All at sea
John Banville is a man of uncompromising literary ideals. Speaking of his success at last week’s Man Booker Prize ceremony • a literary coup that has astonished critics, insiders and bookies alike • the Irish author said, ‘It’s nice to see a work of art winning the Booker Prize • whether it’s a good work of art or a bad one, it’s what I intended it to be’.
His winning novel, The Sea, unquestionably carries a weight of Irish lyricism, although some critics have claimed that this is no more than the self-conscious weight of volumes of Joyce and Beckett on Banville’s shelves. Having beaten both Julian Barnes’ Arthur and George and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go to one of literature’s biggest prizes, this is a novel that still has much to prove.
The novel’s art-historian narrator, Max Morden, has lost his wife to cancer and, in his flight from bereavement, returns to the Irish coastal resort where he had spent childhood holidays. Staying in the house once occupied by a wealthy family, Morden spends solitary days enmeshing himself in tangled half-memories.
The narrative is an expertly-constructed meditation on the nature of grief, love and the past, yet the banality of its content - the standard tropes of the bereaved fifty-something writer, the haunting memories, the house by the sea • lays the novel open to the suspicion that, despite some ravishing poetry, it doesn’t add up to much in the way of a novel.
Morden’s memory of his first kiss with Chloe is a typical moment: ‘I felt as if we were flying, without effort, dream-slowly, through the dense, powdery darkness’. Yet Banville’s high-flown lyricism is offset by a note of barely-contained sadism • Max and Chloe viciously torture insects, animals, and other children • hints that there are darker impulses in the writing. This is a novel very interested in literary effect.
It is a meditation on grief, love and memory, but it is also disturbingly astute in its conception of them as literary inventions. Banville subtly suggests that love exists only as the product of a gorgeously lyrical pen, the memory of a lost past only as the literary interweaving of past and present tenses. Morden’s narrative is the product of his desperation to construct verbally a life and a self which are curiously voided.
Morden says, ‘what I found in Anna from the first was a way of fulfilling the fantasy of myself’ The ravishing stream of words that articulate his grief, his love, his past (who is this unexceptional man, anyway, to have such language at his disposal?) mask Morden’s, and perhaps Banville’s, dread of emptiness. Such a grimly Beckettian world view saves Banville’s novel from its middle-aged, middleclass content • but only just.
3rd Nov 2005