john banville the sea book review

The Literary Edit

Review: The Sea – John Banville

They say to never judge a book by its cover, but I simply couldn’t help myself when it came to John Banville’s The Sea. I was staying at Bendooley Estate in Australia’s Southern Highlands, and was exploring a nearby antiques market when I happened across this book. I hadn’t gone out with the intention to buy a new book – having already packed an ambitious two books for my two night break – but when I happened across a cubby hole whose shelves were piled high with books, I couldn’t resist a browse. There’s something about second-hand books that makes them even more enticing than new ones; their well thumbed pages, the cursive dedications marking a memory – a birthday, a Christmas or a just-because; the simple notion that someone has read the very same book before.

Many of the books for sale were ones I knew and loved – there were a number of Harry Potters, a few by Charles Dickens; a copy of Rebecca that I had to resist buying – but it was The Sea and its tranquil front cover that caught my attention.

Soon after I returned from the Southern Highlands, I started reading The Sea. I was house sitting for friends in Tamarama; you can hear the lull of the waves from their ocean-front apartment, and I couldn’t think of a more appropriate place to read John Banville’s Man Booker winning book.

A melancholy story about memory and grief, The Sea tells the tale of retired art historian Max Morden, who is grieving for his late wife following her battle with cancer. Her death has brought with it a series of memories from when he was a young boy and, during one summer, two of his friends – a girl on whom he had a crush and her twin brother – were tragically drowned in the seaside resort town where he and his parents were on holiday.

To ease his grief and make peace with the past, Max decides to go back to the coastal town that is so rife with nostalgia, and so he returns to stay for a few weeks in a guesthouse that him and his parents visited during his youth.

The tale weaves between the present day, his childhood, and time spent with his wife and daughter prior to his wife’s death, and is rich with poetic prose throughout. Judging by many of the book’s reviews; many find the writing style too rich and dense, but as someone who loves lyricism as much as a compelling plot, for me it’s one of the book’s best features.

Banville explores themes of love and grief, relationships and separation and the seascape is beautifully depicted, as is the intensity of the lonely little boy of Max’s youth. Wonderfully written, with a well paced plot and a number of twists and turns, while The Sea isn’t the most uplifting book I’ve read, it certainly leaves a lasting impression on its reader.

About The Sea by John Banville

In this luminous new novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child to cope with the recent loss of his wife. It is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, gorgeously written novel among the finest we have had from this masterful writer.

About John Banville

Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland. His father worked in a garage and died when Banville was in his early thirties; his mother was a housewife. He is the youngest of three siblings; his older brother Vincent is also a novelist and has written under the name Vincent Lawrence as well as his own. His sister Vonnie Banville-Evans has written both a children’s novel and a reminiscence of growing up in Wexford. He is the author of fifteen novels including The Sea, which won the 2005 Man Booker Prize. He lives in Dublin.

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3 comments on “Review: The Sea – John Banville”

I have to say I disagree with you (and have shall be leaving a review on https://www.goodreads.com saying so. You call the style ‘rich and dense’. That’s being kind. I found it suffocating.

The litany of arcane words used for, apparently, no reason than to use them, the flood of forced similes (and often one just won’t do so you get a second), the pseudo-profound observations, the cod philosophy (I would describe it as middle-brow if that didn’t sound too snobbish – well, I have now) all make it quite soon a dispiriting experience reading The Sea.

Given the number of four and five-star reviews on Good Reads, I was distinctly uncomfortable with my impression and judgment of The Sea and wondered whether I had missed something which I was too stupid ‘to get’. So googling reviews, I came across this onehttps://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/31/arts/the-sea-washes-ashore-lifeless.html?searchResultPosition=3 , by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, which seemed to vindicate what I felt. She (no slouch, but for many years the papers chief book reviewer) described The Sea as ‘stilted, claustrophobic and numbingly pretentious tale’ and ‘a chilly, dessicated and pompously written book that stands in sharp contrast to vibrancy of many of [2005] other Booker nominees’.

Pretty unambiguous.

Hey Patrick, thanks for stopping by. I think it’s great that books can be a cause of polite debate and hope that you enjoy your next book more than you did The Sea. Happy reading!

Patrick,: You are right on the money. This book, which I gave up on at Page 122, is a tedious waste of time.

Banville must have written this junk with a dictionary at his elbow: “What arcane word can I use now?” I am convinced some authors write garbage to see how gullible critics can be. Apparently, they are quite gullible and stupid. This book won major prizes because the losers who award such prizes are cowardly sheep. They go along to get along.

1001 Book Review: The Sea by John Banville

Every once in a while you encounter a book with writing so beautiful that it makes you never want to return to the world of “ordinary” writing. The Sea was one of those books.

The Sea is a seemingly simple, but in essence rather complicated novel about loss, grief, memory, and regret. The protagonist is an aging man who, after losing his wife to cancer, rents a room at a boardinghouse that played a significant role in his childhood. Banville takes his time in letting the reader discover what happened to Banville during his childhood. He glides back and forth in time, weaving in two significant life events. The reliability of the narrator is brought into question as memory is unreliable and impacted by the experience of loss and grief.

I make myself think of her, I do it as an exercise. She is lodged in me like a knife and yet I am beginning to forget her. Already the image of her that I hold in my head is fraying, bits of pigments, flakes of gold leaf, are chipping off. Will the entire canvas be empty one day? I have come to realize how little I knew her, I mean how shallowly I knew her, how ineptly. I do not blame myself for this. Perhaps I should. Was I too lazy, too inattentive, too self-absorbed? Yes, all of those things, and yet I cannot think it is a matter of blame, this forgetting, this not-having-known. I fancy, rather, that I expected too much, in the way of knowing. I know so little of myself, how should I think to know another?

This was my first introduction to Banville’s writing and it blew me away. I loved the beautiful prose and exquisitely crafted sentences. The story is slow and at times meandering and directionless. The narrator skips around in time and the shifts in time make it difficult to follow. I can see why some people were bored (as indicated by goodreads reviews for this book) by the slow pace of the book and the confusing shifts in time, but I found the writing so beautiful and captivating that I remained engaged throughout. As a psychologist, I was also captivated by the way the author made memories blend to provide a more complete understanding of the narrator’s “current” emotional state. The Sea is a psychologically and emotionally complex book that is brought to greater heights by the truly gorgeous albeit highly dense writing.

The book is not for everyone. There is no fast-moving plot and the language and sentence construction is complex. I admittedly had to pull out the dictionary on several occasions. Serious, literary fiction readers will appreciate this book for the beauty and complexity of the writing. That is not to say that the casual reader won’t enjoy this book, but that it is a book that requires a certain degree of investment – a willingness to dig a little deeper below the surface of plot line and think more deeply about the themes and issues raised by the author. Banville also references numerous literary works (both directly and indirectly) and while you can still appreciate the book without this background knowledge, the book is more enjoyable if you are able to recognize these references. I highly recommend this book!

Quotes I enjoyed:

Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things – new experiences, new emotions – and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvelously finished pavilion of the self. Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long Indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.” Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, the will butting its blunt head against the world’s wall, suchlike, but when I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given over to the simple search for shelter, for comfort, for, yes, I admit it, for coziness. This is a surprising, not to say shocking, realization. Before, I saw myself as something of a buccaneer, facing all-comers with a cutlass in my teeth, but now I am compelled to acknowledge that this was a delusion. To be concealed, protected, guarded, that is all I have ever truly ever wanted, to burrow down into a place of womby warmth and cower there, hidden from the sky’s indifferent gaze and the air’s harsh damagings. That is why the past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that. And yet.” There are times, they occur with increasing frequency nowadays, when I seem to know nothing, when everything I know seems to have fallen out of my mind like a shower of rain, and I am gripped for a moment in paralyzed dismay, waiting for it all to come back but with no certainty that it will.

