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John Banville's 'The Sea'
Review Date: OCTOBER 15, 2005
Category: NONE
Classification: ONLINE EXCLUSIVE
Prestige incarnate, though second-guessing and backbiting invariably attend its annual shortlists—as they generally omit some stellar eminence (e.g., Salman Rushdie). The awarding of this year’s Man Booker to veteran author John Banville’s novel The Sea will not, of course, silence the contrarians. For the anointed book is a curious performance, albeit a logical, indeed inevitable development from the 12 novels that preceded it.
Banville, who was born in Ireland in 1945 and is the former literary editor of The Irish Times, won The James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Doctor Copernicus (1976), the first of a trilogy—including Kepler (1981) and The Newton Letter (1982)—concerned with the forerunners of modern science. Another loose trilogy comprises the Booker-shortlisted The Book of Evidence (1989)—in which a Dostoevskyan murderer pleads the case for rational nihilism—Ghosts (1993) and Athena (1995).
The immediately aforementioned books have been favorably compared to Samuel Beckett’s novels, and confirmed a growing reputation that peaked with The Untouchable (1997), Banville’s chilling fictionalization of the life and mind of British spy Anthony Blunt. That antihero was an art historian—as, in a way, is The Sea’s protagonist-narrator Max Morden, a self-described “middling man” working erratically on a study of French painter Pierre Bonnard, whose nostalgic romanticism fits exactly the pattern of reminiscence and recrimination that structures The Sea. For Max has returned, following his wife Anna’s death from cancer, to the seaside resort town where he spent childhood summers and encountered the flamboyant family of “gods,” the socially prominent Graces: father Carlo, his Rubens-like wife Constance and their twins Chloe and (non-speaking) Myles.
In a beautifully composed narrative that shifts among multiple time frames and obsessive preoccupations, Max ponders his difficult relationships with the late Anna and their unhappy adult daughter Claire, while reliving his pre-adolescent fixation on Connie Grace’s overpowering femininity and Chloe’s predatory nascent sexuality, and on the adulterous incident that Max misunderstood and misrepresented (in an ironic echo of L.P. Hartley’s classic portrayal of tortured adolescence, The Go-Between), thus imperiling the idyll that had fed his hungry imagination.
Numerous other allusions (to Shakespeare, Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Henry James and Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea) both enrich and stall the momentum of a meditative fiction certain to uphold the tradition of Booker Prize controversy. To some, The Sea, which Knopf has moved up on its release schedule (to Nov. 8), will seem the rightful culmination of an industrious and admirable writing lifetime. To others, it may appear to be a book made out of other books.
—Bruce Allen
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Copyright 2005 Kirkus Reviews
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 | Talk Like a Man: Robert B. Parker Tribute
January 15, 2010 - I still remember the first time I heard Spenser's voice ring out in the opening chapter of The Godwulf Manuscript (1973), as he razzes the college president who's trying to hire him. What's this guy's problem? I thought. Why does he have such an attitude? The attitude, I soon learned, had deep roots...Part of it was a temperamental similarity to Spenser's creator, Robert B. Parker, who died on Jan. 18th at age 77.
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