The Sea (Man Booker Prize)

This is an extraordinary piece of literature..at the level of a Steinbeck. The story itself is very moving and touches the core of the deepest of human emotions: Love and Loss. Banville's literary style is the richest of any of the other modern authors I have read.

The book hinted at character development to come but, with no beautiful use of language and an absence of any gripping narration, I gave up after 40 pages. I bought this on the strength of its winning the booker prize but it seems that even prize committees can make mistakes.

Sadly, I lost interest a quarter of the way through, skimmed around a bit more and decided that, to me, the author's views on human nature were too dim for me. So much self-involvement. I never finished it.

I read The Sea on the recommendation of an editor for whom I have enormous respect. I anticipated it would be dark and fatalistic. I did not expect it to be pretentious but pretentious to the point of distraction is what I encountered. For the sake of this critique I will share I have an excellent vocabulary. I admire Nabokov for his mastery of a second language. With Manville I copied scores of words I had never before seen, could not decipher within their context. "Timorous" is a word I know but there was absolutely no reason the small animal be rigorous rather than just plain nervous except to display a fifty cent word where an ordinary one would have been a better, more fluid choice for a writer sensitive to his readers. Read The Sea if you will but have a copy of The Thesaurus and Dictionary for the Extraordinary Literate at your fingertips as you slog through page after page seeking coherence and continuity.

After a string of mesmerizing works, Banville has produced something quotidian, conventional and unsatisfying. The character undergoes no profound crisis; the edgy, sinister qualities in many of the previous books is on vacation, and the brilliant style turns a little fuzzy. After the great shout of "Shroud," this book reads like a murmur by someone thinking about something else. It magnifies the wandering, reflective approach of Eclipse like a self-parody - hopefully this is not a sign of things to come. I was disappointed - but it still reads better than 99.9 percent of the drek out there. I'm a great proselytizer of Banville's, but I would not recommend this one.

Banville is a master of the English language. Each page of "The Sea" contains magnificent passages, poetic in their cadence and brilliant in their insights. Banville displayed superb skills in shifting the narrator's thoughts to different points in time.

That alone makes the book a must read. It is a shame that Banville felt compelled to wrap up the story line with an explanation for everything. I didn't think the sudden explanation fit with the information the narrator had previously provided the reader. It somehow diminished the satisfaction of sitting at the foot of the narrator. This was the only reason I didn't give "The Sea" five stars.

I eagerly awaited the arrival of this book, but was sorely disappointed. Granted, the language was challenging at times (I kept a dictionary close by), but I just couldn't empathize with the main character, Max. The story dragged on. I couldn't wait to finish it (I swore I would). What a waste of time. I'll be giving this book away at the next yard sale.

My book group selected this and, while we haven't yet discussed it, I did talk to two of our group and we found this book a very painful read. I have to admit that I stopped half way through when I talked to another reader who told me it never gets better. I really expected to like it. I was immediately grateful to have the Kindle edition because I had to look up words in the dictionary about every other page! How annoying. There wasn't one likeable person in the story, so I couldn't get emotionally connected to any of them. Then when I found out about the tragedy I realized the book was not going to have any redeeming qualities. I quit 1/2 way through.

Max Morden has returned to a coastal villa that once was the summer residence of childhood playmates Chloe Grace and her mute twin brother Myles. The Grace family appealed to Max not only because they were more affluent than his own family but also because young Max was initially attracted to Mrs. Grace. This infatuation eventually dwindled as his attraction to Chloe grew. The narrative goes back and forth in time, and in the present Max is still reeling from the death of his wife, Anna. Several important revelations appear late in the novel, including the disclosure of a character’s identity, which I had already figured out. The big question all along is what happened to Chloe and Myles. We do find out the answer to that question, sort of. However, there are lots of other dangling questions, including the subject of an argument between two women at dinner. This omission seems like a copout to me. The author also teases us with some snippets of another conversation that are intended to mislead us, as well as the other characters who overhear the conversation. I found this to be a little cheesy as well. He could have at least made the snippets a little more ambiguous. After finishing the novel, I reread this section, and I’m even more baffled than ever, wondering if the snippets of conversation are not indicative of the rest of the conversation or if one of the participants in the conversation is not being truthful. Myles’s inability to speak is never explained, either. Perhaps the storyline just demanded his silence. This novel beat out Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Julian Barnes’s Arthur and George for the 2005 Booker Prize, but I’m not sure why. Perhaps the judges were swayed by the author’s prodigious vocabulary. I finally dug out my ancient paperback dictionary, but many of the unfamiliar words were not there. The upside is that now I understand the difference between the verbs “blanch” and “blench”—more or less.

I don't understand why people are so indignant about Banville's using unusual words. What could possibly be wrong in having to look up the occasional word, and maybe even learning something by doing so? There are other points, too. Maybe Banville wanted to ensure that the reader is going slowly and thoughtfully, not just racing through. More important, since the novel is written in the first person, we could think about why the narrator uses this vocabulary. What does it tell us about him? How do the unusual, but very precise, words fit into the narrator's perception of the world around him, the mix of past and present in his mind, the mix of his very thinking? I read very little modern fiction, but I loved reading this book, much more than I expected I would. I hope other readers will plunge right in and not be put off by having to exert themselves from time to time.

I was disappointed in this work. By halfway through I had no idea where we were headed or even where we'd really come from; an odd sense of something sinister about to happen, which is usually a good signpost in a novel, but here I felt it would be odd or kitchy to provide some plot. Sure enough, illogical - in the sense of not seeming part of character or personality - and unpresaged events follow apiece. I struggled to finish the book, but thankfully it is lightly written, undecorated by any deeper levels of plot or meaning I could detect (maybe that's me, not the writer), so I was able to complete the reading.

It won a Man Booker Prize, something which flagged for me before I began that I would be unlikely to enjoy. However, I always try to read with an open mind. But I was untroubled to maintain my lack of respect for this prestigious book award. It is a story teller's, a yarn spinners, prize. Advice to writers: if you are into serious intellectual literature, literature readers have to work at, to puzzle over, to reach for, do not bother entering for an MBP. You'll get nowhere.

It was my first Banville text, so I was keen to encounter, as I have a long acquaintance with Irish writing. What flummoxed me was that nowhere could I find any slightest hint that we were in Ireland or anywhere else. No Irish brogue or accent or idiom, no local descriptions, save for seascapes that could have been Tasmania or Trinidad. No ironic commentaries out of character mouths about the country, the history, the politics. The protagonist drinks brandy, not Guinness or Jameson's - am I too attracted to stereotypes? No, for Bloom was Jewish; never forget that.

My one concession: Banville writes very pretty sentences, and of that I am envious. But when I read literature aspiring to greatness, I want more than pretty writing. 2 stars.

John Banville, The Sea

The Daily Telegraph found Banville's 2005 Booker-winning novel his best so far. This may well be the case, for I had to abandon his Doctor Copernicus when Nicolas and his clownish brother felt obliged to quit Bologna to see the Pope's celebrations, where `the Lord of Darkness himself had come forth to be acclaimed by the delirious mob.' This was in the jubilee year of 1500. But then, I have always had trouble with historical novels - the dates, the whole battery of important names to keep in mind, the constant need to adjust to two timescales. Maybe it's just my problem, as they say, or lately I've just had too much Hilary Mantel. I never quite manage to lose myself, never manage to stop myself from asking why bother with all this fustian. I prefer history undiluted.