In 2013 the book was made into a movie. You can see the trailer below.

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The Sea by John Banville | Book Review

" The past beats inside me like a second heart."

From the very first page, it's evident that Banville's writing is in a league of its own. His prose is akin to poetry, rich with metaphors, lyrical descriptions, and a meticulous attention to detail.

Banville's ability to capture the nuances of human emotion and introspection is truly remarkable, as he looks deep into the mind of the protagonist, Max Morden, a middle-aged man who returns to the coastal village where he spent a pivotal summer of his childhood. He returns to this village after grappling with the recent loss of his wife, where he explores his grief, regrets, and memories.

This novel is a literary work that gracefully explores the intricacies of human emotions, memory, and the profound impact of loss. The novel explores themes of memory, grief, nostalgia, and the enigmatic power of the sea.

While Banville's prose is undoubtedly the novel's shining star, there is an absence of a strong plot. Normally I don't mind having little to no plot, especially when the writing is as beautiful as Banville's, but the narrative meanders through Max's memories and observations without a clear sense of direction. This made my reading experience a struggle between admiring Banville's craft and the frustration of a narrative that often felt directionless, but perhaps this was Banville's intention. I could see how he used the sea and the introspective narrative to show the turbulent currents of Max Morden's mind.

Banville's use of the sea also stands as a symbol that represents both the unyielding passage of time, and the depths of the human subconscious. Just as the sea's waves erode the coastline, time erodes memories and reshapes perceptions. The novel blurs the lines between the past and present, and while it can be frustrating to read at times, I appreciated that it portrayed how memories can both haunt and heal.

Overall I found that Banville crafted a novel that is both poetic and emotionally resonant. His prose brings to life a world of vivid imagery and introspection, making it a must-read for lovers of literary fiction. I will be reading more of his work.

I read this as part of my Reading All the Booker Prize Winners reading challenge. I must admit to having mixed feelings about its Booker Prize win. On the one hand, the writing is undeniably beautiful and exquisite, and I thoroughly appreciated the exploration of its various themes, which unquestionably make it a strong contender for the award. However, on the other hand, I was somewhat surprised when considering the other books in contention for that year's prize. Admittedly, I haven't had the opportunity to read all the books on the longlist, which means I cannot form a wholly objective perspective or gain a comprehensive understanding of why Banville's work prevailed over the rest. Yet, a book such as Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go," which I did read and personally found compelling, might have ranked higher in my view than "The Sea." While Banville's writing is undoubtedly more literary, his handling of certain narrative events and the absence of a well-defined plot left me somewhat disappointed. To gain a more informed opinion, I plan to explore more of the books from that year's longlist.

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It is no easy thing to pinpoint the precise moment when a life changes, when the different things a man might do are rendered impossible.

In THE SEA, winner of the 2005 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, narrator Max Morden returns to the seaside spot where he spent his holidays as a boy. He comes back to mourn his wife, dead of cancer, contemplate his own death, and remember the incidents of a certain summer. Impressively, the novel tacks in two directions at once, capturing the beginning of Max's life and the near end with equal poignancy.

In the beginning, Max was an unhappy, lonely boy, embarrassed by his poverty and the unending squabbles of his mother and soon-to-depart father. He attaches himself to the Grace family, glamoured by the differences between their family and his own, and smitten with the women: Connie Grace, the seductive mother; Rose, the black-haired governess; and Chloe, fearless twin to the creepily silent Myles. They are fascinating, not for anything they do but simply for who they are, and John Banville has such a way with telling details that Max's recollections of a family on the brink of tragedy are almost painfully vivid.

In the end, Max is an art critic, immersed in mourning and self-loathing. His pain does not soften him at all toward his own daughter, whom he dismisses with condescension and unwitting cruelty. Nor does it dim his descriptive powers. The empty seaside town, his rundown hotel, even his fellow guests, do not escape his notice. Max is fascinated by one of his fellow guests, a retired military man; he details his schedule, clothes, and eating habits as if he sees him as a stand-in for himself so he does not have to face his own frailty.

It's hard to find a review of any of John Banville's works that fails to mention the beauty of his writing. He's certainly in top form here, relating Max's experiences with the Grace family in a way that captures his innocence and his misunderstanding and shocks the reader with the immediacy of the tragedy. The effects of Max's early summer never stop resonating, and he never really grows up. His stunted adolescence hardly could be plainer than when he realizes that he is not the only one whose life was altered forever.

Reviewed by Colleen Quinn ( [email protected] ) on January 23, 2011

The Sea by John Banville

Publication Date: November 1, 2005
Genres: Fiction
Hardcover: 208 pages
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN-10: 0307263118
ISBN-13: 9780307263117

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By Terrence Rafferty

Nov. 27, 2005

By John Banville.

195 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $23.

John Banville's new novel seems at first as simple and straightforward as its title, and as familiar: one of those wispy, graceful books about memory and regret, in which an aging narrator takes us back to a semi-idyllic childhood that will, we know, end with a terrible, shocking event -- something sexual, most likely -- after which nothing will ever be the same. The past is a foreign country, and all that. "The Sea" is, at least apparently, the sort of novel English writers do in their sleep. But Banville is Irish, which puts him at a bit of a disadvantage, since Irish writers on the whole prefer to remain awake during the act of composition. And Banville, as he has demonstrated pretty conclusively in 13 previous novels, is not an artist to whom simplicity comes naturally.

He is, in fact, a compulsive complicator: a constructor of fantastically elaborate sentences and a dedicated deconstructor of his narrators' invariably shifty selves. The Banville hero -- who always tells his own story, as if in the confessional or the dock -- is typically a fraud of some kind, an impostor, often a criminal; his name is frequently an alias, his true identity a mystery to others and, usually, himself. The murderers, spies, con men and lesser weasels who slink through this writer's fiction have in common a verbal inventiveness born of dire necessity -- the necessity of concealing at all costs the deep inauthenticity of their lives. Banville likes to catch such characters at the moment when their particular jigs are, at last, up, and see what they have to say for themselves then.

Max Morden, the woolgathering narrator of "The Sea," is by Banville's standards rather a benign specimen of bad-faith humanity, just an aging art critic -- "a man of leisurely interests and scant ambition," he calls himself -- who will never finish his long-procrastinated monograph on Bonnard because he has, by his own admission, nothing urgent or remotely original to say. Morden's wife has recently died, and he has taken a room in a boardinghouse that was occupied, more than 50 summers earlier, by the major players in his personal loss-of-innocence tragedy: the Grace family -- father; mother; the twins, Chloe and Myles -- and a young nanny named Rose. Max was a working-class kid, embarrassed by his parents: the Graces had the free and easy manners of the wealthier and grander. Old Max, remembering, refers to them in his first sentence as "the gods," which sounds a bit much. But in this sort of book portentous rhetoric, preferably laced with classical allusions, is an absolute requirement: an air of consequence must hang heavy over even the most trivial actions, the most ordinary settings. The idea is to suspend us in a lyrical trance while we wait -- and wait and wait -- for the penny to drop.

