The Sea (Man Booker Prize)

Author: John Banville

List Price: $23.00

Pages: 208

Publisher: Knopf (November 1, 2005)

Dimensions: 8.4 x 6.0 x 0.9 inches

ISBN: 0307263118   

Banville's magnificent new novel, which won this year's Man Booker Prize and is being rushed into print by Knopf, presents a man mourning his wife's recent death-and his blighted¹ life.

"The past beats inside me like a second heart," observes Max Morden early on, and his return to the seaside resort where he lost his innocence² gradually yields the objects of his nostalgia³. Max's thoughts glide⁴ swiftly between the events of his wife's final illness and the formative summer, 50 years past, when the Grace family-father, mother and twins Chloe and Myles-lived in a villa⁵ in the seaside town where Max and his quarreling parents rented a dismal⁶ "chalet." Banville seamlessly juxtaposes Max's youth and age, and each scene is rendered with the intense visual acuity⁷ of a photograph ("the mud shone blue as a new bruise"). As in all Banville novels, things are not what they seem.

Max's cruelly capricious complicity in the sad history that unfolds, and the facts kept hidden from the reader until the shocking denouement⁸, brilliantly dramatize the unpredictability of life and the incomprehensibility of death. Like the strange high tide that figures into Max's visions and remembrances, this novel sweeps the reader into the inexorable waxing and waning⁹ of life.

Book review

Although I have only read three of John Banville's novels, I can understand why `The Sea' won the Man Booker Prize. The writing is both mystical and enlightening. And the novel is aptly titled. The first sentence refers to the day the gods departed on the strange tide and ends resonating the novel's first paragraph: the essential strangeness and yet welcoming familiarity of the sea, which, during the course of the novel, becomes metaphor¹⁰ for life, death, yearning¹¹ and love.

Max Mordan, beyond middle age, made sadly old by the long and painful death of his wife Anne, returns to the resort town of his childhood where he spent two weeks every summer with a father who would later desert them and a mother who could never forgive. Though not entirely¹² clear, the seaside town seems to hover¹³ somewhere between England or Ireland. It is clannish¹⁴ self-serving and self-contained redolent with all vices¹⁵ of the fifties, sustained by prejudice: a caste system in which the inhabitants are divided between renters and owners, and those, who like the Graces, stayed in hotels and those like Max, who didn't. But who instead shared three shabby rooms, a chemical toilet and paraffin stove.
Max and Anne both of them large, big-boned, and sensitive, have one thing in common -- each other. Looking back like a drowning man Max sees his life reel by and tells us that what sustained the marriage was the commitment they made their relationship that they could be anything they wanted.

While part of the novel deals with their relationship it also weaves in the relationship between the Grace twins: Chloe and Myles. The two gods Max envied and so desperately¹⁶ wanted to emulate¹⁷.

Years later, Max would return with his daughter Claire and a tearful scene concerning her own awkward relationships. Another time he would bring Anne. Therefore following her death is seems both natural and predictable that he would return. The Cedars¹⁸ rooming house as bereft¹⁹ and nondescript as ever but where Max had first met Grace family. This is what Max wants. What he needs to remember, and in time, relive. The place he has never forgotten, where one summer long ago he became part of a tribal²⁰ and sexual initiation²¹ that had ended in tragedy. And where, another young woman, much like Max had never quite belonged either.

Author introduction

Irish novelist John Banville was born in Wexford in Ireland in 1945. He was educated at a Christian²² Brothers' school and St Peter's College in Wexford. He worked for Aer Lingus in Dublin, an opportunity that enabled him to travel widely. He was literary editor of the Irish Times between 1988 and 1999. Long Lankin, a collection of short stories, was published in 1970. It was followed by Nightspawn (1971) and Birchwood (1973), both novels.

Banville's fictional²³ portrait of the 15th-century Polish astronomer²⁴ Dr Copernicus (1976) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) and was the first in a series of books exploring the lives of eminent²⁵ scientists and scientific ideas. The second novel in the series was about the 16th-century German astronomer Kepler (1981) and won the Guardian²⁶ Fiction Prize. The Newton Letter: An Interlude (1982), is the story of an academic writing a book about the mathematician²⁷ Sir Isaac Newton. It was adapted as a film by Channel 4 Television. Mefisto (1986), explores the world of numbers in a reworking of Dr Faustus.

The Book of Evidence (1989), which won the Guinness Peat Aviation Book Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction, Ghosts (1993) and Athena (1995) form a loose trilogy of novels narrated²⁸ by Freddie Montgomery, a convicted murderer. The central character of Banville's 1997 novel, The Untouchable, Victor Maskell, is based on the art historian and spy Anthony Blunt. Eclipse (2000), is narrated by Alexander Cleave²⁹, an actor who has withdrawn³⁰ to the house where he spent his childhood. Shroud³¹ (2002), continues the tale begun in Eclipse and Prague Pictures: Portrait of a City (2003), is a personal evocation³² of the magical European city.

John Banville lives in Dublin. His latest book The Sea (2005) won the 2005 Man Booker Prize. In The Sea an elderly art historian loses his wife to cancer and feels compelled to revisit the seaside villa where he spent childhood holidays.