The relentless examination of the self amid ghastly or comically lively surroundings has long been a force in Banville's novels about divided, self-loathing men...Max can't be classed with them. He isn't worse than most men, as Banville's men usually are; his sins are common ones, though maybe not venial. He pays close attention to everything but the most important things, and he grants himself slack that he feels is paid for by his bleak self-contempt, though of course it isn't. Without that near-psychotic division at work in Banville's other characters, the animated world in this book seems to have been built up for its own sake … Max recounts with impossible exactness the passing of that summer and his own sensations of remembering.
As Michael Cunningham's The Hours was to Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, so, roughly, is The Sea to [Henry James’] The Turn of the Screw. It is deconstruction and homage at once, an utterly contemporary novel that nonetheless could only have come from a mind steeped in the history of the novel and deeply reflective about what makes fiction still worthwhile … Max becomes a character in a story of his own making. No longer merely a narrator, he becomes a true author. He resumes control. He gets what he came for. The unsayable is said at last.
The idea is to suspend us in a lyrical trance while we wait – and wait and wait – for the penny to drop. Banville can do this trick, and in the first half of The Sea he lays on the atmosphere as thickly as a smoke-and-mirrors illusionist. His descriptive passages are dense and almost numbingly gorgeous … What's strangest about The Sea is that the novel somehow becomes simpler and clearer as it gets more self-conscious: a consequence, I suppose, of its author dropping the pretense of being one kind of writer and giving in to his authentic and much more complicated creative nature. This misshapen but affecting novel turns out to be about something even more familiar than the loss of innocence: it's about grief, the misery and confusion the narrator feels on losing his wife.
...a stilted, claustrophobic and numbingly pretentious tale about an aging widower revisiting his past … Max talks like someone with a thesaurus permanently implanted in his brain: his monologue is studded with words like ‘leporine,’ ‘strangury,’ ‘perpetuance,’ ‘finical,’ ‘flocculent,’ ‘anthropic,’ ‘Avrilaceous,’ ‘anaglypta’ and ‘assegais.’ Perhaps Max's grandiose language is meant to signify some sort of psychic defense mechanism on his part, but it's uncannily similar to the language employed by characters in Mr. Banville's earlier books. And together with his almost comical self-absorption, it makes Max sound like an annoying Peter Handke character on a bad day. Equally irritating is Max's penchant for describing and redescribing everyone in his life and everything he sees in minute physical detail that radiates a prissy disgust for the human body.
Max joins a growing throng of Banville's arch and unreliable narrators. Formerly from the lowest strata of society, he's married money and turned himself into someone who uses words like ‘flocculent’ and ‘crepitant’ … Elegantly worded, the novel still has some flaws. The ‘mystic twin’ connection has been done and overdone, and the climactic events may leave readers scratching their heads and flipping back a few pages to see if they missed something. But those who love language will still want to dive into The Sea.
Reconstruction through memory is Morden's drug: he binges on it and on grief, booze and writing. The sea is where his first love disappeared and where he is now disappearing. The sea is memory itself, its high rising tides are what threaten to drown the present and even the past. Like memory, the sea has a life of its own … In this scopic world, people become things. Morden prefers it that way: ‘What are living beings, compared to the enduring intensity of mere things?’ It's not only the intensity of things that Morden likes perhaps, but the fact that they don't speak. In speech, living beings expect to be understood on their own terms. The sudden dramatic turn of Morden's memories hinges, it transpires, on a colossal misunderstanding, as we see at the novel's end.
The Sea is a stylish novel. Banville, former literary editor of the Irish Times, is a master of language skills. He offers word choices, alliterative phrases and vivid descriptions that seem to reinvent the use of the alphabet … If this brief novel were little more than style without substance, it would not be worth much attention except as an exercise in rhetoric. Banville is too fine a writer to provide just the sizzle. His simple story line and subtle plot structure blend with a mesmerizing narrative voice to reveal a complex memoir of love, grief and a ‘journey of surpassing but inexplicable importance’ … As The Sea approaches its bombshell of an ending, Banville masterfully melds the past with the present, allowing Max to find strength in what remains behind.