Banville can do this trick, and in the first half of "The Sea" he lays on the atmosphere as thickly as a smoke-and-mirrors illusionist. His descriptive passages are dense and almost numbingly gorgeous. ("The mud shone blue as a new bruise," for example, then a sentence later: "the water racing in over the flats swift and shiny as mercury, stopping at nothing.") And he's adept, too, at deploying the mind-clouding aphorisms the English-style memory-novel cannot, apparently, do without. "So much of life was stillness then, when we were young," he writes, "or so it seems now; a biding stillness; a vigilance." And another: "Happiness was different in childhood." Another: "But then, at what moment, of all our moments, is life not utterly, utterly changed, until the final, most momentous change of all?" And one more (my favorite): "What a little vessel of sadness we are, sailing in this muffled silence through the autumn dark."

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Dactyl Review

Dedicated solely to literary fiction, created by and for the literary fiction community., the sea by john banville.

Banville’s The Sea is a wonderfully written story that would be story enough without the shocking surprise. I don’t know what the function of the surprises is, aesthetically I mean. The deaths themselves reinforce the notion that even in (or especially in?) Arcadia, Death is usually found lurking. But the surprise of the deaths just jolted me and made me sad, unnecessarily, and the revelation of pointlessly hidden identity made me feel tricked. I don’t know why a good captivating story should be defined by an event that comes without warning. The opposite seems truer to me. In a story, events are presaged, somehow, in retrospect.

I suppose Banville, who as his alter ego is a writer of thrillers and mysteries, has a fondness for that genre’s plot line. For me, The Sea is at the very heart of the genre of literary fiction, which has very little use for such plots. The real power of the book, I feel lies elsewhere.

The writing is lovely, on every page. This is what literature should be. But I find most works these days calling themselves literary fiction don’t even come close to what Banville seems to do effortlessly. Once I got over the confusion of the ending, I went back to mull over what I really love about this book and I am grateful to Banville for having written it. There is so little out there worth the time. First I loved existing in the mind of this narrator, an authentic and enlightening experience. Novels ought to do this to us, for us, teach what it’s like to be someone else, bestow on us greater powers of empathy. I didn’t always like the narrator, Max (his hypersensitivity to odors, his cruelty to dogs and his insensitivity to his parents), but I understood what it was to be him and that’s the point.

Max is grieving his wife’s death, and wondering what death means in general. He meditates on the way in which people live on in the memories of those left behind, a consoling thought, until he adds that once those people die there is a second death of the first. The next offered solution to the perennially undefined dilemma of being human is successful self-expression. There is a universal desire to be known to another, that, if one could achieve it, would satisfy and make a life seem as if it had done something, done the thing it set out to do at last. Max admits, “I do not entertain the possibility of an afterlife, or any deity capable of offering it. Given the world he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him. No, what I am looking forward to is a moment of earthly expression. That is it, that is it exactly: I shall be expressed, totally. I shall be delivered, like a noble closing speech. I shall be, in a word, said.” As a writer I am wholly sympathetic to Max’s (Banville’s?) ultimate desire.

It’s important to note that this raising of self-expression as the highest attainable good comes after a description of the fall, when Max falls in love with Chloe (one of the twins), his other. “She was I believe the true origin in me of self-consciousness. Before, there had been one thing and I was part of it, now there was me and all that was not me. But here too there is a torsion, a kink of complexity. In severing me from the world and making me realize myself in being thus severed, she expelled me from that sense of the immanence of all things, the all things that had included me, in which up to then I had dwelt, in more of less blissful ignorance.”

Sadly, we find that Max’s relationship with his wife, as good as it gets as it was, lacked the kind of intimacy that would have reconnected him with another and the world. They didn’t know each other, not in that full way that would have been a good substitute for the “immortality” of being remembered. They did not know each other in the way that a reader can when he or she shares the existence of a character in fiction. So I’m sad for Max in the end, but not too because he has been “said” in this book.

Bravo Banville. I did not need the shocking ending, but ultimately it did not distract from the beauty of this meditation on the meaning of completeness.

— V. N. Alexander , author of Trixie (2010)

The Sea by John Banville #bookreview

No-one was more surprised than the Banville at his success, particularly because he felt that two of his earlier books were more like the “middle-ground, middlebrow work” that he felt judges tended to choose. By contrast he considered The Sea to be more of an “art novel”. It was a comment which ruffled more than a few feathers among the literary elite.

Banville’s description of The Sea as an ‘art’ novel could be considered a strange term for a novel that relies on the well-used device of a character returning to a place that played a significant part in his earlier years. But that simplified version of the plot doesn’t to justice to a novel that is a richly textured and patterned meditation on the nature of memory and loss and of the bitter-sweet nature of first love.

In The Sea ,the widowed art historian Max Morden returns to the seaside village where as a young boy on the verge of adolescence, he once spent a family holiday. It’s a trip that is at once an escape from the traumatic loss of his wife but at the same time an opportunity to confront a dramatic event that occurred during that summer seaside sojourn. The nature of that event is held back from the reader until the closing pages of the novel, not because Banville is planning a big dramatic reveal but because his real interest is the process of recollection. Morden’s odyssey into his past takes place through a series of vignettes which reveal his relationships with his father, his wife and his daughter. He recalls also the Grace family who also holidayed in the same resort and whose allure he found impossible to resist.

This is a tale that sucks you in; that takes you along meandering lanes of memory only to suddenly detour to a different time and place and then unexpectedly switch direction yet again to bring us back to the here and now. Banville has been compared to Beckett though at the 2013 Hay Festival he told the audience his favourite authors are Henry James and Georges Simenon (though not the Maigret novels he was at pains to emphasise).

Reading The Sea is a hypnotic, mesmerising experience largely due to Banville’s mastery of the atmosphere-laden sentence. The opening of the book is tantalisingly enigmatic:

They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. All morning under a milky sky the waters in the bay had swelled and swelled, rising to unheard-of heights, the small waves creeping over parched sand that for years had known no wetting save for rain and lapping the very bases of the dunes. The rusted hulk of the freighter that had run aground at the far end of the bay longer ago than any of us could remember must have thought it was being granted a relaunch. I would not swim again, after that day. The seabirds mewled and swooped, unnerved, it seemed, by the spectacle of that vast bowl of water bulging like a blister, lead-blue and malignantly agleam. They looked unnaturally white, that day, those birds. The waves were depositing a fringe of soiled yellow foam along the waterline. No sail marred the high horizon. I would not swim, no, not ever again. Someone has just walked over my grave. Someone.

With an opening like that, I was hooked. And I hope you will be too. This was the first Banville book I had read. I know it will not be the last.

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What do you need to know about me? 1. I'm from Wales which is one of the countries in the UK and must never be confused with England. 2. My life has always revolved around the written and spoken word. I worked as a journalist for nine years then in international corporate communications 3. My tastes in books are eclectic. I love realism and hate science fiction and science fantasy. 4. I am trying to broaden my reading horizons geographically by reading more books in translation

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Superb novel. it’s not my favourite of his. I know you’re reviewing Ancient Light for The Begorrathon, and in some ways that novel feels like a continuation of The Sea, although in fact it is connected to two other novels – Eclipse and Shroud.

I well remember the fuss when Banville won the Booker for this, and I do think he has a point about literary prizes going to middlebrow books, but Banville has both a notorious ego (‘my books are never good enough for me – they’re better than everyone else’s, of course, but not good enough for me’) and an interesting history with The Booker.