So The Sea was a welcome relief and a book well worth re-reading. Indeed, I knew I'd been impressed five years ago on first reading, but that apart couldn't remember much about the novel. But this time I found Max Morden's nostalgic exploration of his past brought on by a recent bereavement even more seductive and haunting. I believed his every word and needed to accompany him on this necessary journey into the interior to assuage his present grief. As with all good novels it is the understated and not stated that intrigues, the seemingly irrelevant diversions that add ultimately the touch of conviction. Thus Max recalls his boyhood curiosity about birds' eggs, his `simple passion to know something of the secrets of the other, alien lives.' One day he visits the nest to find it robbed, one egg smashed: `All that remained of it was a smear of mingled yoke and glair and a few fragments of shell, each with its stippling of tiny, dark-brown spots.' The narrator takes time to speculate on the gorse and `the buttery perfume of its blossoms,' before returning to `those brown speckles' of the egg, `the emblem of something final, precious and irretrievable.' All of which would be fine and consoling were it not for the final shock of his wife `leaning sideways from the hospital bed, vomiting on the floor, her burning brow pressed into my palm, full and frail as an ostrich egg.' By this time both Max and the reader have forgotten all about his bereavement. The sudden shock of recognition is poignantly true to life.

Similar hints that tease the reader into Max's world are provided throughout. The book bristles with unanswered questions. Why is Max still obsessed by the Grace family, all now passed into the land of lost desires, in love with the mother rather than his coevals, Chloe and Myles? What is the significance of his devotion to the work of Bonnard, about whom he is struggling to write? And what about Cedars, the old house, lingered over, pondered on, still standing and still run by the same enigmatic Miss Vavasour, whose mission now seems to be dedicating herself to the Colonel, who may well be an imposter anyway? What happened to Chloe in the end, a sparklingly independent lass who has some affinities with Dickens's proud Estella? Max's revelations are slow and stumbling, as he moves between the crowded past and the empty present. And behind it all is the ever-present allure of the sea.

This is a fine novel, a worthy award-winner, one that stands head and shoulders above so many other flavour of the season best-sellers. As The Times reviewer believes `it will still be read and admired in seventy-five years.' Or longer, much longer.

I read only two John Banville (JB) novels before this one. I loved his Booker Prize winner "The Sea" and his earlier "The Untouchable" about Anthony Blunt, the UK's infamous and long-undetected `Fifth Man' in a famous Cold War scandal, who later became Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. Both novels were in effect, made-up musings by JB's main characters. This JB novel, first published in 1989, bears all the hallmarks of these later books.

Soon after digging into this novel, readers will have serious doubts about Freddie Montgomery, the main subject's character and integrity. Will find him self-centered and unable to fathom the impression he makes on others when they first see or meet him (tall and overweight, speaking upper-class English). As the book progresses, he becomes rather wild-eyed, unkempt and smelly. The book constantly frames (or interrupts) scenes of the hero's weird travails with descriptions of the weather, the clouds, the sea, the landscape, which was a feature of "The Sea", too.

This novel is supposedly written in prison, in the I form as a long-winded plea for mercy from judges and jury in mind, by a killer to justify his crime, his past, what he went through just before and after the fatal event. And about how long it took the police to find him (despite all the clues, sightings, weird incidents he created) during a short stay, or should one say, a spree of bad form between Ibiza, Spain and Ireland?
There is much more to this book, with many highly dramatic side-events for readers to discover. And strange as it may seem, they are often described in a hilariously funny way. Thoroughly entertaining, superbly written and instantly forgettable, because it has no morale or ulterior message. Unless I'm badly wrong. Entertaining and recommended.

This is a novel about loss and memories, but throughout it seems strangely detached, as though the narrator is attempting to feel the appropriate emotions but his lifetime habits of deception prevent him from honestly confronting his tragedies. He seems to be equated with the vast indifference of the sea. At least that is my interpretation, but the meaning here is very nebulous, and alternate interpretations would probably be just as valid.

The plot finds the narrator returning, following the death of his wife, to a seaside town where he spent summers as a child. He remembers most his interaction with the Grace family and the role they played in his first experiences of love and death. Interspersed with these are his memories of his wife's year-long illness and death.

The writing is oh-so-elegant and beautiful that that often seems to be the whole purpose of the novel--to display the author's prodigious talent. The book is a delight to read, but in the end I felt cheated somehow. The ending is somewhat predictable and more than a little sensationalistic.

This book won Britain's Man Booker Prize in 2005. I would recommend it with reservations.

John Banville is one of the best prose stylists working in the English language today. His writing has an effortless, gliding nature and he can turn a phrase like no other. He can at one point deploy a prodigious vocabulary without seeming overwrought:

'There is a name De'Ath, with that fancy medial capital and apotropaic apostrophe which fool no one.'

... and at another express the complexity of disorientation in the simplest phrase:

'Everything seemed to be something else.'

Also: Banville is not an unfeeling writer. He speaks of 'the soundless detonation that love is supposed to set off in even a boy's unsusceptible breast'. Plus he can be quite witty. On an overweight character, he writes: 'When she tottered to her feet the wicker chair cried out in excruciated relief.' And despite some languorously described unhappiness in this book, he has not yet sunk into the woe-is-me marsh that has become the final resting-place of the unbearable J.M. Coetzee.

And yet, and yet. I bought this book because of the promise of a story leading to a worthwhile revelation at the climax. But that's not quite what I got. The blurb on the back of the book claims that the narrator, Max Morden, is 'both escaping a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma', and that the 'distant trauma' which took place in his childhood 'would haunt him for the rest of his years and shape everything that was to follow'. Since you might buy the book based on the promise of this claim (I know I did), I think I should explain - without in any way spoiling the story - why that promise goes unfulfilled.

There are two narrative threads. The first - which takes place in the present - involves the recent passing of the protagonist's wife from a terminal illness. The second involves something traumatic but mysterious that happened at the end of a Summer in the protagonist's boyhood, when a family with two children of about his age came to stay at his seaside village.

Thus both narrative threads involve making the reader wait around while nothing in particular happens. The first thread does not have much gas in it because a plot about a terminal illness - of all plots - is one whose ending is definitively foreordained. What possible surprises can there be? But the other plot-line, we are assured, does hold out the promise of a surprising, indeed 'haunting' conclusion.

Actually that's not quite what happens. The incident which brings closure to this plotline would be unusual were it to happen in real life, but when it happens in a well-written novel, it just seems self-consciously artistic. (It does involve a very Keatsian conceit, and I also thought that therein I detected echoes of Mann's 'Death in Venice'.) The worst defect is that there is nothing in the narrative which foreshadows the event itself. It comes so out of the blue that it seems pasted on, as though the author only decided on it at the last minute, and any of his available alternatives could equally have served the purpose. One is left thinking: 'That's it?'

One other point on Banville's characterisation. The protagonist of 'The Sea' is an art historian. The protagonist of 'Shroud' is an art dealer. The protagonist of 'The Untouchable' is an art museum curator. The protagonist of 'The Book of Evidence' is an art thief. The protagonist of 'Athena' is an art historian. That's essentially the same character in five novels. Not a good sign.

'The Sea' is a truly great novel: it's hard to think of anything recently released which could match the vividness of the writing. But the reader does need to be aware that it is somewhat plotless: it embodies not so much a story as a kind of leisurely stroll around a garden of picturesque prose.

The minds of people approaching the age of 60 are supposed to be invaded and captured by a first wave of childhood memories. It prompts self-centered Max Morden (MM), age unknown, to write this quite frank and transparent autobiography. So frank that after reading it, two dozen adjectives are insufficient to fully describe MM's own character, whose book is situated on the Irish coast with a view of the sea. Readers might want to make a tally of negative adjectives on MM, and compare them in book reviewing gatherings.

MM is an elderly writer on French painters (a dilettante, second-rater in his own understated judgment), still quite tall, but in mental and physical decline. After the death of his wife Anna he has returned to where all his early life-stirring events and drama began, to The Cedars, the rented house the far wealthier Clare family occupied many decades ago. As a tall 11-year old he befriended the smaller, strange twins Myles and Chloe, fell in love with their mother but only weeks later became enchanted with Chloe. Now The Cedars has become a rundown lodging house with an eccentric landlady and only one other occupant of its six rooms for rent, a retired Colonel with set habits. The atmosphere!

