The Sea, by John Banville

It was difficult to decide what to read after the sweeping majesty and horror of Blood Meridian: – but I decided to pick up The Sea, by the great John Banville. It won the Booker, causing much brou-haha in literary circles (some of his comments in re: the Booker are almost laugh-out-loud funny) – and of course I just finished Christine Falls – the noir crime novel by John Banville (writing under the name Benjamin Black – post about that here). I have been hearing about Banville for years, since he is one of my father’s favorite writers – but I am (as usual) late to the party. I own all of his books, but they have been sitting on the shelves forever. And now I am ready. I’m in a fiction mode these days – it’s been a couple of years since my interest lay in that direction … and it’s been a lot of fun. I’m on a roll now. I’ve only just begun The Sea, and there have been moments, already, where I almost put it down. It’s hitting too close to the bone. I think: Do I really want to go there right now? I think maybe I should pick up the next book in the Master & Commander series – books which transport and elevate and make me think … but certainly don’t dive right into the heart of what I am experiencing at this moment in time. But I am going to stick with it. The Sea is the story of Max Morden, a 50-something man whose wife has just died. In the year following her death, he decides to move back to a town where he used to go on holiday, when he was a little boy. And something obviously happened way back then, in his childhood, that was definitive. Something having to do with the Grace family, who also were there on summer vacation – mother father, kids … I am not sure yet what happened but I have a feeling it wasn’t good. So Max, dealing with the loneliness in the wake of becoming a widow, is now regressing, reverting … although Banville makes the point that Max has always had those tendencies … he has always looked for comfort, warmth, coziness … and so going back to childhood is a natural escape – even if horrible things happened back there.

It’s interesting. Blood Meridian made such an impact (post about it here, here and here). It made an enormous crater in my brain, and the language of that book still buzzes through me, in its awful bloody omniscence, and mythic enormity.

But here, in The Sea, we are in more traditional territory. Wonderfully written, acute, sensitive, perceptive – he’s SUCH a good writer … but I have had to adjust to the fact that I am now in the world of minutia, of objects, of what things smell like, look like, sensory moments that transport you back … the typical business of writers. Now a bad writer will make such moments (seeing something that reminds you of something else) insufferable. Banville is a master. He is nothing less than absolutely specific. And he is skirting on the edges of some big stuff here: mortality, death, loss … but also, you can feel that the book will also be about loss of innocence. Something was lost, back there in his childhood … and the 50 something years in between have been just him marking time. Now that’s an eerie thought, one that has kept me up at night in my white-knuckle moments. But I have had to let Blood Meridian go in order to get into this book. It makes me realize, again, just how dominant Cormac McCarthy really is, just how much he has taken over the landscape. Extraordinary.

Max has a daughter, Claire. There is something about how Banville writes about her that really touches me. Also, in very few words, he sketches an entire life … seen through the eyes of her father, of course (the book is first-person). I “get” Claire. Banville is so so good in this arena. Listen:

Claire, my daughter, has written to ask how I am faring. Not well, I regret to say, bright Clarinda, not well at all. She does not telephone because I have warned her I will take no calls, even from her. Not that there are any calls, since I told no one save her where I was going. What age is she now, twenty-something, I am not sure. She is very bright, quite the blue-stocking. Not beautiful, however, I admitted that to myself long ago. I cannot pretend this is not a disappointment, for I had hoped that she would be another Anna. She is too tall and stark, her rusty hair is coarse and untameable and stands out around her freckled face in an unbecoming manner, and when she smiles she shows her upper gums, glistening and whitely pink. With those spindly legs and big bum, that hair, the long neck especially – that is something at least she has of her mother – she always makes me think, shamefacedly, of Tenniel’s drawing of Alice when she has taken a nibble from the magic mushroom. Yet she is brave and makes the best of herself and of the world. She has the rueful, grimly humorous, clomping way to her that is common to so many ungainly girls. If she were to arrive here now she would come sweeping in and plump herself down on my sofa and thrust her clasped hands so far down between her knees the knuckles would almost touch the floor, and purse her lips and inflate her cheeks and say Poh! and launch into a litany of the comic mishaps she has suffered since last we saw each other. Dear Claire, my sweet girl.

That is heartbreakingly good. It’s difficult, to hear a father talk about his daughter like that, but Banville is nothing if not unafraid to say difficult things.

And then of course there is the opening paragraph of the book, which is a stunner:

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.

Sometimes has just walked over my grave. Someone.