With Banville, The Sea beckons
A man grieves the death of his wife and the emptiness of his life. It doesn’t sound a promising premise for a novel, but the first sentences make clear that you want to pay attention:
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 (p. 3).
If you don’t read the blurb on the back cover, you might go perhaps a hundred pages or so before the man has a name. This first-person narrator doesn’t need to tell himself his name. He’s not thinking, writing, feeling for your benefit. Nor does he need to tell you where he is in his story. He knows whether it’s now, a year ago, or thirty years ago. You have to remember all the things that aren’t clear, because you’re living inside his collection of memories, some of them faulty, but even if so, they are his, now, and all the broken pasts are present in the moment of his reflection – and your reading.
The book is John Banville’s The Sea, the sea that seems eternal yet ever changing; it ebbs and rises and sweeps you in and out and back again. It won the Booker Prize in 2005 against very stiff competition. It’s not an easy book to read but worth the effort, even if the effort involves digging into that dictionary you must keep close to hand: Mewled. Pharmacopoeia. Finical. Flocculent. Kibble. Knobkerrie. Plangent. Anabasis.
Some phrases come with sounds pregnant with meaning – the “chicken-pale flesh in the declivities of my shoulders” (p. 57) – but meaning what?
These are not frequent occurrences. If they were you would not keep reading. They slow you down. Give you time to reflect, to let the words roll around somewhere near your brain until they snake their way down to your stomach and the ache sets in. Some sentences just start there:
I was there and not there, myself and revenant, immured in the moment and yet hovering somehow on the point of departure. Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it (p. 98).
As you move, slowly, through the book, not wanting to abandon it, even as a scene shifts through decades without so much as a new paragraph, you sense that something is stirring beneath these devices of languages on the page. And then you come to one passage …
I was nervous of this moment, the moment when I would have to take on the house, to put it on, as it were, like something I had worn in another prelapsarian life, a once fashionable hat, say, an outmoded pair of shoes, or a wedding suit smelling of mothballs and no longer fitting around the waist and too tight under the arm but bulging with memories in every pocket (pp. 155-156).
… that reminds you of your closet, in your house, and it convinces you that the ending will be succulently sad. And you know, now that you have found a path through the wood of words to how this narrator thinks and feels, that getting there will be even more rewarding than it was to get this far.
John Banville’s name keeps coming up in the sorts of reviews and literary discussions I regularly read. A year or so ago, I read one of his detective novels and liked it enough the turn the pages, reasonably quickly, to its satisfying end. But that’s not why I keep seeing his name. The pieces I’ve read about him all seem to contain the word “philosophy” somewhere.
A few months back, a friend mentioned that he knows the philosopher John Gray. I bought a collection of Gray’s essays, Gray’s Anatomy, and there – writing the introduction – was John Banville. I decided to spend a bit of the summer with him and The Sea. It certainly isn’t a page-turner, unless you count the pages of the dictionary. I’m glad, though, that I kept turning the pages, slowly, and turning over the ideas and gut-aches, all the way to the end. This may not be philosophy in fiction – What is the good life? What good is life? – but it makes me feel I have been somewhere nearby.
I, too, found The Sea difficult, even off-putting at first. But got through it and re-read it and enjoyed it more the second time through. It may be that in his serious writing he is something of a "writer's writer," perhaps in the vein of William Maxwell or Larry Woiwode.