The Sea - John Banville
The 2005
Booker Prize winner, The Sea is
written by Irish author John Banville.
This book
is much shorter than Staying On was,
and much quicker to read style-wise as well. I started reading it one evening
and was finished two days later. The structure of the story is also more
“modern”; both Staying On and The Sea are told in a non-linear fashion,
jumping back and forth in time, but whereas Staying
On would stay in one time period for a whole section, The Sea jumps from one time to another mid-paragraph.
The story
is told as memories by the main character, Max, and feels almost
stream-of-consciousness at times. Reminiscing on his childhood will remind him
of time with his wife, before something in the “present” will catch his
attention – and the narrative. To start with, this threw me off balance; I took
a while to get my bearings on exactly what I was reading, and which time period
I was in at any given point in the narrative, but it feels as though the author
has done this intentionally.
There are
three main time periods that the book, and Max, focus on: his summer holidays
at a beach and the holidaying family he interacts with there as an
eleven-year-old, his memories of watching his wife die, and the ‘present’ time
of living in a quasi-retirement home back at the beach from his childhood
memories. It seems clear that the stories of his childhood are going to have a
great impact on his adult life, but the book doesn't reveal the reasons for
this until the final few pages, with an event that is both deeply traumatising,
and slightly unbelievable. Reflecting on the book a few days later, I'm still
not sure exactly what I feel about this final event. There is a sense in which
the book has been foreshadowing it, and elements of its sordidness feel
entirely appropriate to the characters, and yet the final decisions of two of
the characters involved in this moment still feel too extreme to me. Does it have impact? Yes. Does it explain why
Max would struggle in some areas of his adult life? Yes. But does it really fit the characters…? Maybe…
The big
themes in The Sea closely match the
big themes in Staying On: a life not
lived to its full potential (though Max is a lot more settled in his life
decisions than Tusker and Lilly were), relationships that have “hung on”
without the early spark, loss, death… Both also contain that sordid element, The Sea more so than Staying On (which may be due to the time
period written in).
Completed 18 June 2017.
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