From a young age MM has been an acute watcher and every page provides evidence. In later life, when early memories crop up unaided, MM often links incoming thoughts and images to paintings he has studied and adores, Bonnard most of all (and de la Tour and Gericault, as MM would like me to add to this review). Late in the autobiography MM admits he has no personality, never had one. It may be the key admission in this brilliantly-paced, tragic and often hilariously-funny account of the life of a person unable to relate to anyone.

John Banville won the 2005 Man Booker Prize with this masterpiece, which is perfectly paced, with surprises hidden throughout the book right until the final pages. On every page the reader is challenged to pick up a dictionary to acknowledge MM's Irish superior way with words. An absolutely great, rich and annually re-readable novel. And the gap of five or more decades between MM's youthful dreaming and his elderly self are for the reader to fabulate about.

Thank you, John Banville, for your most exquisite and exquisitely slow book, "The Sea" (which I just found out won the Booker in 2005, and is his 18th novel (!)). Because of an over zealous traveling and social schedule, it took me more than 2 months to finish TS, but I'm glad because it meant I got to live with some of the most beautiful language I've ever read (I'm taking the liberty of inserting it liberally (in quotes) in this review). The first line alone felled me: "They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide."

"The Sea" recounts the wry, sharp, lush memories of Max, a middle aged Irishman, recently widowed, who returns to his childhood holiday home to escape and grieve. "The past beats inside me like a second heart."

In the vivid "salt sharpened light" and "the air like scratched glass" that imbues the book, Max remembers his summer loves, the cruel and clever Chloe and her spacy sexpot mother, Mrs. Grace, and his last love, the beautiful Anna. In between, a host of other characters are described with Dickensian/Nabakovian genius. A phrase as small as "a silky, sulky gracefulness" is as perfect as one of his longer descriptions:

"She wore a sack-coloured tweed dress tightly belted in the middle, which made her look as if she had been pumped up to bursting at bosom and hips, and her short stout cork-coloured legs were stuck out in front of her like two gigantic bungs protruding from her nether regions. A tiny sweet face, delicate of feature and pinkly aglow, is set in the big pale pudding of her head, the fossil remains, marvellously preserved, of the girl that she once was, long ago."

Does it matter that Bun (her of the tweed dress) is a side character who appears only once and with no lingering pre or foreshadowing? Not when the description itself is this marvellous.

I am also in awe of Mr. Banville's vocabulary. Some of it is archaic usage, but most is not. I cannot believe how many words I had to look up (thank you, iPod Touch, for your amazing touch-the-word-for-its-definition feature). Here are a few: revenant, leporine, strangury, losel, louring, proscenium, flocculent, womby, minatory, gleet, bosky, scurf, ziggurat, cicatrice, ichor, maenad, rufous, craquelured, canthus, groynes, cinereal, horrent, anaglypta, glair, cretonne, hugger-mugger, costive, boreens, catafalque, jeroboam, bombazine, cruets, scumbling, jack tar, soughing, knobkerrie, assegais, blench, anabasis, and vulgate. Now would that I remember even a fraction of those that I looked up.

Mr. Banville's precise and lyrical descriptions extend well beyond his characterisations. After all, "what are living beings, compared to the enduring intensity of mere things?" This wondering adjoins his description of a train just arrived:

"And the steam engine, of course, that had come to a clanking stop over in the station, and stood now seething and gasping and squirting jets of scalding water from its fascinatingly intricate underparts as it waited impatiently to be off again."

And this dazzler: "A chintz-covered sofa sprawls as if aghast, its two arms flung wide and cushions sagging."

Sometimes, he cannot even let his protagonist keep churning out these gems without comment: "In the porch, a pot of geraniums flourished aloft their last burning blossoms of the season. Honestly, this world."

Honestly indeed. There's everything else and nothing else to the story. It's about the human condition, and also about how none of it matters. If you like your fiction loosely narrative and densely poetic, this is your book. Meanwhile, I'll have to download more Banville rightquick. Luckily there's at least 17 more.

Booker Prize-winning author John Banville presents a sensitive and remarkably complete character study of Max Morden, an art critic/writer from Ireland whose wife has just died of a lingering illness. Seeking solace, Max has checked into the Cedars, a now-dilapidated guest house in the seaside village of Ballyless, where he and his family spent their summers when he was a child. There he spent hours in the company of Chloe and Myles Grace, his constant companions. Images of foreboding suggest that some tragedy occurred while he was there, though the reader discovers only gradually what it might have been. While at the Cedars, he contemplates the nature of life, love, and death, and our imperfect memories of these momentous events.

As Max probes his recollections, he reveals his most intimate feelings, constantly questioning the accuracy of his memory, and juxtaposing his childhood memories with his recent memories of his wife Anna's "inappropriate" illness and her futile treatments. Through flashbacks, he also introduces us to his earlier life with Anna and his fervent hopes that through her he could become someone more interesting. "I was always a distinct no-one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone," he says, confessing that he saw her as "the fairground mirror in which all my distortions would be made straight."

More a meditation than a novel with a strong plot, The Sea brings Max to life (as limited as his life is), recreating his seemingly simple, yet often profound, thoughts in language which will startle the reader into recognition of their universality. To some extent an everyman, Max speaks to the reader in uniquely intimate ways. In breathtaking language, filled with emotional connotations, he captures nature in perfect images, often revealing life as a series of paintings--"a Tiepolo sky," a hair-washing scene reminiscent of Duccio and Picasso. He objectifies his thoughts about memory through Pierre Bonnard's many portraits of "Nude in the Bath," paintings of Bonnard's wife in which she remains a young girl, even when she is seventy years old. Images of the bath and the sea pervade the novel--cleansing, combined with the ebb and flow of life.

Lovers of plot-based novels with snappy dialogue may find that the lack of external action and the novel's focus on the interior battles of an ordinary man of about sixty fail to engage their interest. Other readers, who may have faced the deaths of family or friends and recognized the limitations of memory, however, may see in Max a kindred spirit to whom they respond with empathy. I have rarely read such a short book so slowly--or reread with pleasure so many passages of extraordinary beauty and import--and I felt a connection with Max that I have never felt before in any of Banville's previous novels. I loved this novel. n Mary Whipple

Grieving for his dead wife, Anna, the recently widowed - widowered? - art critic Max Mordern returns to the seaside village where he passed the summers of his childhood. He doesn't move into the old family chalet, but rather into a room of the large holiday house once occupied by the wealthy family of his childhood friend, Chloe Grace. There he's supposed to be writing about the artist Bonnard, but instead - or perhaps as well - pens a meditation on the past, exploring the nature of memory and loss... Sounds depressing, but this novel actually made me laugh out loud several times. Banville virgins coming to this direct from the Man Booker winners list might find the absence of a compelling plot off-putting, not to mention the knowingly unreliable narration and the lurking sense that the reader is being elaborately toyed with - especially in the final pages where melodramatic revelations are self-consciously, almost wryly, deployed. It isn't you. It's Banville. As David Mehegan reported recently in the Sydney Sun Herald, most of Banville's novels are like this: relatively thin in terms of plot, scene and dialogue, and virtually all of them are told in the first person by a more or less dislikeable male narrator in an overwrought, lyrical style. His tormented men see everything, and what they see and think unrolls in dazzling verbal pyrotechnics, thick with arcane words and startling metaphors (you'd best keep a dictionary handy). Mehegan quotes other critics as saying that Banville does stretch the reader at times, looking for exactitude and precision, always searching for the mot juste. At its most intense, there is a kind of preciousness in his work. When it's most liberating it reveals the resources of the language and how much is going on in things that look like still life: the light coming in the window, someone sitting in a chair. For some readers, it's not the style that's a problem but the want of traditional novelistic elements. Banville's response to this complaint: "I'm not really interested in fiction. I don't regard the novel as a very interesting art form." Asked if that means that his books aren't novels or aren't interesting, he says, "If I had the choice of what kind of artist I would be, it would be a composer or a painter, but I have no skill whatsoever." That's perhaps the best way to think of "The Sea" and most other Banville novels: as something akin to a painting or a piece of music. The thrill isn't in the tale, but in the exquisitely rendered details. It takes some getting used to, but once you know what to expect - once you work out that the artful pomposity is a deliberate function of the character-narrator, and not a failing of the author - then Banville's work is amazing. Lovers of language will adore it. Lovers of plot will be dozing. Lovers of Dan Brown will be furious - which is a nice change, considering they're usually so infuriating.

