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Banville's magnificent new novel, which won this year's Man Booker
Prize and is being rushed into print by Knopf, presents a man mourning his
wife's recent death-and his blighted life. "The past beats inside me like
a second heart," observes Max Morden early on, and his return to the
seaside resort where he lost his innocence gradually yields the objects of
his nostalgia. Max's thoughts glide swiftly between the events of his
wife's final illness and the formative summer, 50 years past, when the
Grace family-father, mother and twins Chloe and Myles-lived in a villa in
the seaside town where Max and his quarreling parents rented a dismal
"chalet." Banville seamlessly juxtaposes Max's youth and age, and each
scene is rendered with the intense visual acuity of a photograph ("the mud
shone blue as a new bruise"). 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. |
