The Sea

(2005)

~John Banville~

In this his fourteenth novel, Dublin writer John Banville gets inside the very soul of his narrator, middle-aged Irishman and newly bereaved widower Max Borden. The loss of his wife has left Max anguished and angry, and in an attempt to assuage his grief, he goes back to the seaside village of Ballyless, where he vacationed with his parents as a child, and moves into a boarding house called The Cedars.

Throughout the novel, Max travels back and forth in time, alternately recounting his childhood summers, the last year of his wife, Anna's, life, and various episodes from the time he spends as an adult lodger at The Cedars.

The opening scene places an eleven-year-old Max at Ballyless, watching the arrival of a new family to the shore. This family, aptly named the Graces (for the mother, daughter, and governess each figure boldly in Max's story), rent the largest summer house in the village, The Cedars, the very house to which Max returns more than fifty years later.

In many ways this novel is as much about literary structure as it is about story. Banville is a master craftsman - I marveled at the way he seamlessly moved from one time frame to the next. It was almost like being in conversation with someone, when you are talking first about the day you've had at work and then chatting about that odd uncle who used to come for Christmas dinner. Banville writes in an immediate and intimate voice that assumes, and rightly so, that the reader has been included in the hushed whisperings. You are always an insider with this novel: connected, drawn-in, aware. And the language is hauntingly beautiful, - when Max first moves into The Cedars he remarks that the past beats inside him "like a second heart," later in the story he describes a violent thunderstorm as "the sky stamping up and down in a fury, breaking its bones."

This novel is at once a coming-of-age and a growing-older story, for in its telling Max moves both through early adolescence and into late middle age. Its ending is tragic, revelatory, and ultimately consoling.

This is my third foray into the works of contemporary Dublin writers, following Anne Enright's The Gathering and Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. I am finding these titles each a bit disquieting but equally lyrical, moving, and intelligent - sustenance for the mind and the spirit.

Banville's The Sea was awarded the 2005 Man Booker Prize.