John Banville has stated that he "tries to give his prose the kind of denseness and thickness that poetry has", and this is what he does. The descriptions are often very well done, but overall this book was not my cup of tea, and I was disappointed. The story seems to drag on and on, with nothing happening. A trip to the beach, in which nothing remarkable happens, seems to take 20 pages. The narrator comes off to me as overly educated and hopelessly introverted, so caught up in his own world and words that the characters of the story are at pains to get a word in edgewise. When the story does get moving along for a single slow, long mile, as, for example, it did when Max described meeting up with his daughter and going out to a restaurant, it was complex and enjoyable.

I realize that my opinion is a minority opinion, and there are some--perhaps more sensitive to language than I am--who positively exhalt in this book. Some will see this as a high point for literature, while I simply disagree on a basic level. I need to be amused and impressed, while erudition, apt description, and long words alone simply do not do it for me. I suppose I want prose to be more extroverted with more action and dialogue. The prose seems to me to harken back to a former age, romantic, perhaps? Or previous? Some will embrance this old, aristocratic, philosophical sound with relish, but I could not shake the feeling that the language often did not fit the subject matter. (Some of the philosophical implications were quite good, deep, and interesting, and would provide ample resource for a thesis of some sort.) At its best, I found the book amusing, at its worst long winded. To be sure, there were moments when I did get lost in the descriptive prose that so many have spoken of, but I was always awakened by the desire to know what was going to happen next long before Banville was ready to deliver it. In a word, it wasn't my cup of tea. Then again, I'll never see a Booker, either.

In this dramatic reading by John Lee, Booker Prize-winning author John Banville's sensitive and remarkably complete character study of Max Morden comes alive in new ways. An art critic/writer from Ireland whose wife has just died of a lingering illness, Max, seeking solace, has checked into the Cedars, a now-dilapidated guest house in the seaside village of Ballyless, where he and his family spent their summers when he was a child. There he spent hours in the company of Chloe and Myles Grace, his constant companions. Images of foreboding suggest that some tragedy occurred while he was there. While at the Cedars, he contemplates the nature of life, love, and death, and our imperfect memories of these momentous events.

As Max probes his recollections, he reveals his most intimate feelings, constantly questioning the accuracy of his memory, and juxtaposing his childhood memories with his recent memories of his wife Anna's "inappropriate" illness and her futile treatments. Through flashbacks, he also introduces us to his earlier life with Anna and his fervent hopes that through her he could become someone more interesting. "I was always a distinct no-one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone," he says, confessing that he saw her as "the fairground mirror in which all my distortions would be made straight."

The Irish brogue of reader John Lee and his sensitivity to the poetry of Banville's language, with its internal rhyme, its dream-like imagery, and its alliteration, bring the reading to life. More a meditation than a novel with a strong plot, Lee makes Max a fascinating character (as fascinating as a man with a limited life can be), recreating his seemingly simple, yet often profound, thoughts in language which will startle the reader into recognition of their universality. To some extent an everyman, Max speaks to the reader in uniquely intimate ways.

The reading perfectly captures the emotional connotations of Banville's language, his nature imagery, and his revelations of life as a series of paintings. Like the greatest of the Irish story-tellers, Lee has an instinctive sense of when to raise and lower his voice and when to pause for emphasis, adding greatly to the mood and drama. Max Mordern, a "distinct no one," becomes fully human through the voice of this narrator, the "indistinct someone" he so wished to be. n Mary Whipple

Shroud
Eclipse: A Novel
The Untouchable
Ghosts

The Sea will either delight or aggravate you. Some may experience both reactions.

The delight will come from finding a surprising word choice or unexpected detail on almost every page, the unusual development of the plot and the rapid shifts between thought, memory, perception, desire, musing and reflection. For some, the fresh descriptions of male sexual awakening will also be sweet.

The aggravation will come from realizing that the story could have been told more directly. You will also feel yourself being manipulated quite often. The word choices could have been more direct. The surprises on each page become almost mechanical after awhile. Deal with the aggravation is my advice. Otherwise, you'll miss the chance to see how often you jump to unwarranted conclusions. Reading this novel is like holding up a mirror to see your mind's perceptions and prejudices.

You won't realize much of the book's power until you're done. If you are like me, you'll immediately want to read it again.

The story takes place while Max Morden recovers emotionally from his wife's untimely death from a wasting illness. Uncharacteristically, Morden avoids family and friends to be quite alone most of the day while staying in a run-down rooming house where he experienced many delights as a youngster. Being there brings up many memories of the Grace family . . . surely a metaphor for inspiration in this lover of Bonnard. You'll find yourself drawn into those long-ago memories as well as Morden's unhappy reaction to his wife's loss. But you'll also know that there's an enigma wrapped in a mystery. Gradually, all will become clear through the mental peregrinations of Morden.

I don't remember stream of consciousness done in sentences in quite as interesting a way as Mr. Banville achieves. All aspiring novelists must read this book!

Here's an example of Mr. Banville's power to evoke irony:

"There are other things I can do. . . . Or I might retire into a monastery to pass my days in quiet contemplation of the infinite, or write a great treatise there, a vulgate of the dead. I can see myself in my cell, long-bearded, with quill-pen and hat and docile lion, through a window beside me minuscule peasants in the distance making hay, and hovering above my brow the dove refulgent. Oh yes, life is pregnant with possibilities."

Enjoy this original and provocative work.

This book captivated me with its beautiful, poetic language and descriptions. I really wanted to love it, but in the end language alone wasn't enough to save it when there's no plot or character development. I think I can see what Banville was trying to do here by exploring the overlapping of memory and grief, but in my opinion he hasn't succeeded. Too many pointless diversions and descriptions and characters I couldn't bring myself to care about caused me to give up on this one. It got to the point where I was forcing myself to pick it up. Maybe it's the type of book you can only appreciate at a certain point in your life but I hope I never reach that point.

John Banville's award winning "The Sea" is an evocative look at one's past and its presence in the present and future. The novel is written in skilful prose that uses a lot of adjectives to set the mood and the nostalgic tone of the narrative. The writer also relies on plastic arts as a reference to bring to this story pictorial image that sometimes looks like a foggy dream.

Throughout the narrative Banville makes his main character Max Morden a believable person that is trapped in a past that he can't quit. His most recurrent memory is one summer when he met the Grace family, and how he was fascinated by them -- mostly by the two teenage-twins, Myles and Chloe. As he became more and more close to this people, his own life seemed to be drown in a spiral of love and desire. Years later, he comes back to that idyllic village, what brings back many memories.

Banville trusts in his prose to bring his reader Max's feelings and emotions -- therefore, much is said, and mostly in a poetic tone. What for some can be a blessing, for others can be dreadful. It only depends on how much the reader is interested in learning about how colorful things happened instead of how and why they happened.

To create a powerful image, the writer is always evocating famous painters and their work -- mostly Bonnard. The result is usually magic since the reader has a source from where have the idea of the picture Banville is trying to create. On the other hand, sometimes the prose reads very artificial and purposely labored.