I think he should have won it years ago for The Book of Evidence, and a few years later he was nominated again for Athena and was miffed and bewildered why he didn’t win and why that book was not better received by critics.

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We read this in one of my reading groups just after it won the Booker and it split the group entirely. Some liked it and others thought it was interminably dull. I suspect it depends on what you look for in a novel.

The same thing seems to have happened with people who post reviews on The Complete Booker blog. Which side of the fence were you Alex?

Oh, another book I want to read. Sounds wonderful.

This is a great book. Have you heard that there’s going to be a film adaptation?

We were meant to see a preview of part of the film during his Hay talk but it never materialised. I’m intrigued b how you can make a film from an interior monologue.

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The Sea by John Banville

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A- : subdued mourning-tale, nicely done

See our review for fuller assessment.


Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
	.	8/11/2005	Yvonne Zipp
The Economist	.	13/10/2005	.
	.	25/6/2005	Finn Fordham
Independent on Sunday	A+	4/9/2005	John Tague
London Rev. of Books	A	4/8/2005	Adam Phillips
The LA Times	A	6/11/2005	Jack Miles
	.	20/6/2005	Brian Dillon
	.	14/11/2005	David Thomson
The NY Times	F	1/11/2005	Michiko Kakutani
The NY Times Book Rev.	.	27/11/2005	Terrence Rafferty
	.	14/11/2005	.
People	A	14/11/2005	Lee Aitken
Rev. of Contemp. Fiction	.	Spring/2006	Steven G. Kellman
The Spectator	A	7/5/2005	Sebastian Smee
Sunday Times	D	12/6/2005	David Grylls
The Telegraph	A+	5/6/2005	Lewis Jones
The Telegraph	.	7/6/2005	Tibor Fischer
TLS	D	3/6/2005	Robert MacFarlane
	.	7/11/2005	Deirdre Donahue
	.	14/11/2005	Jessica Winter
	.	13/11/2005	John Crowley

Review Consensus : No consensus, with opinions tending toward the extremes From the Reviews : " The Sea is ultimately not as cold as its counterpart. There's a sense of consolation at its conclusion that's anything but indifferent." - Yvonne Zipp, Christian Science Monitor "Mr Banville's style affords the reader a voluptuous, unfashionable pleasure that grows with every re-reading of the book and casts the story with ease into second place." - The Economist "Literary allusions play hide and seek in this very literary novel. (...) Soliloquist and solipsist, Morden is deaf to dialogue, something generally lacking in Banville's prose: what speech appears is fragmented, reported, misheard. But Banville turns this to his advantage: his narrators portray limited visions of the world as a series of paintings, fixed, mute and still." - Finn Fordham, The Guardian " The Sea is not a lengthy novel, but by its end I felt heady and a little off-balance, so distilled and intense is its cumulative strength. (...) Banville demonstrates a masterful technical control of his material. The narrative moves in a stately, tidal motion across the past as Max loses himself in reveries. (...) It confirms Banville's reputation as once of finest prose stylists working in English today and, in the sheer beauty of its achievement, is unlikely to be bettered by any other novel published this year." - John Tague, Independent on Sunday "In The Sea Banville has written an utterly absorbing novel about the strange workings of grief, and the gratuitous dramas of memory. (...) The disillusionment with memory that is everywhere in The Sea , though nowhere polemical or wearyingly insistent, is a testament to the fact that -- for those for whom the gods have departed -- memory has become redemptive." - Adam Phillips, London Review of Books "As Michael Cunningham's The Hours was to Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway , so, roughly, is The Sea to The Turn of the Screw . It is deconstruction and homage at once, an utterly contemporary novel that nonetheless could only have come from a mind steeped in the history of the novel and deeply reflective about what makes fiction still worthwhile." - Jack Miles, The Los Angeles Times "(A) novel where the real drama is in the perplex of botched approaches to the past." - Brian Dillon, New Statesman "There�s nothing sportive, coruscating or especially witty in this book. Like everything else by Mr. Banville that I�ve read (and liked), the novel is founded in the gradual uncovering of true, if shy, feeling. He�s Irish. (...) The Sea has me marooned. There may be a comic construct at work that has missed me in the night. (...) Too much of The Sea is an elbow in the reader�s ribs, and a weird uneasiness on the part of the writer." - David Thomson, The New York Observer "(S)tilted, claustrophobic and numbingly pretentious (.....) Max sounds like an annoying Peter Handke character on a bad day. (...) (A) chilly, desiccated and pompously written book" - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "What's strangest about The Sea is that the novel somehow becomes simpler and clearer as it gets more self-conscious: a consequence, I suppose, of the author dropping the pretense of being one kind of writer and giving in to his authentic and much more complicated creative nature. This misshapen but affecting novel turns out to be about something even more familiar than the loss of innocence: it's about grief, the misery and confusion the narrator feels on losing his wife." - Terrence Rafferty, The New York Times Book Review "The plot is minimal; instead, the novel's drama takes place in Banville's remarkable imagery" - The New Yorker "Banville is a master at capturing the most fleeting memory or excruciating twinge of self-awareness with riveting accuracy. So it hardly matters that the book unfolds without much action" - Lee Aitken, People "An exercise in repetition compulsion, The Sea demands a reader willing to chew over its sumptuous but elliptical sentences, in quest of all there is to learn of Max." - Steven G. Kellman, Review of Contemporary Fiction "The somewhat contrived revelations at the end I found disconcerting � or at least unnecessary (...). 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." - Sebastian Smee, The Spectator "Banville has a talent for sensuous phrasing, and pungent observation of human frailty, but in other areas important for fiction -- plot, character, pacing, suspense -- The Sea is a crashing disappointment." - David Grylls, Sunday Times "(H)is best novel so far. (...) All this sounds horribly pretentious, and so it is, in a way, but it is deftly done, and never quite overdone. And Banville's prose is sublime. Several times on every page the reader is arrested by a line or sentence that demands to be read again. They are like hits of some delicious drug, these sentences. One has to stop for a while, and gaze smiling and unseeing into the middle distance, before returning to the page for one's next fix. For a shortish book, it takes a long time to read." - Lewis Jones, The Telegraph "As the novel progressed I realised that it was more like sitting an exam than taking in a tale: Banville's text is one that constantly demands admiration and analysis. Bard of Hartford ? Nom d'appareil ? Cracaleured ? If the preciosity was used solely for comic effect it would work better, but I suspect Banville is after some elegiac granite here. (...) The Sea has some sharp vignettes and its characters occasionally jerk into life, but story deficiency would, I'm afraid, be my final diagnosis. (...) There's lots of lovely language, but not much novel." - Tibor Fischer, The Telegraph " The Sea , indeed, might qualify as a novel-sized anagram, since it permutes so many of Banville's distinctive tropes, traits and tics. (...) In The Sea ,, however, vagueness serves no higher intellectual purpose. The languorous ambience of Max's prose, indeed the entire structure of the novel, seems to exist only to permit Banville his exquisite scrimshaws of style. One reads the novel by turns admiring the polish of the language, and frustrated by a sense of authorial self indulgence and safety -- the familiar images and performances, the gelid plot, the inconsequentiality of it all. (...) The Sea , feels -- disappointingly from such a gifted and interesting writer -- tired and retried, and other near-anagrams indicating second-handedness." - Robert MacFarlane, Times Literary Supplement "For readers who take books and literature seriously, The Sea is a must-have. One periodically rereads a sentence just to marvel at its beauty, originality and elegance. (...) The Sea offers an extraordinary meditation on mortality, grief, death, childhood and memory. It's not a comfortable novel, but it is undeniably brilliant." - Deirdre Donahue, USA Today "Banville's famously torrid affair with his thesaurus has previously birthed erudite but emotionally delimited characters, whose fierce powers of observation and description are rendered poignantly meaningless by failings of moral temperament, but The Sea nudges this pathos toward parody. (...) Brandishing Roget's apotropaic caduceus, Banville's prose is flocculent and positively crepitant with memory's torsions, but the strangury of obscure vocabulary tends to embalm The Sea in a hebetudinous catafalque." - Jessica Winter, The Village Voice "It seems that Max (and his maker) are engaged not in the working out of a character's actions through time -- the usual business of a novel -- but in the limning of moments of stillness, as a poem or a painting might. (...) (T)he power and strangeness and piercing beauty of its fragments are all, and are a wonder." - John Crowley, The Washington Post Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

