John Banville - The Sea

I don’t know what possessed me to pick up this book in the first place, as I’d never heard of Banville before. Perhaps it was the simplicity of the title and the Magritte-esque cover, and of course, that stamp of approval on the bottom right hand corner: “Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2005”.

What struck me most through reading this book was Banville’s prose…extremely elegant and at times esoteric as well. He uses words that I have never even seen before. “Blench” for example. I stupidly have always thought it was spelled “blanche”. Parboiled, leporine, lummox, costiveness, anthropic, polyp, vulgate, apercus. Words I’ve seen but forgotten: recreant, traduced, crapulent…so many, sometimes you feel like Banville’s choice of words is an angry onslaught to catch the reader offguard. You can almost imagine him spitting each distinct syllable of these foreign words at his ignobly ignorant readers, of which I am one. He demands an exercise of the brain and I like that.

Another distinction with his prose…he has no chapters. Just a part I and a part II. He slides in and out of scenes, memories, time periods, point of views in a quick turn of the pen and you feel securely seatbelted behind his mind’s eye, as it takes you for a ride. There are surprising moments, catches in his plot, points where you draw a sharp intake of breath as the twist dawns upon you, but it’s not the plot that keeps you going, but rather, the meandering vein of his prose.

The storyline circles around the grieving process of Max Morden, who has just lost his wife to cancer. Yet in grieving for his Anna, Max finds himself wandering through his childhood and past griefs. The intertwining of his adulthood and childhood forms a unique perspective as you trace the outlines of his mind. Unexpectedly, anger will boil up to the forefront, prompting him to address the dead Anna directly with foul epithets you wouldn’t think Max Morden could be capable of.

One particular passage that struck a chord for me…there is a moment when Max’s anger erupts in an all too familiar question that once ran through my mind during my early stages of grief. He demands of Anna, “Why have you not come back to haunt me? It is the least I would have expected from you. Why this silence, day after day, night after interminable night?…Send back your ghost. Torment me, if you like. Rattle your chains, drag your cerements across the floor, keen like a banshee, anything. I would have a ghost.”

All in all, the man has a succinct an elegant style that makes you keep reading. His perspectives are wide-ranging, sometimes you are deep in his neuroses, other times reading what seems to be just a straightforward, subjective account of a summer’s day. Which is so indicative of how one’s mind usually works…completely randomly. Deep one minute, then fixated on some superfluous detail in the next. He commands your attention by the very power of his prose and you follow, mesmerized in this alternate reality he weaves.