In the end, "The Sea" has a positive result -- it is a beautiful book with a powerful story (that gets better near the end) --, but at the same time one has the feeling that English lingo writers have produced better books in 2005 -- Ian McEwan's "Saturday", and Zadie Smith's "On Beauty", to name a few -- that deserved to take the Man Booker Prize. It seems that judges preferred the supposedly beautiful form, that never connects to the real world, to powerful novels that brought up current social-political issues.

Yes, John Banville's prose in his Booker Award-winning novel, "The Sea," is pompous and prolix, and there probably is a metaphor or simile in every sentence, but readers who are critical of the book overlook the fact that it's a first-person narrative, told in the voice of a self-absorbed character who is both pompous and prolix himself. In fact, he's a bit of a charlatan, as we learn. He's writing a monograph on Bonnard that he doesn't expect to finish, and he married above him in order to escape the poverty of his childhood. He has even changed his name. Luckily, however, Max Morden (now there's a name worthy of Nabokov) is also a charmer, in his way, and often "mordantly" funny. Consider his Proustian ruminations on the character of Connie Grace, the mother of Max's childhood friends, twins Chloe and Myles, and the object of Max's first crush: "Yet for all my disconcertion it is the mortal she, and not the divine, who shines for me still, with however tarnished a gleam, amidst the shadows of what is gone. She is in my memory her own avatar." Some readers may argue that it's not worth winding one's way through such tangles of prose, with its awkward syntax, others will see the journey as evidence of Max's pomposity, not to mention his inadequacy as an "avatar" of memory. Sometimes the shifts of prose become playful, as when Max puns on the name of a character nicknamed "Bun," a rather obese woman "as unmissable as the late Queen of Tonga," with "cork-coloroured" legs "like two gigantic bungs protruding from her nether regions." Max also toys with modifiers; for example, when I first read the sentence, "I think it must be that we were both only children," I took it to refer to Max and wife Anna's age. Almost immediately, however, Max clarifies that we "were both the only children of our parents." The reader has entered an Escher-like world of prose riddles that is sometimes difficult to sort through, and one might question whether "The Sea" is worth the effort. I would argue that it is but that one's final estimation of the book may depend upon how one interprets the ending. I was, frankly, a bit disappointed by it. But I had enjoyed the ride up until that point, and I can recommend the book to others who, like me, enjoy superior wordplay and erudite prose puzzles.

John Banville's lyrical novel, "The Sea," was highly recommended to me, and it met my every expectation for a well-written, intriguing piece of fiction. Though there is a story imbedded in the fanciful meanderings of the protagonist, Max Morden, it is slow to come amid his interior musings, and, as in any good novel, the crucial incidents are not revealed until late in the book.

The novel opens by the sea with a strange high tide with seabirds mewling and swooping, and the sea becomes a presence, as Max deals with disturbing crises in his life. His wife, Anna, has died of cancer, his grown daughter remains distant, and he is plagued by memories from his childhood summers spent on the Irish coast. Max returns to the seaside town of his boyhood, remembering his own loveless parents, the enviable upper-class Grace family, Connie, the attractive mother, Carlo, the corpulent father, the twins, Max's playmates, Chloe and the mute, sometimes spooky, Myles, and Rose, the twins' nanny.

While the plot is rather thin, the reader is carried along with Max as he relives the traumatic incidents of his life, his adolescent awakening to love and sex and unexpected death, and his current struggle with grief and depression, from which his daughter, Claire, tries to rescue him. But the reader is buoyed from this morass by the wonderful and uplifting imagery of Max's meanderings, the ever-reassuring presence of the sea, and the surprising revelations as the novel reaches its climax. Banville's prose is a pure treat, and the novel's prize-winning power is evident on every page.

There is the beauty of this book -- the watercolor writing that gives the slanted sunlight and cresting waves nuance and, often, intent; the presentation of the purity of youth, delighting in the salty softness of summertime sands and discovering the arresting humidity of puberty and sensuality; and the meandering reminiscences of the main character, Max Morden, who has come back to the seaside resort of his youth to understand who he is and, after the death of his wife, where he belongs. But then there is its brutality -- death and decay and depression and drunkenness; Max Morden's anger and repulsion at the gritty realities of life, from his wife's death to the realization that the physical of act of sex is sweaty and smelly and so far removed from that single moment of "instant divinity" when one finally touches a breast or touches the lips of a pretty girl. Then, of course, there is Max's constant, nearly instinct-driven journey toward his own death and destruction, rejecting all manner of love and acceptance along the way.

The Sea, by John Banville, was the Man Booker prize winner in 2005. Understandably, it garnered massive praise. But it is a complex, often deadly cold tale that requires a detachment in the reader to fully appreciate the work and to step back to gather in its breadth. It also takes some patience, because Banville's brilliant writing is almost undone by his sophomoric use of names and symbols to underscore his meaning. To wit, the word "morden" in German means to kill or to end life, which is Max's apparent life-goal, at least as far as his own life is concerned. Giving the character the name "max" makes it only worse. The visiting family in the seaside resort are the Grace family -- the source of Max's fascination with daughter Chloe, her mother, and even the governess, Rose. Max indeed finds grace in the lips and scent of Chloe, and in the upskirt views that her mother offers Max. And then there is the color blue which the author hits us repeatedly over the head with, blue as in sea, light, air, breath, etc

But that aside, Banville offers a look into a character type that lives for that perfect moment of glee -- discovery, awareness, delight -- but then shuffles off into hiding when it realizes that extending the moment requires hard work, defeat, assertiveness, and, well, living. Max falls in schoolboy love with Chloe's mother, and reaches near ecstasy when she gives him a look at her private regions, but then feels instantly used, even taken advantage of. Same with Chloe, a nymph of the sea who he dislikes and bashes mere moments after he kisses her lips and declares his love for her.

But then again, he is that type of man. He aches for his own demise. He will not accept his dying wife's admonitions to just go out and live. He is eternally caught in a threesome, whether with the Graces, or Chloe and her twin, or even with his landlady and the aging fellow boarder. But stepping out of that role would nearly sicken him -- he is more a leech, a sucker (and harsh judger of life) than an active participant. Deep in his soul, at least as a youngster, he sought consummation, but found that consummation was complicated. In reading this book I wonder if Bannville is aiming at male egos, always eager for the hunt and the capture, but bored with the aftermath. Max is surrounded by big, powerful women, many of whom seem to know themselves (and can see through him). And he realizes very late that two of his apparent male "conquests" -- one with Mrs. grace and one with the aging landlady-- were simply elements of lesbian love that he just downright misinterpreted.

Three stars is the best I can do.

Books like this are a dying breed. Banville was half expecting his manuscript of 'The Sea', his 14th novel, not to be published at all after a long back catalogue of novels that only sold two to three thousand copies apiece. He was known as a difficult and wordy prose stylist, totally obscure. Then in October last year 'The Sea' won the Booker prize, guaranteeing it instant media attention, and several critics claimed the choice of winner would ruin the status of the Booker indefinitely, given its verbosity, its lack of plot, its supposed inaccessibility.

The Sea sits firmly in that quiet, reflective erudite continental tratition of intelligent literature - early Nabokov, Proust, some Joyce, Beckett. There is very little dialogue. It achieves its affect by a slow, drip of meditative prose craft. The narrator, Max Morden, is an almost post human entity, a ghostlike man, focusing his attention intently on the aesthetic details around him and his memories of the past at the Irish seaside town he revisits. Some of the details are conjoured up beautifully, a wet swimming costume, for instance 'lying where she had tossed it, limply wadded and stuck along one wet edge with a fringe of sand, like something thrown up drowned out of the sea.' Some of the details are beautifully evoked, but come across as rather strainingly artificial, try this: 'The steel milk churns looked like squat sentries in flat hats, and each one had an identical white rosette burning on its shoulder where the light from the doorway was reflected.' Does reflected light really shine like a rosette? It is, nevertheless, a beatifully crafted image. Some of the imagery I did find too false, especially Banville's over attatchment of the colour blue to things. Is mud really blue? Is smoke in a room really blue?