The complete review 's Review :

The Sea is narrated by Max Morden, who has recently been widowed. He has come to a seaside resort where he had spent the summer holidays with his parents when he was a child. Ostensibly, he's working on a monograph on Bonnard, but in fact it's the pull of the sea and the past that draws him here. He is grieving for his wife Anna, and he is dealing with the pain of having watched a loved one waste away and die, and of surviving, and of the difficulty of having to go on, alone. The pull of the sea, at this particular locale, turns out to be a strong one for reasons that are not immediately made clear. But it's not merely nostalgia for lost childhood, a return to a place of happiness or safety or simpler, that brings him here. Indeed, there's a darkness, roughness, and shabbiness to the place -- not quite ominous, but suggestive. The narrative moves back and forth between the present and the past -- both the immediate one, the "plague year" of Anna's decline and death, as well as memories from their life together, as well as memories of a summer from his childhood spent here. Very occasionally, Max's visceral anguish about his wife's death come through -- interjected cries of pain ("You cunt, you fucking cunt, how could you go and leave me like this") that he barely acknowledges -- but for the most part his narrative is remarkably controlled, relating and admitting to the good and the bad, a subdued look back at a generally happy marriage. The focus on the summer from his childhood seems, at first, an odd choice of what to turn and return to, but, though for the most part Max seems to be coping with his wife's death quite well, it can be understood as the sort of escape he needs. As it turns out, it is, of course, considerably more. The summer he revisits is the one when he was ten or eleven, and the Grace family rented one of the local summer houses. At first the boy was attracted to the mother, but when he gets to know the twin children, Chloe and the mute Myles, he eventually falls for the girl. His memories are of a summer of first love, though of the clumsy sort of children, still playing by their own rules. (Banville does a wonderful job of describing the awkward interplay between the children as they get to know each other, relationships governed by uncertainty more than anything else.) Chloe's capriciousness, and her close relationship -- a connexion incomprehensible to outsiders -- with her brother mystify him, but in the way the world with all its unknowns is generally mystifying for children he is happy enough to just go along with it. The Sea is an attempt to recapture the past. Not an idyll, in the case of his childhood, because even though this past was a time of wonder it was also a dark one: here, as also later in life, Max is not always happy with the moral compromises he makes -- harmless enough, generally, and yet leaving a bad taste. The closer past, his life with Anna, is the lost time he really mourns, but it is only in that summer from his childhood that he finds a way of confronting it. His daughter, Claire, accuses: "You live in the past". It certainty appeals to him: no unpleasant surprises, only the warm glow of favoured memories. But past, like present, can't be reshaped entirely to fit our needs, and the painful can't be kept at bay. Max only reveals near the end what made that summer with the Graces so significant, a resolution a bit too tidily tied up (especially regarding the one character from the past that resurfaces), but overall a successful and, despite its restraint, in some ways stunning denouement. The Sea chronicles his struggle with death and loss, and in finally putting all the pieces together packs quite the punch. Coming to the sea is a test for Max. He recognises the danger of his past-obsession: "There are moments when the past has a force so strong it seems one might be annihilated by it." Indeed, he feels overwhelmed from the first -- "I may go mad here. Deedle deedle ." -- but this is the place he must be to come to terms with past, present, and future. Memory also plays games (and so does Max, occasionally), and his account is a mix of precision and questions, Banville expertly describing how we relive our pasts, that mix of memories we choose and those forced upon us, and the shifts between absolute clarity and dream-like vagueness. Max imagines living solely in the remembered memories of the past, but realises -- and proves every step of the way -- that memory is inconstant, a gapped blur, that it is, indeed, like the ever-changing huge expanse that is the sea. The Sea feels like an almost off-hand story, a sad man who drinks too much reflecting haphazardly on his life. It doesn't even really build up to the denouement(s) -- which makes it all the more effective, in the end, but also demands more patience from the reader. The jumps between present, his past with Anna, and his childhood -- along with asides about his daughter -- almost disguise how remarkably well built up the story is, how many small clues about so many different things are littered throughout the text. (It is book that gains from -- and is well worth -- re-reading.) Similarly, Banville's use of language -- the reader is immediately confronted with: "that vast bowl of water bulging like a blister, lead-blue and malignantly agleam", and Banville continues in this vein -- is almost distracting (at least on a first reading), style threatening to overwhelm story. Despite being so short, and despite the seemingly casual tone of much of it, The Sea is a rich, packed story. The familiar and distinctive Banville tropes and vocabulary (i.e. the liberal use of obscure words you've never seen used before) are perhaps too familiar, as is the character of Max himself, who would fit just as comfortably in many of Banville's other books, but it is still an impressive achievement. (One of the problems of the book being so obviously from Banville's hand is that it's hard to take some of the passages as seriously as they're meant: readers familiar with his work have come to expect portentous sea-scenes and the like, and probably don't read as much into these typically Banvillian descriptions as they should.) Max's desperation, and his wrestling with grief, mortality, and his own life -- how he has lived it so far, and how he might live his remaining days -- are very well related, and make for a thoughtful and powerful read. Recommended.

About the Author :

Irish author John Banville was born in 1945. He has written a number of highly acclaimed novels.

Introduction

The novel “The Sea” is written by Irish writer, novelist, dramatist, and screenwriter John Banville. William John Banville, who sometimes penned by Benjamin Black was born on December 8, 1945. He is considered as one of the most imaginative literary writer and novelist; such imagination is proofed by his novel “The Sea”.

The Sea by John Banville Summary

When the novel begins, we see Max standing looking at the sea. The author introduces the readers to a family that will predominantly play an important role in his future. Max- the 1st person narrative of the play describes three settings of the play. The first setting is “Cedars” – a house that a wealthy middle class rented in his childhood. The second setting is of a month in which his wife Anna died. While the third setting is of the present “Cedars” house in which he is living now after the death of his wife.

In the second part of the novel, Max illustrates his other half of the memories of that summer. In this part, Max story revolves around his uncomfortable relationship with Cloe, a girl having convulsive personality and blunt behavior. Max describes Cloe as the one with volatile character; for instance, she deliberately kissed Max in cinema, acting in a violent manner with her brother, Myles. Moreover, she is shown as hyper-sexual by Max in the early part of the novel, yet is confirmed at the end of the novel.

