The Sea [Import] [Paperback]

John Banville (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: Picador (2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0330436252
• ISBN-13: 978-0330436250
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (148 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,925,925 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

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.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

210 of 215 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for leaving it.", December 18, 2005

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Sea (Man Booker Prize) (Hardcover)

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

103 of 107 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Beauty Of Language, November 27, 2005

By 

H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Sea (Man Booker Prize) (Hardcover)

Once in a while a novelist totally captures the reader with his exquisite, finely wrought language. John Banville in THE SEA, the recent winner of the Booker Prize, is just such a writer. If you are not careful, you will be so taken by the beauty of his words, that you may miss the nuances of meaning so important to fitting all the parts of his story together.

The narrator is Max Morden, an Irishman who a year after the death of his wife, returns to a town by the sea where he spent his summers over 50 years ago and fell under the spell of the Grace family, composed of the mother, father and twins: Chloe and Myles, a strange young lad who has never spoken. In a style reminiscent of Proust, Thomas Mann, Henry James and the best of Edmund White, Banville's narrator goes from the summers in the past to the recent "plague year" of his wife's terminal illness to the present where he rents a room in the Cedars, where once the Graces lived, and is now inhabited by the mysterious Miss Vavasour, the current landlady, and her only other tenant, the Colonel.

You can open the book to almost any page and read beautiful, poetic language. On our memories of our youth: "So much of life was stillness then, when we were young, or so it seems now; a biding stillness; a vigilance. We were waiting in our as yet unfashioned world, scanning the future as the boy and I had scanned each other, like soldiers in the field, watching for what was to come." Or on Banville's description of the sea: "Down here, by the sea, there is a special quality to the silence at night. I do not know if this is my doing, I mean if this quality is something I bring to the silence of my room, and even of the whole house, or if it is a local effect, due to the salt in the air, perhaps, or the seaside climate in general."

I would have been content if this novel had just been about Morden's musings on first love, the inexactitude of memory, the taking care of and losing in death of a wife far too early, the mild sorrow of what he might have done differently-- he opines that if Bonnard, the artist whom he is attempting to write about, didn't have all the answers then neither should he: "Why should I demand more veracity of vision of myself than of a great and tragic artist? We did our best, Anna [his wife] and I. We forgave each other for all that we were not." Many a decent writer would have let it go at that. Banville does not. In the last few pages of this small novel, he delivers at least three body blows that the reader-- at least this one-- was not prepared for. Looking back, I see that the writer does drop clues along the away about the possible ending. Read carefully or Mr. Banville will take your breath away.

60 of 65 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The beauty of grief, September 22, 2006

By 

Darin Rachunok "drachunok" - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Sea (Paperback)

John Banville's The Sea has had such a profound effect on me that I have decided to write my first Amazon review. I picked it up out of curiosity, knowing it had won the 2005 Booker Prize and it has lived up to its prize-winning reputation.

I have rarely, if ever, had the pleasure of reading such beautifully constructed prose. It's almost poetic at times. The words paint an image, meticulously shaded by simile and metaphor, that haunts the reader, much as the memories of the protagonist haunt him. And the sea of the title is a presence on every page, whether it is mentioned in the text or not. At times you can feel the language rolling across its undulating surface. It's this feeling which propels you on.

I found it to be a moving treatise on loss, grief and the way we deal with it. At the same time, it offers a glimpse at the way memories can bend and fracture until one can't distinguish between what one remembers and what one thinks one remembers.

The comparisons to Nabokov's style have been made about Banville for quite some time, but I'll add a comparison to Virginia Woolf here, particularly with To the Lighthouse, based on the vivid descriptions, keen observations and strong internal monologue.

I'd recommend it for fans of The Lovely Bones, as well, for the way it shows a character dealing with tragedy and grief.