Banville is also a stylist who deals with language, he loves the shape, the sound, the formation of words. Much of the vocabulary is arcane - 'cracaleured', 'ichor', 'cinereal' anyone? I referred to my OED frequently throughout. However this is not the pretentious thesaurus abusing of some other contemporary wannabe literary novelists. Banville really is an experienced master with his self proclaimed 'Hibo-English' and readers who take the time to absorb the patterns and thoughts he evokes on the page will find it a treat.

Many people will pick up this novel, fail to see what all the fuss is about, and return to their familiar slush piles of middle brow fiction. However the prestige attatched to 'The Sea' has deservedly raised Banville's profile, for so long underrated, in the literary world. The Sea is his best novel so far and he has reached the peak of his powers as a prose stylist. It is a shame that his next novels are apparently to be pulp detective fiction written under the pseudonym 'Benjamin Black'.

Max Mordon is an aging art specialist who is reeling over the death of his wife Anna from cancer. He books himself into a cozy seaside resort on the windswept Irish Coast, hoping that he can somehow reconnect with his past. Deeply affected and distressed by Anna's quick illness and subsequent decline, Max is in dire need of consolation. His dutiful and kindly daughter, Claire wants him to come and live with her, but the grieving Max prefers the all-encompassing isolation of the house by the sea.

The boarding house is called The Cedars and is and managed by the enigmatic and capricious Miss Vavasour. It is here where Max recounts his childhood friendship with the socially well-to-do family, the Graces. The Graces not only changed his life, but also provided his first two definitive adolescent crushes. As Max spends his days in the company of the crusty old Colonial - a fellow aging widower, he steadily ruminates, intermingling episodes from the remote and recent past.

In fact, Max seems to be living in the past, and is constantly haunted by the memory of how things once were. Perhaps by staying at The Cedars - his room here, the only possible refuge for him - will enable him to recapture perhaps some of his time as a boy. But Max is shocked by the state of the lodging house, and is surprised that it has retained little of the past, of "the part of the past that he knew." He had hoped for something more definite of the Graces, but now there's nothing, where "so many of the living passing through have all worn away all traces of the dead."

Gradually the memories return, of his yearning for a connection with Mrs. Grace and his furtive, unsure couplings with Chloe, and his stoic friendship with Chloe's twin brother Myles. A child of meager means, the result of a father who abruptly deserted him, and a mother who was forced to find menial work where she could, Max is absolutely mesmerized by the Grace family; he sees them almost as gods and even gives them a mythical status, they had a motorcar and stayed in a big house, while he and his parents rented a chalet.

But as Max broods on his ghosts - his troubled relationship with his parents, the illness of his wife, and his enigmatic relationship with the Graces - he succumbs to "paralyzed dismay" at what his life has become. Essentially a story about age, love, and loss, The Sea - like the ebb and flow of the ocean itself - is all about the coming of old age and the reconcilement of one's older life with one's youth. For Max, "so much of life was stillness then, when we were young, or so it seems now; a biding stillness; a vigilance."

It's not as though Max is waiting to die, far from it, and although he's "grown corpulent and half-grey and almost old," he still possesses feistiness and a savage will to live. When he thinks of the Graces, and especially of Chloe, it is as if he had stepped suddenly out of the dark. But with so much loss and grief Max ultimately finds solace in his past. He even admits that the past is such a retreat: "I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the colder future."

The prose is exquisite, the reader constantly assaulted with stunning images: "the seabirds rose and dived like torn scraps of rag, and a silent sea had now set up a vague tumult; water-beads break and fall in a silver string from the tip of oar." The sentences are languid, broad and poetic, forever mirroring the melancholic nature of the story.

Full of mythical parallels, and artistic allusions, The Sea is all about one man's journey through memory and loss from puberty to adulthood, where the past and the present inevitably coalesce. Until Max can make sense of his feelings - work through the death of Anna, and come to terms with the tragedy of his childhood - he is perhaps a prisoner of his own memories. Max ultimately discovers that in this world of nostalgia, this land of his adolescence, there are more answers than he could have ever hoped to dream of. Mike Leonard January 06.

This is a very rewarding book that requires patience and close attention because of the narrative shifts in time and place.

The story revolves around middle aged Max. In the present, Max is grappling with the recent death of his wife. Clearly the pair had long been a "unit" and Max is quite at loss as to what to do next in her absence. Although he loves his adult daughter Claire, she is no substitute in his affection. So Max is drawn back to a place by the shore that he hadn't been for 50 years, a place where he has a typical early adolesent experience with the opposite sex and an untypical experience with tragedy. The past and present are expertly interwoven by Mr. Banville, who deservedly won his Booker for this effort.

Banville does an incredibly good job showing us the power and limits of memory and how things are remembered (or disremembered) lucidly or poorly.

I think only Ian McEwan today writes with quite the same degree of elegance. And actually, as I think about it, I could make an argument that there are interesting similarities between McEwan's "Atonement" and "The Sea". In each case, the narrator sees or thinks they see something that turns out not to be the case and, in each instance, with terrible consequences; although more obviously so in "Atonement".

Read it "The Sea" and see for yourself.

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 ([...])

For better or worse, depending on your reading preferences, they just don't make `em like this any more. John Banville's THE SEA, the 2005 Man Booker Award winner, is most certainly not everyone's cup of tea; some might even put him off as bitter medicine whose tortured sentences and exotic phrasings are too difficult to swallow. However, readers who appreciate nice turns of phrase, striking imagery, and multi-layered, deeply thoughtful stories patiently revealed will find much to like in this book. Put another way: those who enjoy writers like the Garcia Marquez of AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH or ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, the Faulknerian Cormac McCarthy of SUTTREE or BLOOD MERIDIAN, the Jose Saramago of THE STONE RAFT or THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JESUS CHRIST, or the David Grossman of SEE: UNDER LOVE, to mention a few, should find rewards aplenty in this short but densely scribed novel. Interestingly, Banville's writing and story-telling style is strikingly similar in many respects to the book that many felt deserved the 2005 Booker Prize - Kazuo Ishiguro's NEVER LET ME GO.

THE SEA is, in essence, an extended elegy narrated by one Max Morden, an aging, self-described dilettante whose wife has recently succumbed to a twelve-month bout with cancer. In response to this loss, Max has returned to live out his remaining years at the seaside resort of his childhood, where he first encountered the Grace family, "the gods" as he called them. Outwardly, the Graces represent everything that the boy Max and his parents were not - money, sophistication, charm, beauty, and the idyllic family life. Young Max undergoes his first sexual awakenings with the Graces as well, via an idealized infatuation with Mrs. Grace (Connie) that is eventually transferred to daughter Chloe. Years later, the aging Max does not simply return to the resort town, he takes a room in the Grace's former home, the Cedars, now converted into a boarding house. Ms. Vavasour, the matronly landlady of the house, assures Max when he first calls that she does indeed remember him from his childhood days there.

As Banville slowly unwinds his story, we learn that Max has much to rue in his life. He is professionally unaccomplished, a dabbler in the arts who writes about them rather than produce them and who has squandered years researching the painter Bonnard for a barely begun treatise for which Max himself admits he has nothing new to say. He is distant from his daughter Claire and realizes that he has lived a comfortable life from his wife's money (inherited from the ill-gotten gains of her scamming father) without ever having done anything to deserve it. Even his relationship with his late wife is revealed to have been cold and unemotional, more an arrangement than a romance with strong hints of affairs on both their parts. Of course, the crux of Max's emotional torment is his boyhood disillusionment over the Graces. What seems to be nothing more than infatuation transformed into arrested development is ultimately revealed to have been much more, more than enough to have scarred Max for the rest of his life.

