John Banville's novel The Sea (available in the UK in June, and in the US in 2006, and already in our hot little hands) has gotten the first review we know of, from the Spectator. It's locked up behind registration, but our pal Dave Lull has provided us a copy, and we share it with you after the jump, until the cease and desist notice arrives. And yes, our thoughts on the book are coming soon, we promise. Hoping to tie it in to something a bit bigger ...
By the way, if you want a copy for yourself, apparently they've hit Ebay ...
Sparks from sifted embers
Reviewed by Sebastian Smee
The Sea
by John Banville
Picador, 264pp, £16.99, ISBN 0330483285
Prompted by a dream, Max Morden, the elderly narrator of John
Banville's new novel, shuffles back to a seaside town called Ballyless,
the scene of his first experience of childhood ardour. This ardour,
like the fiction it now shapes, had been both convulsive and erratic:
one moment infatuated with an older woman, his attentions had all of a
sudden shifted to her daughter.
In old age, Max is 'a man of leisurely interests and scant ambition'
('I was always a distinct no one, whose fiercest wish was to be an
indistinct someone'). Grieving over his wife's recent death, he has
returned to Ballyless for no good reason, but rather 'precisely so that
it should be a mistake, that it should be hideous, that it should be,
that I should be . . . inappropriate.'
He is a man out of joint. So is the narrative, which folds this way and
that, from the shallow past of his wife's dying to the deep,
misremembered past and back to the present.
This present life is an exercise in avoidance. One of the things he is
specifically avoiding is a book he had wanted to write about Pierre
Bonnard. As it turns out, the often remarked-upon contrast between
Bonnard's late, vibrating and mysteriously veiled self-portraits and
the series he painted concurrently of his wife Marthe stretched out in
the bath, insulated from the mortifications of age, provides an exact
correlative to the narrative.
Picasso once said of Bonnard, 'He never goes beyond his own
sensibility. He doesn't know how to choose . . . The result is a
potpourri of indecision.' Max, too, deliberately wallows in
epistemological uncertainty, as a means of prolonging what he can still
salvage in the way of feeling, perhaps even of bliss. When he
approaches someone who is connected to his past she tells him about her
family's subsequent fortunes: 'I found it suddenly dispiriting to hear
of them, these offshoots of the Duignan dynasty . all crowding in on my
private ceremony of remembering like uninvited poor relations at a
fancy funeral.' It is as dispiriting as having the plug pulled from
Marthe's bath. Although it is only 260-odd pages long, it took me weeks
to finish reading The Sea. The book is drenched in sensations of
rudderless impotence, and almost every paragraph prompts the mind to
reverie.
Something about the set-up and Max's state of mind recalls the
character of Van in Nabokov's Ada who, at 94, 'liked retracing that
first amorous summer not as a dream he had just had but as a
recapitulation of consciousness to sustain him in the small gray hours
between shallow sleep and the first pill of the day'. Much of
Banville's brilliant, wrenching effects are achieved through the
shifting registers of tone. Passages of authentic, unironic longing
give way to a kind of searing, anarchic gaiety veiling mournful
depression. Tight, close-in observation ('the monotonously repeated
ragged collapse of waves down on the beach'; 'water flowing over our
arms like undulations of black satin'; 'in the flocculent hush of the
Golf Hotel .') alternates with urgent philosophical assertion: 'What we
wished was exactly that, not to know each other.'
There are superb passages on every page. This, for instance:
It was full night by now, and in the wide-eyed glare of the headlights
successive stands of unleaving fright-trees loomed up suddenly before
us and were as suddenly gone, collapsing off into the darkness on
either side as if felled by the pressure of our passing.
The somewhat contrived revelations at the end I found disconcerting -
or at least unnecessary (Banville himself seems to admit as much in an
aside just before he pulls them out of the hat). But then again, I was
not unduly bothered; the drama of exposure seemed to interfere with the
atmosphere of lassitude and unknowingness I had relished, but the
conceit involved is well-handled, and even rather exciting. It is a
brilliant, sensuous, discombobulating novel.
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