|
Although I have only read three of John Banville's novels, I can understand why `The Sea' won the Man Booker Prize. The writing is both mystical and enlightening. And the novel is aptly titled. The first sentence refers to the day the gods departed on the strange tide and ends resonating the novel's first paragraph: the essential strangeness and yet welcoming familiarity of the sea, which, during the course of the novel, becomes metaphor for life, death, yearning and love.
Max Mordan, beyond middle age, made sadly old by the long and painful death of his wife Anne, returns to the resort town of his childhood where he spent two weeks every summer with a father who would later desert them and a mother who could never forgive. Though not entirely clear, the seaside town seems to hover somewhere between England or Ireland. It is clannish self-serving and self-contained redolent with all vices of the fifties, sustained by prejudice: a caste system in which the inhabitants are divided between renters and owners, and those, who like the Graces, stayed in hotels and those like Max, who didn't. But who instead shared three shabby rooms, a chemical toilet and paraffin stove.
Max and Anne both of them large, big-boned, and sensitive, have one thing in common -- each other. Looking back like a drowning man Max sees his life reel by and tells us that what sustained the marriage was the commitment they made their relationship that they could be anything they wanted.
While part of the novel deals with their relationship it also weaves in the relationship between the Grace twins: Chloe and Myles. The two gods Max envied and so desperately wanted to emulate.
Years later, Max would return with his daughter Claire and a tearful scene concerning her own awkward relationships. Another time he would bring Anne. Therefore following her death is seems both natural and predictable that he would return. The Cedars rooming house as bereft and nondescript as ever but where Max had first met Grace family. This is what Max wants. What he needs to remember, and in time, relive. The place he has never forgotten, where one summer long ago he became part of a tribal and sexual initiation that had ended in tragedy. And where, another young woman, much like Max had never quite belonged either.
|