Max Morden's character in THE SEA comes across as strikingly ineffectual and oddly effeminate, perhaps a product of his upbringing. He is raised primarily by his mother, surrounded by female Graces during the summertime (Chloe's father Carlo is a hairy clown and her twin brother Myles, he of the webbed feet, is a mentally impaired mute), married to Anna, fathered a daughter Claire, and submits himself to the daily ministrations of Ms. Vavasour (who has her own disturbing connections to the Graces). Surrounded by women throughout his life, Max on two occasions turns vituperative, almost misogynistic, once angrily at his deceased wife and once with the ludicrously-named Vivienne Bun. Here the real Max momentarily appears - powerless, unaccomplished, impotent - metaphorically castrated by the women of his life. "I was always a distinct no-one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone" Max claims in what has to be the world's most ambiguous statement of life goals.

Of course, no discussion of THE SEA is complete without mention of the author's wordsmithing. Whether coloring the world blue as he does throughout, penning phrases like "Rooks cawed rawly," "rooks in a raucous flock," and "the bland packed sand," or torturing his sentences with words like crepitant, refection, jeroboam, convolvulus, scumbling, mephitic, cerements, blench, anabasis, crapulent, flocculent, refulgent, horrent, anaglypta, craquelured, and (my favorite) groynes, Banville is ever one to make you pull up short just to admire his sheer dexterity with the Queen's English. THE SEA, too, tells its own admirable story of loss, on many levels.

John Banville is currently my favourite contemporary fiction writer (after Ian McEwan) so nothing should give me greater pleasure than to see him honoured finally - after making the shortlist a couple of times before - with the Booker Prize for "The Sea". For there is just one word to describe the distinctive quality of Banville's prose - incandescent - and in "The Sea", it shimmers and dances like flames in the night, sending tingles and shivers down one's spine. Banville's words are, simply put, a thing of beauty. The question is, should a novel tipped for one of the most prestigious annual book awards be judged solely or even predominantly by its words and sentences, however beautifully and tantalizingly strung together ?

Max Morden's coming of age story of pain, memory and loss while certainly moving and quietly compelling, is far too ordinary to make an impression on one's reading experience. The feeling is "haven't I read this before ? ". Think of L P Hartley's "The Go Between" and you get the drift. Banville takes his time telling Max's story. Scenes move backwards and forthwards between the distant past and Max's more recent bereavement from the loss of his wife. Memories of that one confusing summer he spent with the Graces return to haunt him after Anna's death leaves him weakened and vulnerable. Young Max's nominal dalliance with the daughter and his heady infatuation with the mother renders him unconscious and unobservant of darker things happening around him. The tragedy that meets the Grace twins and the devastating secret of that one related but non-Grace family character lurking just out of eyes' range, seem to come together in one explosive climax in the last chapters. It is here, I think, that Banville commits a serious blunder. By leaving the denouement so late in the day, he overstrains his readers' anticipation to such a degree that when the truth is revealed, it is met with an almighty shrug. After all, there must be some point to Max's recall ?

I will always have time for a John Banville book. "The Untouchables", "The Book Of Evidence", "Shroud", etc, they're all marvelous, every single one of them. Although "The Sea" has won the Booker, it can't say it's Banville's best. Nevertheless, I still give it a five star rating for the irresistable quality of its prose and the pleasure I felt reading it.

Exquisitely written novel: I savoured such descriptions as 'the iron gate...rust has reduced its struts to a tremulous filigree.'
The narrator slips between three time frames- the present, staying in a seaside guest house in the village where he spent his childhood summers; the recent past, living with his wife through her terminal illness.
And the distant past and the summer when he met the exciting Grace family- glamorous parents and their 11 year old twins...
Keep on reading; right up to the end you think nothing much is going on, but the twist comes right at the end.
I can't say it's one of those books that will remain with me- it was hard to really engage with any of the characters- but Banville's poetic prose is quite out of this world.

John Banville composes his work. Like a symphonic masterpiece, his words flow and ebb, weaving themselves into a clarity of expression that tell the story of a man dealing with the loss of his wife. He returns to a sea-side village where he spent time as a child, hoping to regain a balance in his life. The return to this village awakens childhood memories of a time spent in the company of another family of very different means. As we walk through his memories, he re-examines the things he believed as a child and how these things take on a different patina with age. It is an involved work full of rich patterns of language. While I loved the writing, the actual story was less than I had hoped for. It almost feels like the writing was on a much superior level than the subject itself. While I usually love reading books that have been awarded the Man Booker Prize, this was not one I loved.

John Banville's novel, The Sea, is certainly a work of literary art, with intricate sentence structure, vast poetic language, and lyric cadence, so that the story comes forward in waves of memory, from a vast sealike unconscious that brews and is not at rest. I have total admiration for Banville's mastery of the English language. The book is darkly poetic along a braided narrative of present reflections, recent events of loss and pain, and fragments of earlier memories pulled from memory.

Max, a fellow that you never really comprehend or grasp, almost like a smokey or ghostly narrator, comes to a boarding house to relax in isolation after the death of his wife Anne. Yet he returns to the boarding house which had formerly been occupied by two childhood friends who drowned themselves to spite their parents.

This is the story of remembering loss and re-weaving those memories before sending them off to the vast sea of memory and unconscious. Max has multiple loses. His father leaves him and his mother in poverty, never to be seen again. Max encounters his first loves with the Grace family, where as a pre-adolsecent he first falls into infatuation with Mrs. Grace and then with her 10 year old daughter, Chloe.

Max returns to the seaside scene of these painful events to recovery from Anna's recent death. Why would someone do this? I suspect because we never really heal from great loss, we recover gradually and the process of forgetting helps the raw wound of grief heal into scar tissue. But when new grief is encountered, it must be integrated into the fragmented cloth of memory and woven into the patterns of previous lose and memory. Thus this novel is highly reflective rather than propelled by action of the characters in some form of conflict.

The ability of Banville to shift between his childhood, his marriage, and the present is superb and flawless. It never feels awkward because he recognizes that memory allows us to shift scene so long as we understand the thread of imagery that unites the various times and places and memories. The use of poetic narrative further evokes the memory and its parallel emerging unconscious processes.

The Sea is often a universal symbol of memory and unconscious. Here that image is used well as memories emerge and sink from Max's vast unconscious sea.

Booker Prize-winning author John Banville presents a sensitive and remarkably complete character study of Max Morden, an art critic/writer from Ireland whose wife has just died of a lingering illness. Seeking solace, Max has checked into the Cedars, a now-dilapidated guest house in the seaside village of Ballyless, where he and his family spent their summers when he was a child. There he spent hours in the company of Chloe and Myles Grace, his constant companions. Images of foreboding suggest that some tragedy occurred while he was there, though the reader discovers only gradually what it might have been. While at the Cedars, he contemplates the nature of life, love, and death, and our imperfect memories of these momentous events.

As Max probes his recollections, he reveals his most intimate feelings, constantly questioning the accuracy of his memory, and juxtaposing his childhood memories with his recent memories of his wife Anna's "inappropriate" illness and her futile treatments. Through flashbacks, he also introduces us to his earlier life with Anna and his fervent hopes that through her he could become someone more interesting. "I was always a distinct no-one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone," he says, confessing that he saw her as "the fairground mirror in which all my distortions would be made straight."

