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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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On the surface—the calmly rippled surface—John Banville’s The Sea is a simple story: a widower slowly unrolls the story of his wife’s death and gets in touch with childhood memories by returning to the seaside town where his family used to holiday. The sea itself is background, and what could be a rather grand title is meant to evoke not the roiling immensity of the ocean, but a subtle, shifting presence that only reveals its significance at the end of the novel.
Under this surface, however, the established Irish author, described as a master of language, has condensed a powerful meditation on disorienting loss into a scant 250 pages of spaced-out text.
Banville’s character Max is an ageing art historian (he says he is “losing track of the millennia”) who is trying to write a book on the painter Bonnard. He is a modern narrator, referring to the not-always happy art of writing, hesitating, bemoaning the imprecision of language, and offering apologies for false starts and wrong turns. Yet there is a confidence in his turn-of-phrase, and this is where Banville himself is most evident. Banville’s prose is precise, deliberated on, and his use of commas slows it down, allowing the reader to savour the ebb and flow of the sentences.
At times one needs a dictionary at hand. On one page alone are the words cicatrice and ichor. But this verbosity comes too naturally to be simply an ostentatious use of the thesaurus. He fits adjectives and adverbs like a jeweller; in particular giving inanimate things human characteristics—kettles are grumpy, cars complain. It is great writing when descriptions are inventive but ring true. Waves are like a seamstress working a hem, mud looks like a new bruise.
“Everything for me is something else,” says Max. The art historian’s eye is attuned to colours and light. The countryside in summer is described as looking like its reflection in a lake, a brilliant touch. There are repeated references to slanting shafts of sunlight, which become, as in the paintings of Edward Hopper, both haunting and nostalgic, as in a dream or memory.
Although much smaller in scale than Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, The Sea is likewise a meditation on memory. Like Proust, Banville cleverly plants pre-echoes (as Bob Carr puts it). Motifs weave in and out of the text, gradually cohering as Max’s memories gain clarity and solidity. It is about the shape of memories, how memories live. It is about memory’s way of picking out details. One assumes we all have strong childhood memories of certain places that seem like a dream, like the seaside village and holiday cottage to which Max returns. For me, it is my grandmother’s lounge room, dim and silent, with a leather couch that remained cool all year round, and dark recesses, as in a cave.
Max remembers tangled cypresses and glimpses of rooms. But the house in the seaside village is also smaller and different on return. Memories distort and deceive. Max is troubled by how memory has shifted childhood incidents into rooms in which they could not have occurred.
Banville has also finely rendered the distortions inherent in a young boy’s view of the adult world, and of romance. Adults are compared to mythological gods because they are powerful, but their behaviour incomprehensible. Girls too are objects of awe and wonder, and are approached with sweaty palms and a typically boyish focus.
The book is also about how the dead live in memories. As daydreaming floats us from one thing to another, so the prose washes between the present and the distant and recent past, and between summer and Max’s wife’s cancer. It becomes increasingly sadder, as the cancer cuts her off from her husband even before she dies. Max tries to fill the void with alcohol and reminiscing, as he is a man without religious faith, and seemingly without community. His only family is a daughter from whom he feels increasingly distanced. After his wife’s diagnosis he describes himself and his wife as being the only two in the world.
When she dies his reaction is obvious. He tries to deal with the situation calmly, but cracks widen. As a writer he tries to cope through the precise use of language, but the sudden jolt that occupies a single sentence in the text shows just how shattered his wife’s death has left him.
In the end, when the fragments are finally linked for the reader, a sad but delicate portrait is completed. Banville’s pleasurable prose, like the sea, manages to convey beauty and mystery, light and darkness. His empathetic evocation of the intelligence and comprehension of his character, but at the same time his inadequacy in the face of loss, obviously endeared the book to the judges of the Man Booker Prize with which the author was awarded.
There is also lingering emptiness and numbness, as this is a portrait of a man who believes death is the end, whose past offers few answers and whose future offers no glimpse of recovery. It is therefore a portrait of modern alienation.
Extract from Signs of the Times, October 2006 .
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