Themes in The Sea

Youth, growth, and innocence:.

At a picnic with Grace Family, he imagines romance with Mrs. Grace but feared that his emotions would be revealed to somebody, particularly Mr. Grace. However, later, he suddenly realizes his feelings for Chloe. Remembering his childhood experiences, Max realizes that he loses his childhood innocence soon through the love incidents and stormy experiences, and grows into maturity.

The Sea Characters Analysis

Max morden:.

He soon loses his innocence while stealing glances at Mrs. Grace at a picnic, kissing Chloe and imagining himself under her swimsuit. The way he describes Graces is as if he is describing the “gods” of the Roman and Greek mythology, overwhelmed by their stories, even called Chloe, his childhood friend as “Pan”-like.

Chloe Grace:

The first sweetheart or girlfriend that max had. He shared his first kiss with Chloe. Chloe had a twin brother named Myles; both of them look alike to a greater extent and would go out bare feet in shorts. Max and Chloe would swim together, play together and their relationship, with the passage of time, grew more than that of friendship. The simple beginning of the friendship, for Max, turns into a strong attraction for the female sex.

Other minor characters:

The sea literary analysis.

The sea in the novel “The Sea” has symbolic and literal importance. The sea, in most of the literary circles and psychological theories, is a symbol of literary inspiration, unconsciousness, and innate and creative freedom. It doesn’t only affect the atmosphere and mood by also it is an important part of the setting of the play.

Max intentionally crawls himself with the family by befriending the two non-identical twins, Myles and Chloe. Mrs. Grace, the mother of two children, with whom Max first fall in love with, is a sensuous lady. Later, Max started loving her daughter Chloe and presents Mrs. Grace as another goddess of the mythologies.

Reading guide for The Sea by John Banville

Critics' Consensus:
Readers' Rating:
First Published:
Nov 1, 2005, 195 pages
Aug 2006, 208 pages
Literary Fiction
UK (Britain) & Ireland
20th Century (multiple decades)
Mid-Life Onwards
Dealing with Loss
Publication Information
Write a Review
Buy This Book

About this Book

Reading Guide

Reading Guide Questions

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

The Sea is made up of three temporal layers: the distant past of Max's childhood, the recent past of his wife's illness and death, and the present of his return to Ballyless. Instead of keeping these layers distinctly separated, Banville segues among them or splices them together, sometimes within a single sentence. Why might he have chosen to do this, and what methods does he use to keep the reader oriented in his novel's time scheme?
Morden frequently refers to the Graces as gods, and of course the original Graces were figures in classical mythology. What about these people makes them godlike? Does each of them possess some attribute that corresponds, for instance, to Zeus's thunderbolt or Athena's wisdom? What distinguishes the Graces from Max's own unhappily human family? Are they still godlike at the novel's end?
When Max first encounters the Graces, he hears from the upstairs of their house the sound of a girl laughing while being chased. What other scenes in the book feature chases, some playful, some not? Is Morden being chased? Or is he a pursuer? If so, who or what might he be pursuing?
Morden is disappointed, even "appalled" [p. 4], to find the Cedars physically unchanged from what it was when the Graces stayed there. Yet he is also disappointed that it contains no trace of its former occupants [p. 29]. What might explain his ambivalence? Has he come to Ballyless to relive his past or to be free of it? Given the shame and sadness that suffuses so much of his memory, how is one to interpret his sense of the past as a retreat [pp. 44–45]?
"How is it," Max wonders, "that in childhood everything new that caught my interest had an aura of the uncanny, since according to all the authorities the uncanny is not some new thing but a thing known returning in a different form, a revenant?" [p. 8]. What might account for this sense of déjà vu? What episodes in this novel seem to echo earlier ones, and are there moments when the past seems to echo the future, as if time were running backward? In this light, consider Max's realization that his childhood visions of the future had "an oddly antique cast" [p. 70], as if "what I foresaw as the future was in fact . . . a picture of what could only be an imagined past" [p. 71].
How does Banville depict the other characters in this novel? To what extent are they, as Max suggests, partial constructs, as Connie Grace was "at once a wraith of my imagination and a woman of unavoidable flesh and blood" [p. 65]? Does Max's voice, wry, self-reflexive, and resplendently vivid, give these characters an independent life or partially obscure them? Are there moments when they seem to peek out from beneath its blanket and show themselves to the reader?
Throughout the novel Max suffers from an overpowering, all-pervasive sense of guilt. Is this guilt justified? What are his crimes, or using another moral language, his sins? Has he managed to atone for any of his failures or redeem any of his spoiled relationships by the novel's end? Is such redemption possible in this novel's view of human nature?
On learning that she is fatally ill, both Max and Anna are overcome by something he recognizes as embarrassment, an embarrassment that extends even to the inanimate objects in their home. Why should death be embarrassing? Compare the grown Max's shame about death to his childhood feelings about sex, both his sexual fantasies about Connie Grace and their subsequent fulfillment with her daughter.
Significantly, Max's fantasies about Mrs. Grace reach a crescendo during an act of voyeurism. What role does watching play in Max's sense of others? Has observing people been his substitute for engaging with them? How does he feel about other people watching him? And what are we to make of the fact that Max is constantly watching himself—sometimes watching himself watching others, in an infinite regress of surveillance and alienation?
Max is a poor boy drawn to a succession of wealthy women, culminating in his very wealthy wife. Was his attraction to them really a screen for social climbing? In loving Connie and Chloe and Anna, was he betraying his origins? Are there moments in this novel when those origins reassert themselves?
Why might Max have chosen the painter Bonnard as the subject for a book? What episodes from the painter's life parallel his own or illuminate it metaphorically? Note the way the description of the Graces' picnic recalls Manet's Dejeuner sur l'Herbe . What other scenes in the novel allude to works of art or literature, and what is the effect?
The Sea has a triple climax that features two deaths and very nearly a third. In what ways are these deaths linked, and to what extent is Max responsible for them? Do you interpret his drunken night walk on the beach as an attempt at suicide? How does your perception of Max change in light of Miss Vavasour's climactic revelation about the events that precipitated Chloe's drowning?
Just as the critical trauma of Max's life grew out of a misapprehension, so the entire novel is shrouded in a haze of unreliable narrative. Max's memories are at once fanatically detailed and riddled with lapses. He freely admits that the people in his past are half real and half made up. "From earliest days I wanted to be someone else," he tells us [p. 160], and a chance remark of his mother's suggests that even his name may be false [p. 156]. Can we accept any part of his account as true? Are there moments in this novel in which reality asserts itself absolutely? What effect do these ambiguities have on your experience of The Sea ?

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Vintage. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.

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BKMT READING GUIDES

The Sea by John Banville

Introduction

In this luminous new novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child to cope with the recent loss of his wife. It is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, gorgeously written novel — among the finest we have had from this masterful writer.

Editorial Review

Discussion questions.

Suggested by Members

Notes From the Author to the Bookclub

Book club recommendations.

Recommended to book clubs by 1 of 1 members.

Member Reviews

Mr. Banville's magnificently hypnotic poetic-prose transports one to another place, the profoundly palpable atmosphere that are the thoughts and memories of Max Mordem. While ruminating on the death of... (read more)

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The Sea (Man Booker Prize) Hardcover – Deckle Edge, November 1, 2005

Print length 208 pages
Language English
Publisher Knopf
Publication date November 1, 2005
Dimensions 5.75 x 1 x 8.25 inches
ISBN-10 0307263118
ISBN-13 978-0307263117
See all details

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com review.

