fool of herself,  and not only loses him as a result,  but ultimately loses everything else as well.  She's guilty only of wanting to control her fate. Her mistake is to have been too open with her feelings.

There's so much to admire and enjoy in this novel.  And let's not forget the wonderful local characters - which rival Shakespeare's rude mechanicals and village personalities.  Who can forget the  ghastly Furmity woman, Jopp or Abel Whittle  and his trousers - and the Peter's Finger pub where all the lowlifes hang out and plot the terrible "skimmity ride."   Village life and the life of Casterbridge  and the history buried in its hillsides is indelibly linked to the life of the town.

"Casterbridge announced old Rome in every street alley and precinct," Hardy writes.  "It looked Roman bespoke the art of Rome, concealed dead men of Rome. It was impossible to dig more than a foot or two deep about the town fields and gardens without coming upon some tall soldier or other of the Empire, who had lain there in his silent unobtrusive rest for a space of fifteen hundred years He was mostly found lying on his side, in an oval scoop of chalk..."

A place like this seems worlds away  -  centuries removed from our lives today. But yet the psychology of the characters couldn't feel more pertinent, more vivid or more fresh.
#mayorofcasterbridge #michaelhenchard #thomashardy

the fruit of sacrifice in alice mcdermott's the ninth hour

Some lives are sacrificed for a good cause and other lives are wasted for no particular reason  - and this is a novel where sacrifice and waste confront and respond to each other in many different ways.  It's a story about Catholic nuns and working class people in Brooklyn and it begins when a young man commits suicide.  His pregnant wife Annie is then taken in by The Little Sisters of the Poor.  She earns her keep by working in their laundry, washing and ironing the sister's habits and laundering the soiled sheets of the many sick who they care for. 

When her daughter Sally is born, Annie raises her with the help of the nuns. What would they do without Annie and the joy of this baby in their lives? Annie provides warmth and good humor and besides, the washing never ends.  Neither does her sacrifice. Bodily fluids, human filth and the stains of humanity are endlessly scrubbed out in the laundry.  The nuns are efficient and starched and their approach to getting through life and dealing with human weakness is  "Never waste your sympathy... never think for a minute that you will erase all suffering from the world with your charms."  At least this is what Sister Lucy tells Sally when they visit the invalided Mrs Costello. 

Mrs Costello is a particularly nasty patient, simpering, demanding and completely charmless. When she lost her leg to a septic infection she decided to use her injury as an excuse - while her husband Mr Costello, a kindly milkman  must look elsewhere for companionship.  He finds it in his friendship with Sally's mother Annie,  a warm and natural woman, who like him is also at risk of spending her life in penance  - for her husband's suicide.

Then it seems that Sally must also sacrifice  - as all good people do in this book -  by serving God and entering a convent in far away Chicago.  When she takes a train to begin this new life, the journey is described as a kind of purgatory - populated by difficult, unpleasant and dirty people who Sally is not up to saving.  For me these pages are just about the best writing in the book.

Other characters in the novel also make different kinds of sacrifices for the sake of the less deserving. There is Red Whelan who takes the place of his friend Michael Tierney in the Civil War and returns without an arm and a leg.  Michael is ever indebted, so that when his son falls in love with a working class girl he cannot give them his blessing. "Is this what Red Whelan threw away an arm and a leg for - so the fruit of his sacrifice can drag us back to the slums?"

Alice McDermott clearly has a deep fondness for her characters, especially for the nuns.  She has written them as fully realized, dedicated and interesting individuals. But is sacrifice always God's will?  Must everyone in contact with Mrs. Costello have the thankless task of caring for her, listening to her endless complaints while changing her nighties and sheets and emptying out her disgusting chamber pot?  And where is the reward? Only in the hereafter? Is Mr Costello supposed to live in a world without love? Is Sally's mother Annie also to live without love? And what about Sally herself?

"There is a hunger" the sisters explain.  But since it isn't a hunger that any of them have, they don't known what to do about it.  The hunger they encounter always takes an ugly form.  And death hovers over everything.  The passage of time and the way time behaves in the presence of death is movingly conveyed in this thoughtful and elegantly written novel.

#ninthhournovel #alicemcdermottninthhour