The novel is a mystery, and Banville solves it bit by bit … The Sea is eerily accurate in describing how children on the cusp of adolescence perceive the world and the adults who rule it. Banville doesn't offer us the happy Victorian fantasy that childhood is a realm of innocence and joy. Instead, the young narrator watches the grown-ups with the fanatic surveillance of a Cold War spy. Like Nabokov, Banville describes everything with the precision of a scientist and the language of a poet … The Sea offers an extraordinary meditation on mortality, grief, death, childhood and memory. It's not a comfortable novel, but it is undeniably brilliant.
Max Morden is a middle-aged widower struggling a year after his wife's death with loneliness and instability. Without Anna, whose wealth supported his indifferent career as an art writer, Morden is ‘at sea,’ adrift and determined to suffer as a victim ...Banville delves into the psyche of a soul unwilling to give up the past because he's emotionally unable to move on. This novel is so confined and static, despite its passages of lyric language, that it can't grasp the larger subject of the power of loss to transform its characters.
...a piece of violent poetry – an autumnal, elegiac novel whose desolate story is carried along by the sweet and stormy tides of its exquisite, sometimes too exquisite, prose … Never did a novel seem so fey from its beginning, with its dark, raging tides and its white-haired children, and yet the power of Banville's prose – as gorgeously formidable as the cliffs on the Irish Sea – distracts us from the truth, which is that the narrator, unlucky bloke that he may be, is not a likable man … The Sea is treacherously smart, and haunting, and its story of a ravaged self in search of a reason to go on is cloaked in wave after wave of magnificent but hardly consoling prose.
The story, such as it is, is narrated by one Max Morden (not quite, we are told quite late on, the name he was christened with), a widowed art historian, who is returning to a seaside boarding-house he once knew as a child on the cusp of adolescence. He has arrived there in order to deal with, in some roundabout way, the death of his wife from cancer. But the reason he lodges at Miss Vavasour's comically moribund guest-house is also because, when he was young, Something Happened there, and the novel only reveals what that was at the end … This is not so much a novel about memory as an examination of what it is to have a memory at all, to have had experiences that seem to be on the brink of slipping away.
The Sea is a dual narrative combining the ‘present-day’ life of Max Morden – an aging dilettante art historian – with his memories … Through the novel’s fitful movements back and forth there is a disquieting feeling of trouble, but it is curiously lacking in incident. Nearing the end, things start to happen, new revelations tumble out, and though they are believable, they threaten to overbalance the plot … At the end, Max is leaving The Cedars, with secrets revealed and, apparently, the past redeemed. But the strength of The Sea is not in what Max does or even what he remembers doing a half-century earlier, but in his voice and Banville’s brilliant creation of atmosphere.
Here Banville is repeating himself, most conspicuously by repeating himself—the Irishman’s most recent run of novels has become perplexingly reiterative. The Sea’s narrator, Max Morden, is a familiar permutation of earlier Banville protagonists found in The Untouchable, Eclipse, and Shroud … Banville’s famously torrid affair with his thesaurus has previously birthed erudite but emotionally delimited characters, whose fierce powers of observation and description are rendered poignantly meaningless by failings of moral temperament, but The Sea nudges this pathos toward parody.
There’s nothing sportive, coruscating or especially witty in this book. Like everything else by Mr. Banville that I’ve read (and liked), the novel is founded in the gradual uncovering of true, if shy, feeling … This is the point at which I should remind you that John Banville’s The Sea has just won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in London. Now, there have been Banville works in the past that I could see winning prizes, and I don’t doubt his ability in the future to write masterpieces. But The Sea has me marooned.
As in all Banville novels, things are not what they seem. Max's cruelly capricious complicity in the sad history that unfolds, and the facts kept hidden from the reader until the shocking denouement, brilliantly dramatize the unpredictability of life and the incomprehensibility of death. Like the strange high tide that figures into Max's visions and remembrances, this novel sweeps the reader into the inexorable waxing and waning of life.