The fashion in which John Banville draws the reader into this hypnotic and disturbing world is non pareil , and the very complex relationships between his brilliantly delineated cast of characters are orchestrated with a masters skill. As in such books as Shroud and The Book of Evidence , the author eschews the obvious at all times, and the narrative is delivered with subtlety and understatement. The genuine moments of drama, when they do occur, are commensurately more powerful. -- Barry Forshaw

From Publishers Weekly

From the new yorker, from bookmarks magazine.

From Booklist

About the author, from the washington post.

Product details.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf (November 1, 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 208 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0307263118
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307263117
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.75 x 1 x 8.25 inches
#4,914 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
#25,188 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

John banville.

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of thirteen previous novels including The Book of Evidence, which was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize. He has received a literary award from the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Dublin.

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Customers find the writing quality exquisite and enjoyable. They also describe the book as superbly realized and worthwhile to read. However, some find the self-examination dull and overly self-conscious. They say the pacing is not fast. Opinions are mixed on the story, with some finding it full of emotion and timeless, while others say it's not extraordinary. Readers disagree on comprehensibility, with others finding it insightful and plausible, while still others find it confusing. Customers also disagree on character development, with those finding it exquisite and lacking.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the writing quality exquisite, finely wrought, and rich. They also mention the story is fine overall with interesting vocabulary and descriptions.

"...Banville's The Sea is a wonderfully written story that would be story enough without the shocking surprise...." Read more

"...The book has other, smaller pleasures, such as the sensuousness of Banville's prose , his painterly eye for nature, and the precision with which he..." Read more

"...(this being the most recent), John Banville's novel is long on atmosphere and style , but short on story; think of a male Anita Brookner, or a Proust..." Read more

"...But was Max ever in-balance?Banville's language is densely poetic ...." Read more

Customers find the book very worthwhile to read, pleasurable, and hooked. They also describe it as a marvelous work, very deep, and aptly titled.

"...Both the paradox and the triumph of this superbly realized work is that out of Max's posturing, out of his erratic manufacture of memories, emerges..." Read more

"The Sea is a marvel of efficiency ; in less than 200 pages, Banville writes a "memoir" that is spare and yet touching and profound...." Read more

"...Yes, it's a delightful performance , sentence by sentence, yet I never found myself "liking" the book...." Read more

"...yet somehow the beauty of the art overwhelms, bringing forth awe, enthusiasm ...even joy...." Read more

Customers find the book insightful, deeply felt, and gentle.

"...This creates a surprised tingle in the reader , and often enough triggers the delighted recognition that the writer has got the description exactly..." Read more

"...less than 200 pages, Banville writes a "memoir" that is spare and yet touching and profound...." Read more

"...However, the observations that he makes about his life are so touching and so profound that one becomes as involved in his life as with an engaging..." Read more

"...it is a deliciously slow read, insightful, and deeply felt . I read it, and then immediately turned back to the first page to read it again...." Read more

Customers are mixed about the story. Some find it full of emotion, remarkable, and full of surprises. They also say it's timeless, but others say the story itself is not extraordinary, the setting is overdone, and slows the narrative.

"...'s posturing, out of his erratic manufacture of memories, emerges something as poignant , illuminating and half-grasped as truth itself...." Read more

"...And there is no particularly compelling epiphany in this book, in my view...." Read more

"...pages, Banville writes a "memoir" that is spare and yet touching and profound ...." Read more

"Let's see, what have we here? This little book seems to have caused quite a stir , I suppose because of its winning the Man Booker...." Read more

Customers are mixed about the comprehensibility of the book. Some find it insightful, refreshing, and brilliantly unique. They also say it's a sophisticated triumph, true, and plausible. However, others find it confusing, disjointed, and muddled.

"...I loved existing in the mind of this narrator, an authentic and enlightening experience ...." Read more

"...of the book and the subject it tackles, the human condition, remain muddled ...." Read more

"...Banville's style is extraordinary, his insights ring true , and his feeling for place and period is remarkable...." Read more

"...on for a while about how much I liked this book, how true Banville's observations rung , how deep the sense of loss is, how scary it makes one feel..." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the characterization in the book. Some appreciate the exquisite character descriptions, while others say the development is lacking.

"...In some sense that's a positive as the character development was deep and compelling ...." Read more

"...because the subject matter demands it, but because the character development is so lacking and the plot so vacuous, tiresome, and cliched, that his "..." Read more

"The writing is superlative. Descriptions, insights into character , the theme of an elderly person revisiting places important to his childhood to..." Read more

"...As a novel, it is a disappointing little character study ." Read more

Customers find the pacing of the book to be slow and plodding. They also say it's hard to finish and that they couldn't get past the first pages.

"Banville's latest book is an exercise in languish airs, tedious , overwritten not because the subject matter demands it, but because the character..." Read more

"...What I found unusual about it was that it was a bit laborious, a little slow to develop ...." Read more

"...Some people will not like this book. It is not a fast paced story , but it is a story full of emotion. Soo.... go read it." Read more

"...But in Part 2, the novel slows and deepens ; in the process, what we've already read is seen in a new light...." Read more

Customers find the self-examination in the book dull, obnoxious, and self-conscious. They also say the author's style is frustrating and overly self-absorbed.

"...of Kazuo Ishiguro's _The Remains of the Day_, but it is nowhere near as compelling ...." Read more

"...this happens too many times, it begins to seem an affectation, overly self-conscious ...." Read more

"...beyond this narrative, this story of a contemptible, obnoxiously selfish brute ...." Read more

"...Then sums everything up in last chapters. Got frustrated with his style ." Read more

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Book Review: The Sea , by John Banville

Feb. 13th, 2011 at 1:03 PM

In this luminous new novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child to cope with the recent loss of his wife. It is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, gorgeously written novel—among the finest we have had from this masterful writer.

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

I first saw her, Chloe Grace, on the beach. It was a bright, wind-worried day and the Graces were settled in a shallow recess scooped into the dunes by the wind and tides to which their somewhat raffish presence lent a suggestion of the proscenium. They were impressively equipped, with a faded length of striped canvas strung between poles to keep the chill breezes off, and folding chairs and a little folding table, and a straw hamper as big as a small suitcase containing bottles and vacuum flasks and tins of sandwiches and biscuits; they even had real tea cups, with saucers. This was a part of the beach that was tacitly reserved for residents of the Golf Hotel, the lawn of which ended just behind the dunes, and indignant stares were being directed at these heedlessly interloping villa people with their smart beach furniture and their bottles of wine, stares which the Graces, if they noticed them ignored.

It was the end of one of these sad little galas displays that I had my first inkling of a change in Chloe's regard for me, or, should I say, an inkling that she had a regard for me, and that a change was occurring in it. Late in the evening it was, and I had swum the distance -- what, a hundred, two hundred yards? -- between two of the green-slimed concrete groynes that long ago had been thrown out into the sea in a vain attempt to halt the creeping erosion of the beach. I stumbled out of the waves to find that Chloe had waited for me, on the shore, all the time that I was in the water. She stood huddled in a towel, shivering in spasms; her lips were lavender. "There's no need to show off, you know," she said crossly. Before I could reply -- and what would I have said, anyway, since she was right, I had been showing off -- Myles came leaping down from the dunes above us on wheeling legs and sprayed us both with sand and at once I had an image, perfectly clear and strangely stirring, of Chloe as I had first seen her that day when she jumped from the edge of that other dune into the midst of my life.

Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things -- new experiences, new emotions -- and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvelously finished pavilion of the self. And incredulity, that too was a large part of being happy. I mean that euphoric inability to believe one's simple luck. There I was, suddenly, with a girl in my arms, figuratively, at least, doing the things that grown-ups did, holding her hand, and kissing her in the dark, and, when the picture had ended, standing aside, clearing my throat in grave politeness, to allow her to pass ahead of me under the heavy curtain and through the doorway out into the rain-washed sunlight of the summer evening.

Yes, I was falling in love with Chloe -- had fallen, the thing was done already. I had that sense of anxious euphoria, of happy, helpless toppling, which one who knows he will have to do the loving always feels, at the precipitous outset. For even at such a tender age I knew that there is always a lover and a loved, and knew which one, in this case, I would be. Those weeks with Chloe were for me a series of more or less enraptured humiliations.

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The Sea by John Banville
John Banville deserves his Booker Prize." —Los Angeles Times Book Review. Banville has a reputation as a brilliant stylist—people like to use the word 'Nabokovian' in reference to his precisely worded books. His fourteenth novel, The Sea, has so many beautifully constructed sentences that every few pages something cries out to be ...
Review: The Sea
Banville explores themes of love and grief, relationships and separation and the seascape is beautifully depicted, as is the intensity of the lonely little boy of Max's youth. Wonderfully written, with a well paced plot and a number of twists and turns, while The Sea isn't the most uplifting book I've read, it certainly leaves a lasting ...
The Sea by John Banville: Summary and reviews
Winner of the 2005 Booker Prize. A luminous novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory. The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wife's death, has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child—a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his life without her.
1001 Book Review: The Sea by John Banville
The Sea was one of those books. The Sea is a seemingly simple, but in essence rather complicated novel about loss, grief, memory, and regret. The protagonist is an aging man who, after losing his wife to cancer, rents a room at a boardinghouse that played a significant role in his childhood. Banville takes his time in letting the reader ...
The Sea by John Banville
"The past beats inside me like a second heart."From the very first page, it's evident that Banville's writing is in a league of its own. His prose is akin to poetry, rich with metaphors, lyrical descriptions, and a meticulous attention to detail. Banville's ability to capture the nuances of human emotion and introspection is truly remarkable, as he looks deep into the mind of the protagonist ...
The Sea (novel)
The Sea is a 2005 novel by John Banville. His fourteenth novel, it won the 2005 Booker Prize. [1] ... On Bookmarks Magazine Jan/Feb 2006 issue, a magazine that aggregates critic reviews of books, the book received a (4.5 out of 5) based on critic reviews with the critical summary saying, ...
Review of The Sea by John Banville
A luminous novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory. 2005 Booker Prize Winner. Novel. From the book jacket: The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wife's death, has gone back to the seaside town in Ireland where he spent his summer holidays as a child—a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his life without her.
'The Sea'
By John Banville. Nov. 27, 2005. Someone has just walked over my grave. Someone. The name of the house is the Cedars, as of old. A bristling clump of those trees, monkey-brown with a tarry reek ...
The Sea
by John Banville It is no easy thing to pinpoint the precise moment when a life changes, when the different things a man might do are rendered impossible. In THE SEA, winner of the 2005 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, narrator Max Morden returns to the seaside spot where he spent his holidays as a boy.
All Book Marks reviews for The Sea by John Banville
USA Today. The novel is a mystery, and Banville solves it bit by bit …. The Sea is eerily accurate in describing how children on the cusp of adolescence perceive the world and the adults who rule it. Banville doesn't offer us the happy Victorian fantasy that childhood is a realm of innocence and joy.
The Sea
The Sea. BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An "extraordinary meditation on mortality, grief, death, childhood and memory" (USA Today) about a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside to grieve the loss of his wife. In this luminous novel, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who has gone ...
The Sea by John Banville
The Sea. John Banville. ... The New York Times Book Review) now gives us a luminous novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory. The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wife's death, has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child—a retreat from the grief ...
Drowning Man
Drowning Man. THE SEA. By John Banville. 195 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $23. John Banville's new novel seems at first as simple and straightforward as its title, and as familiar: one of those wispy ...
The Sea by John Banville
In a story, events are presaged, somehow, in retrospect. I suppose Banville, who as his alter ego is a writer of thrillers and mysteries, has a fondness for that genre's plot line. For me, The Sea is at the very heart of the genre of literary fiction, which has very little use for such plots. The real power of the book, I feel lies elsewhere.
The Sea by John Banville #bookreview : BookerTalk
June 19, 2013 BookerTalk. John Banville was the surprise winner of the Booker Prize in 2005 with his lyrical novel The Sea. Literary pundits had put their money on Julian Barnes's Arthur and George walking away with the prize or a repeat Booker success for Kazuo Ishiguro and Never Let Me Go. No-one was more surprised than the Banville at his ...
The Sea: Banville, John: 9781400097029: Amazon.com: Books
The Sea. Paperback - August 15, 2006. by John Banville (Author) 4.0 2,613 ratings. See all formats and editions. BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An "extraordinary meditation on mortality, grief, death, childhood and memory" (USA Today) about a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside to grieve the loss of his ...
The Sea
The Sea, feels -- disappointingly from such a gifted and interesting writer -- tired and retried, and other near-anagrams indicating second-handedness." - Robert MacFarlane, Times Literary Supplement "For readers who take books and literature seriously, The Sea is a must-have. One periodically rereads a sentence just to marvel at its beauty ...
The Sea by John Banville Summary, Themes, and Characters
The novel "The Sea" receives two awards: Booker Prize award, Irish Book Award Novel of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Irish Book Award, author of the year. The Sea by John Banville Summary. The story of the novel "The Sea" is about an Irishman named Max Morden, a sixty years old man.
The Sea by John Banville: 9781400097029
About The Sea. The author of The Untouchable ("contemporary fiction gets no better than this"—Patrick McGrath, The New York Times Book Review) now gives us a luminous novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory.The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wife's death, has gone back to the ...
Reading guide for The Sea by John Banville
Reader's Guide. The Sea is made up of three temporal layers: the distant past of Max's childhood, the recent past of his wife's illness and death, and the present of his return to Ballyless. Instead of keeping these layers distinctly separated, Banville segues among them or splices them together, sometimes within a single sentence.
The Sea by John Banville Reading Guide-Book Club ...
Editorial Review Incandescent prose. Beautifully textured characterisation. Transparent narratives. The adjectives to describe the writing of John Banville are all affirmative, and The Sea is a ringing affirmation of all his best qualities. His publishers are claiming that this novel by the Booker-shortlisted author is his finest yet, and while that claim may have an element of hyperbole ...
The Sea (Man Booker Prize): Banville, John: 9780307263117: Amazon.com
The Sea (Man Booker Prize) Hardcover - Deckle Edge, November 1, 2005. The author of The Untouchable ("contemporary fiction gets no better than this"—Patrick McGrath, The New York Times Book Review) now gives us a luminous novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory. The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman ...
Book Review: The Sea, by John Banville: inverarity
One-line summary: A middle-aged Irishman returns to the scene of his childhood to remember the only important thing that ever happened in his life and get drunk. Knopf, 2005, 195 pages In this luminous new novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his ...

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