More a meditation than a novel with a strong plot, The Sea brings Max to life (as limited as his life is), recreating his seemingly simple, yet often profound, thoughts in language which will startle the reader into recognition of their universality. To some extent an everyman, Max speaks to the reader in uniquely intimate ways. In breathtaking language, filled with emotional connotations, he captures nature in perfect images, often revealing life as a series of paintings--"a Tiepolo sky," a hair-washing scene reminiscent of Duccio and Picasso. He objectifies his thoughts about memory through Pierre Bonnard's many portraits of "Nude in the Bath," paintings of Bonnard's wife in which she remains a young girl, even when she is seventy years old. Images of the bath and the sea pervade the novel--cleansing, combined with the ebb and flow of life.

Lovers of plot-based novels with snappy dialogue may find that the lack of external action and the novel's focus on the interior battles of an ordinary man of about sixty fail to engage their interest. Other readers, who may have faced the deaths of family or friends and recognized the limitations of memory, however, may see in Max a kindred spirit to whom they respond with empathy. I have rarely read such a short book so slowly--or reread with pleasure so many passages of extraordinary beauty and import--and I felt a connection with Max that I have never felt before in any of Banville's previous novels. Mary Whipple

Shroud
Eclipse: A Novel
The Untouchable
Ghosts

John Banville is an enormously gifted writer of the first order. The Sea is a book that contains such lovely imagery and language that it frequently verges on poetry. A late middle aged man dealing with the loss of his wife retreats into his past and the realm of memory to deal with grief. Skillfully weaving present and past as his character relates his inner dialogue , the Sea invites the reader to slowly absorb each page and scene as the story unfolds. I agree with other reviewers that Banvillle is a writer for whom style and the moment represented in rich language is as important as plot. Nevertheless I enjoyed this book and would recommend giving it a try. Keep a dictionary handy a Banville is unafraid to use an extensive and challenging vocabulary without seeming overly pretentious.

A gentleman reflects on his life, especially his youth, after the death of his wife. He returns to the formative landscape of his childhood, a modest seaside town and inn in Ireland. It is also the site of the formative tragedy of his childhood. In effect, we have a coming-of-age novel as reflected upon in later life. Instead of the psychological depth of Danish author Jens Grondahl reflecting on his marriage in Silence in October, we get lush descriptions and beautiful turns of phrase. Thoughtful, slow reading; a treasure with many lines to savor. The Sea won the Booker Prize in 2005 and was picked as Novel of the Year by the Irish Book Awards in 2006.

John Banville puts his readers on notice within the first ten pages, with words such as `leporine' and `apotropaic,' that we are securely in the hands of a master of the English language. And there's a safe, cozy feeling knowing that our guide on this literary journey is fully in command of his linguistic tool set.

Go ahead, look `em up. And you may want to keep that dictionary handy.

Reading a book like this is a beautiful reminder of the difference between good and great fiction. Great fiction is about more than just plot and characters and voice; it's about every single word being there for a reason. It's the blending of both the art and the science of writing. And it isn't achieved all that often.

In The Sea, the story flows like a nostalgic, melancholy reverie, floating back and forth between past and present. The writing is more poetry than prose. I rarely put much stock in the blurbs and sound bites on a novel's cover, but in this case the Sunday Telegraph's reference to Banville as "the heir to Nabokov" is right on. Like Nabokov, every word feels pregnant with meaning and power. Every few moments there is a passage so exquisitely written that you find, at the end of it, that you have been holding your breath throughout. Like this one:

"In those endless October nights, lying side by side in the darkness, toppled statues of ourselves, we sought escape from an intolerable present in the only tense possible, the past, that is, the faraway past. We went back over our earliest days together, reminding, correcting, helping each other, like two ancients tottering arm-in-arm along the ramparts of a town where they had once lived, long ago."

You may find yourself re-reading passages in order to savor the full effect, or reading out loud to yourself so that you might feel the sensuality of the language on your tongue. This is a book that begs to be read slowly.

In a book like this, plot seems secondary, almost unnecessary. And yet there is also an exquisite story here, in fact two stories, a widower's struggle to escape the grief of his wife's passing, and a young boy's coming of age over the course of a summer. Both stories unfold at the sea, in the same place in fact, though separated chronologically by fifty years. And as the two stories gracefully intertwine, they bear witness to the powerful connection we all maintain to our past.

Still have that dictionary handy? Try `anabasis' and `aperçus' - those are from the last ten pages. Man this guy is good.

John Banville's award winning "The Sea" is an evocative look at one's past and its presence in the present and future. The novel is written in skilful prose that uses a lot of adjectives to set the mood and the nostalgic tone of the narrative. The writer also relies on plastic arts as a reference to bring to this story pictorial image that sometimes looks like a foggy dream.

Throughout the narrative Banville makes his main character Max Morden a believable person that is trapped in a past that he can't quit. His most recurrent memory is one summer when he met the Grace family, and how he was fascinated by them -- mostly by the two teenage-twins, Myles and Chloe. As he became more and more close to this people, his own life seemed to be drown in a spiral of love and desire. Years later, he comes back to that idyllic village, what brings back many memories.

Banville trusts in his prose to bring his reader Max's feelings and emotions -- therefore, much is said, and mostly in a poetic tone. What for some can be a blessing, for others can be dreadful. It only depends on how much the reader is interested in learning about how colorful things happened instead of how and why they happened.

To create a powerful image, the writer is always evocating famous painters and their work -- mostly Bonnard. The result is usually magic since the reader has a source from where have the idea of the picture Banville is trying to create. On the other hand, sometimes the prose reads very artificial and purposely labored.

In the end, "The Sea" has a positive result -- it is a beautiful book with a powerful story (that gets better near the end) --, but at the same time one has the feeling that English lingo writers have produced better books in 2005 -- Ian McEwan's "Saturday", and Zadie Smith's "On Beauty", to name a few -- that deserved to take the Man Booker Prize. It seems that judges preferred the supposedly beautiful form, that never connects to the real world, to powerful novels that brought up current social-political issues.

Middle aged Irishman Max Morden mourns deeply the loss of his wife Anna. Needing to escape the overwhelming memories and though fifty years have passed since he has been there, Max retreats to the Cedars, a house that was the summer home of the Graces, who strongly influenced him when he was a child. He takes a room there hiding from his normal now dispirited life.

Max thinks back to that summer when the affluent Graces vacationed at the Cedars. They "adopted" him as their personal waif for those glorious months. Though the parents, the authoritative father and the real family ruler the mother treated him nicely, the twin daughters Chloe and Myles were his connection. He compares that time with the lingering illness until death do us part of his spouse and his daughter Claire. Worried about her dad, Claire tries to help Max overcome his depression; but he wants to sink deeper into the past when death was something adults dealt with and youngsters like him blithely played all day without a care in the world.

THE SEA runs fathoms deep as the audience obtains a remarkable character study that focuses on an individual who in spite of expecting the Grim Reaper to call cannot cope when the visit occurs. Max is morbid and melancholy as he mourns his loss and cannot cope with it; while his daughter can readily see his angst but has no concept on how to return her dad to the living. Readers will sympathize with Max, but wonder whether the past will engulf his present and future or will he realize those idyllic days had woes too that his memories chose to discriminately ignore.

Harriet Klausner

This book is filled with beautiful use of language and texture. The landscape and feel of this book are just right to convey the mood of this character. Max Morden has just lost his wife and has now returned to the Irish seaside town where he spent his childhood. Banville's writing reminds me a little of Updike in his capturing this aging man's look back upon the events and relationships of his past. The story unfolds slowly and without surprises as the reader feels they are in the mind of Max as he reflects on the events of his childhood. We are discovering what happened. Max is looking back on them with the new perspective of a man with a lifetime of experience behind him.

There is very little literature as good as this out there. Highly recommended.

John Banville's use of the language is just gorgeous. He is a master of beautiful writing. When I read his work, I don't even care about plot. I also enjoyed his The Untouchable and Mrs. Osmond, the latter written as a sequel to Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady. I can recommend all.

The Sea does have a story, of course, a striking and sad one that creeps up on you and hits hard in the end.