The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Sea, by John Banville
reviewed by Steven G. Kellman

Knopf, 2005. 208 pp. $23.00.

Max Morden made a vocation out of a remonstration. At seven, preparing for his First Communion, Max was admonished by a zealous priest to eschew the mortal sin of looking. Nevertheless, he became an art historian. More than fifty years later, he returns to the seaside site where his penchant for observing people unobserved produced consequences he could not foresee. A year after the death of his wife, Anna, Max takes up residence in the Cedars, the boarding house in seaside Ballyless where he first—and last—encountered the Graces, an affluent family who seemed, in the eyes of an awestruck boy, the very embodiment of their name. His eyes were drawn to Constance Grace’s seasoned flesh, while he consorted with her peculiar twins, Chloe and Myles. Max’s sinuous narrative keeps circling back to the dramatic summer in which he was initiated into the mysteries of eros and extinction. At present, when he is more likely to tipple than type another page of his monograph on painter Pierre Bonnard, he describes himself as “a person of scant talent and scanter ambition, greyed o’er by the years, uncertain and astray and in need of consolation and the brief respite of drink-induced oblivion.” Max’s ungainly daughter Claire, who disappointed him by abandoning her studies in art, accuses him of living in the past, and, at least to himself, he admits: “The past beats inside me like a second heart.” It is a powerful beat. Claire cannot understand what drives Max to take up residence in an antiquated house whose only permanent inhabitants are a stiff old gent called Colonel Blunden and the lodging’s prim manager, Miss Vavasour. Nor does she fathom what draws her widowed father, who does not swim, back to the sea. Until the end of John Banville’s novel, neither does the reader. Max, who dreams he owns a typewriter without the letter “i,” longs to vanish in an act of penitential self-effacement. Like Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, he explains: “I am like a man with an agonising toothache who despite the pain takes a vindictive pleasure in prodding the point of his tongue again and again deep into the throbbing cavity.” And his last name, Morden, suggests the mordancy of a troubled man who enjoys gnawing on what annoys him (Banville delights in Dickensian onomastics; when he reveals that the physician who diagnoses Anna with terminal cancer is named Todd, we are told: “This can only be considered a joke in bad taste on the part of polyglot fate”). Anna, whose name commemorates the transitory years, photographs unwilling patients in the hospital ward where she is dying. As scopophilic as her husband Max, she says the images she collects are her indictment of everything. An exercise in repetition compulsion, The Sea demands a reader willing to chew over its sumptuous but elliptical sentences, in quest of all there is to learn of Max.