A highly unrecommended novel for the merry and gay of heart. Would appeal greatly to those of a darker disposition. John Banville’s The Sea is not a story, it is a jumbled collection of excerpts from a man’s life written in the form of a diary or a journal entry. Predominantly set in a town which the narrator, Max Morden “calls” Ballymore(less). Ballymore. Ireland. James Joyce. Funny that James Joyce should pop up in my mind here, because A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is what The Sea reminds me of the most.
The Narrator goes, freely at will, from free indirect discourse to Stream-of-Consciousness to direct discourse without the slightest bit of consideration for the reader. John Banville’s writing style seems almost surgical when contrasted with traditional texts. Without undue embellishments, he is able to startle the reader with the stark and naked description of everyday life analysed in its most basic and raw detail.
Max Morden, the Narrator, is an art historian, an alcoholic, a dilettante, and I suspect suffers from a mild Oedipus Complex. He has come to stay at The Cidars, after his wife’s death to come to terms with his past. Max Morden is a man with some serious baggage. Max’s wife, Anna, suffers from cancer and is going to die. Meanwhile, a scrawny teenage Max finds companions in the Grace twins Chloe and Myles at the same time having a crush on their mother, Constance(Connie) Grace.
Max Morden appears overly concerned with smells. A great deal of his description of people and places is based on the smells he associates with them. He can smell brown coloured hair, he remembers how his first girlfriend used to smell(like stale biscuits) and puts a lot of effort into describing how he feels about everyday smells.
“..tolerant, necessarily, of the products of my sadly inescapable humanity, the various effluvia, the eructations fore and aft, the gleet, the scurf, the sweat and other common leakages, and even what the Bard of Hartford quaintly calls the particles of nether-do...”
Max is also a hypochondriac as the following excerpt, one of his wife’s peculiar ways of addressing him shows,
“..Doctor Max, she would call me. How is Doctor Max today, is he feeling poorly? ..”
But also, he had become quite a medical encyclopaedia. The book is littered with long and scary sounding medical terms thrown about by the Narrator, which, at least in my opinion was the only possible reaction one could have when a loved one is suddenly diagnosed with a terminal illness. All someone can do, besides worrying oneself to death, is to read up all that is available on the subject. Maybe it helps, maybe it does not, but surely, the fear of the unknown is assuaged a teensy bit.
Another important point is the author’s fascination with words which he passes on to the characters and the Narrator in particular. Every few pages, he comes up with something which makes you see a word in a new light. It’s almost as if someone suddenly gave you the 3D glasses at a 3D movie which until now you had been watching blurred and 2 dimensional.
“..pair of puncture marks made there by the canine's canines.”
“..lamps in the room and the long, tapering trapezoid of light spilling across the linoleum..”
“..I had considered him an unsuitable suitor..”
“.."Patient" Anna said to me one day towards the end, "that is an odd word. I must say, I don't feel patient at all."..”
There are plenty more, but let’s stop here for now.
In addition to the visual imagery, there is a sprinkling of aural imagery throughout the book. What I mean is when you are reading the book, occasionally, you will start hearing the accompanying orchestral or natural music.
“..I felt transfigured, I felt like one of Wagner's demi-gods, aloft on a thunder-cloud and directing the..”
While reading this I could practically hear Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries’ crescendo rising up in my head.
Near the end of the book, Miss Vavasour is playing one of Robert Schumann’s compositions. Robert Schumann was a German composer and I only mention him because I have just finished a particular episode of Jerry Seinfeld’s popular show where he is telling George, who has a certain melody stuck in his head, that Schumann went mad because he kept hearing the note A and couldn’t get it out of his mind.
Another prominent presence in the book is that of Pierre Bonnard (Bonn’art, Bon’nargue, Brides-in-the-bath).Max is writing a book on him and draws parallels between Bonnard and himself throughout the book. Bonnard’s muse and later wife, Marthe de Meligny, as she liked to call herself, was the subject of a lot of his paintings depicting her in the bath or in the various stages of dressing or undressing. The notable thing is that years later, when she grew old and her skin became blemished with some skin disease, he still drew her as the pink skinned, nubile belle that he remembered from when they first met.
The Sea is a distinctively post-modernist novel in the sense that the narrative style and the Narrator’s frequent lapses into reveries analysing his relationship with Anna, Chloe, Connie Grace and others lead him into philosophical and existential mazes.
“..last night in a dream, it has just come back to me, I was trying to write my will on a machine that was lacking the word I. The letter I, that is, small and large...”
“..Who, if not myself, was I? The philosophers tell us that we are defined and have our being through others. Is a rose red in the dark? In a forest on a far planet where there are no ears to hear, does a falling tree make a crash?..”
I found that the style in which this novel is written is such that the text sounds more like poetry than prose. I’m not really sure if this would still have been my opinion if I hadn’t read the back cover of my copy of the novel where there is this little excerpt from the Literary Review:
‘Poetry seems to come easily to Banville. There is so much to applaud in this book that it deserves more than one reading’
P.S.: Be sure to keep a dictionary handy while reading this book. Bonnard, Gilles de Rais, Wagner, Schumann, in the unlikely[sic] event that you are unfamiliar with the aforementioned people, forget the dictionary and go straight for the encyclopaedia.
