Review: The Sea

The Sea by John Banville
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I make it a principle not to judge the way others mourn. It’s not for me to say how someone else should behave, not for me to assign roles or rituals to someone who’s lost a parent or a spouse. My job, as I understand it, is to help the person realize she or he isn’t alone – to listen in sympathy and try to echo back whatever he or she wants to hear.

This novel is a novel of mourning. Max Morden has lost his wife, and he’s dealing with it by returning to a summer cottage where he spent a time in his childhood. It’s where he first fell in love and [SPOILER] where he first had to deal with the death of someone he cared about.

At the same time, this is a deeply clever novel, one that comes to us as a self-conscious verbal game. It opens with a striking sentence, one that I think may well be indecipherable until we’ve read the final pages. Our speaker is arch in his vocabulary – a point driven home to me by the fact that the library book I read had hand-written notes defining obscure words every several pages. And he’s fond of blunt assessments of the people in his world: he says he thinks his daughter is unattractive, and he refers to her sometime boyfriend as “chinless.”

I admire each of those separate ambitions – the effort to limn mourning and the Nabokovian word-play – but I confess I found myself missing the rhythm of their interplay. It’s almost as if, at a shiva, wake, or memorial service, I’m finding myself listening with the wrong attitude. I’ll think the mourner needs a somber face from me, and I’ll get a joke. Then I’ll assume a more humorous stance and get the “I’m just devastated” confession.

As I say, then, I’m not here to judge the way Banville – or, more properly, Max – mourns the loss of his wife, but I find I’m a poor audience for him as he does it. On the one hand, much of this novel deals with the present-tense moment of Max’s return. He gets caught up in looking over the old place and indulges in spurts of superior feeling. He grew up as a “townie,” as a kid who lacked the money to be part of this particular world, but that one magical summer he fell in love, moved on to marry a wealthy woman (whose father got the money through unspecified crimes), and now returns as an adult to a place once closed to him.

The flashbacks to that summer are more fun, but they too dodge the weight of the loss of his wife. At first he falls in love with Chloe’s mother, and the Lolita parallels are almost laugh-out-loud funny. He has scant interest in Chloe, who is his own age and vaguely interested in him, but rather trails the mother, drawn to her middle-age, post-pregnancy fullness. Eventually he discovers that he is indeed attracted to Chloe, and their adolescent romance is quirky and interesting. He doesn’t fall in love all at once but rather plays their summer games into affection.

[SPOILER] As the book comes to a close, though we discover that Chloe and her brother were swept away to sea in the rising tide referenced in the first sentence. Max has lost her before he has really known her, and his trip back to the beach community has been as much about giving himself permission to mourn Chloe as to mourn his wife.

As I describe that, I find it moving and admirable. As I read it, though, I kept waiting for the nature of the mourning – or some indication of the avoidance of mourning – to present itself. Instead, the book seemed to me always on the brink of becoming something else, some deep literary puzzle that demanded a riddle-like solution rather than an emotional coming-to-terms.

[SPOILER: It’s a small point, but I am troubled by how little Banville/Max does with the late-revealed fact that his present-day landlady is Chloe’s one-time nanny. That seems an opportunity for another perspective on loss, for someone else to try to understand how the death of another can transform a survivor’ life, but it just lands and does little more.

I chose this book because it’s supposed to be Banville’s best – and because I have never known the Booker-Prize winners to disappoint – and because everything I read about Banville told me I was sure to like his work. I’m inclined to give him another chance because his reputation is so high and because I realize I am missing some of the cleverness tying the whole together, but I worry I may simply be the wrong reader to give him the sympathy he’s asking for with such skill.




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