The Sea
by John Banville
Summary
Max Morden, a retired art historian, has gone back to the seaside village where his family took cheap lodgings the summer he was eleven. His wife has recently died of cancer, and he is drinking steadily in a boarding house called the Cedars, which fifty years earlier was the holiday home of the Grace family.
Two griefs run in parallel. One is Anna's illness, told in exact and unbearable domestic detail: the consultations, the wig, the last weeks. The other is that summer, and the twins Chloe and Myles Grace, and what happened at the end of it, which Max has arranged his memory around ever since.
Banville is a prose stylist above everything, and this is the reason to read him and the reason some readers cannot. The sentences are elaborate, the vocabulary reaches for words most novelists would not use, and Max is a snob and frequently unpleasant. If that sounds intolerable it will be. If it sounds like a pleasure, few living novelists write better sentences.
It is short, slow and almost plotless until the final pages, when a revelation lands that recasts the summer entirely. Read it for the language and the grief rather than for the story.
At around two hundred pages it is a good introduction to a writer many readers admire more than they enjoy. If you find the first ten pages beautiful you will love it, and if you find them airless you should stop, because it does not change. Banville later wrote crime fiction under the name Benjamin Black, at speed, precisely to escape the sentence by sentence perfectionism on display here.
Historical Context & Significance
The Sea won the Booker Prize in 2005 as an outsider, and the decision remains one of the most argued about in the prize's history.
The shortlist was formidable, with Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Zadie Smith, Julian Barnes, Ali Smith and Sebastian Barry. Reports at the time had the judges reduced to a choice between Banville and Ishiguro, settled only by the casting vote of the chair, John Sutherland.
There was a symmetry in it. Banville's The Book of Evidence had been shortlisted in 1989 and lost to Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, so the two writers had now been set against each other twice, sixteen years apart, with one win each. Banville's own remark that it was nice to see a work of art win the prize did not reduce the controversy.