 The Sea book cover | |
| Author | John Banville |
|---|---|
| Country | Ireland |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | Picador |
Publication date | 3 June 2005 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| Pages | 200 pp (hardcover) |
| ISBN | 0-330-48328-5 |
| OCLC | 60419387 |
The Sea is a 2005 novel by John Banville. His fourteenth novel, it won the 2005 Booker Prize. [1]
The story is told by Max Morden, a self-aware, retired art historian attempting to reconcile himself to the deaths of those he loved as a child and as an adult.
The novel is written as a reflective journal; the setting always in flux, wholly dependent upon the topic or theme Max feels inclined to write about. Despite the constant fluctuations, Max returns to three settings: his childhood memories of the Graces—a wealthy middle-class family living in a rented cottage home, the "Cedars"—during the summer holidays; the months leading up to the death of his wife, Anna; and his present stay at the Cedars cottage home in Ballyless—where he has retreated since Anna's death. These three settings are heavily diced and jumbled together for the novel's entire duration.
Max's final days with Anna were awkward; Max does not know how to act with his soon-to-be-dead wife. Scenes of Anna's dying days are more full of commentary than with actual details, as are most of the novel's settings. It's through these commentaries that we learn of Max's choice to return to the cottage of his childhood memories (after Anna's death), confirming that a room would be available for residence during a visit with his adult daughter, Claire.
We learn of the Cedars' current house-maid, Miss Vavasour, and her other tenant: a retired army Colonel, often described as a background character (even during his important role in the denouement). The Colonel is also seen, at the beginning of Max's stay, to have a crush on Miss Vavasour; Max suspects Miss Vavasour had entertained the Colonel's slight infatuation prior to Max's own arrival.
Despite the actual present day setting of the novel (everything is written by Max, after Anna's death, while he stays in the Cedars' house), the underlying motivation to Max's redaction of memories, the single setting which ties the novel together, are Max's childhood memories. With Max's unreliable, unorganised and omitted iteration of events, we gradually learn the names of the Graces: Chloe, the wild daughter; Myles, the mute brother; Connie, the mother; Carlo, the father; and finally the twins' nursemaid, Rose. After brief encounters, and fruitless moments of curiosity, Max becomes infatuated with Connie Grace upon first sight; seeing her lounging at the beach launches him to acquaint Chloe and Myles in, what Max stipulates to have been a conscious effort to get inside the Cedars, hence, closer to Mrs. Grace. He succeeds. Later, Max recounts being invited on a picnic—for what reasons or what specific time during the summer is never explicitly stated—where Max, in awe, catches an unkempt glance at her pelvic area. This day of "illicit invitation" climaxes when Max is pulled to the ground, and snuggled closely with Connie and Rose in a game of hide-and-seek.
The latter half of his summer memories (the relation of Max's memories in the second part of the novel), however, revolve around Max's awkward relationship with Chloe: a girl with a disabled personality and blunt demeanor whom Max describes as one who "[does] not play, on her own or otherwise". Chloe is shown as a volatile character: flagrantly kissing Max in a Cinema, rough-housing with her brother Myles, and what was hinted as hypersexuality earlier, is quite possibly confirmed as hypersexuality in the book's final moments.
We soon learn that Chloe and Myles like to tease Rose, who is young and timid enough to feel bullied. Max, another day, climbs a tree in the yard of the Cedars' house, and soon spots Rose crying not too far from him. Mrs. Grace soon emerges, comforting Rose. Max overhears (rather, Max remembers overhearing) key words from their conversation: "love him" and "Mr. Grace". Assuming this to mean Rose and Mr. Grace are having an affair, he tells Chloe and Myles. The ending of the book entwines the exact moment of Anna's death with Chloe and Myles drowning in the sea itself as Max and Rose look on. Max, done with his childhood memories, offers a final memory of a near-death episode while he was inebriated. The Colonel does not physically save Max, rather finds him knocked unconscious by a rock (from a drunken stumble). His daughter scolds him at the hospital, assumingly being told he nearly killed himself, and tells him to come home with her. It is revealed at this point that Miss Vavasour is Rose herself and she was in love with Mrs. Grace. Max finishes with a redaction of himself standing in the sea after Anna's death (an allegory is made between crashing waves and tumultuous periods of his life). We are to assume that he will leave the Cedars' home to be cared for by his daughter, Claire.
Banville described the book as "a direct return to my childhood, to when I was ten or so. The book is set in a fictionalized Rosslare, the seaside village where we went every summer as children. Looking back now it seems idyllic, though I'm sure ninety-five percent of the experience was absolute, grinding boredom". The book also began in the third person—" Shroud was the latest in a series of novels of mine in the first person, all of them about men in trouble. I knew I had to find a new direction. So I started to write The Sea in the third person. It was going to be very short, seventy pages or so, and solely about childhood holidays at the seaside—very bare. I worked on it for about eighteen months, but I couldn't get it to work. And then, out of nowhere, the first-person narrative voice made itself heard again." [2] The Sea was completed in September 2004.
