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Although I have only read three of John Banville's novels, I can
understand why `The Sea' won the Man Booker Prize. The writing is both
mystical and enlightening. And the novel is aptly titled. The first
sentence refers to the day the gods departed on the strange tide and ends
resonating the novel's first paragraph: the essential strangeness and yet
welcoming familiarity of the sea, which, during the course of the novel,
becomes metaphor for life, death, yearning and love.
Max Mordan,
beyond middle age, made sadly old by the long and painful death of his
wife Anne, returns to the resort town of his childhood where he spent two
weeks every summer with a father who would later desert them and a mother
who could never forgive. Though not entirely clear, the seaside town seems
to hover somewhere between England or Ireland. It is clannish self-serving
and self-contained redolent with all vices of the fifties, sustained by
prejudice: a caste system in which the inhabitants are divided between
renters and owners, and those, who like the Graces, stayed in hotels and
those like Max, who didn't. But who instead shared three shabby rooms, a
chemical toilet and paraffin stove.
Max and Anne both of them large,
big-boned, and sensitive, have one thing in common -- each other. Looking
back like a drowning man Max sees his life reel by and tells us that what
sustained the marriage was the commitment they made their relationship
that they could be anything they wanted.
While part of the novel
deals with their relationship it also weaves in the relationship between
the Grace twins: Chloe and Myles. The two gods Max envied and so
desperately wanted to emulate.
Years later, Max would return with
his daughter Claire and a tearful scene concerning her own awkward
relationships. Another time he would bring Anne. Therefore following her
death is seems both natural and predictable that he would return. The
Cedars rooming house as bereft and nondescript as ever but where Max had
first met Grace family. This is what Max wants. What he needs to remember,
and in time, relive. The place he has never forgotten, where one summer
long ago he became part of a tribal and sexual initiation that had ended
in tragedy. And where, another young woman, much like Max had never quite
belonged either.
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