The book received generally positive among critics. On Metacritic, the book received a 73 out of 100 based on 25 critic reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews". [3]
The poet Michael Longley expressed admiration for The Sea, and described Banville as "a wonderful writer". [4] During an interview conducted several years after the death of his friend Seamus Heaney, Longley recalled: "I remember Seamus saying when The Sea came out, he said to me, 'Isn't it wonderful to be part of a culture that produces prose as good as that?' I told Banville what Heaney had said. Do you know what Banville said to me? 'Did he really say that? Did he?!'" Longley munched upon a biscuit, and added: "We're all like schoolboys, really". [4]
The book continued to receive acclaim among many critics lists after and during its time of release. According to The Greatest Books, a site that aggregates book lists, it is "The 1021st greatest book of all time". [5]
The novel won the Booker Prize for 2005. The selection of The Sea for the Booker Prize was a satisfying victory for Banville, as his novel The Book of Evidence was shortlisted in 1989 but lost to The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. Ishiguro was again on the shortlist in 2005 with his novel Never Let Me Go . In fact, it was reported in The Times that they had whittled the shortlist down to those two novels and it was only the chair John Sutherland's casting vote that decided the winner. The choice of Banville as winner of the award was not seen as a populist choice, causing Banville to ponder: "If they give me the bloody prize, why can't they say nice things about me?" [1] Banville's surprise win was described by Boyd Tonkin as "possibly the most perverse decision in the history of the award", [6] though others defended the choice, citing the lyrical, stylistic prose as making the book worthy of the award. [7]
In his acceptance speech Banville expressed his pleasure at a work of art winning the prize, a statement that led to him being accused of arrogance. He later explained, "Whether The Sea is a successful work of art is not for me to say, but a work of art is what I set out to make. The kind of novels that I write very rarely win the Man Booker Prize [as it was then referred to], which in general promotes good, middlebrow fiction." [2]
Rick Gekoski, one of the Booker judges who argued for The Sea, later wrote in its defence: "'It is a work of art, in the tradition of high modernism, and I'll bet it will still be read and admired in 75 years". [8]
A film adaptation has been shot, with Banville having penned the script. It is directed by Stephen Brown and stars Ciarán Hinds (Max Morden), Rufus Sewell (Carlo Grace), Charlotte Rampling (Miss Vavasour), and Natascha McElhone (Connie Grace). It is produced by Luc Roeg and scored by Andrew Hewitt, with cinematography by John Conroy.
The Booker Prize, formerly the Booker Prize for Fiction (1969–2001) and the Man Booker Prize (2002–2019), is a prestigious literary award conferred each year for the best single work of sustained fiction written in the English language, which was published in the United Kingdom and/or Ireland. The winner of the Booker Prize receives £50,000, as well as international publicity that usually leads to a significant sales boost. When the prize was created, only novels written by Commonwealth, Irish, and South African citizens were eligible to receive the prize; in 2014, eligibility was widened to any English-language novel—a change that proved controversial.
Sir Kazuo Ishiguro is a British novelist, screenwriter, musician, and short-story writer. He is one of the most critically acclaimed and praised contemporary fiction authors writing in English, having been awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its citation, the Swedish Academy described Ishiguro as a writer "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world".
John Robert Fowles was an English novelist of international renown, critically positioned between modernism and postmodernism. His work was influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, among others.
John Maxwell Coetzee FRSL OMG is a South African and Australian novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is one of the most critically acclaimed and decorated authors in the English language. He has won the Booker Prize (twice), the CNA Literary Award (thrice), the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina étranger, and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and holds a number of other awards and honorary doctorates.
The first Irish prose fiction, in the form of legendary stories, appeared in the Irish language as early as the seventh century, along with chronicles and lives of saints in Irish and Latin. Such fiction was an adaptation and elaboration of earlier oral material and was the work of a learned class who had acquired literacy with the coming of Latin Christianity. A number of these stories were still available in manuscripts of the late medieval period and even as late as the nineteenth century, though poetry was by that time the main literary vehicle of the Irish language.
A vavasour is a term in feudal law. A vavasour was the vassal or tenant of a baron, one who held his tenancy under a baron, and who also had tenants under him.
William John Banville is an Irish novelist, short story writer, adapter of dramas and screenwriter. Though he has been described as "the heir to Proust, via Nabokov", Banville himself maintains that W. B. Yeats and Henry James are the two real influences on his work.
Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian-American novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, was published in 1994 and went on to become an Oprah's Book Club selection. Danticat has since written or edited several books and has been the recipient of many awards and honors. As of the fall of 2023, she will be the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.
Khaled Hosseini is an Afghan-American novelist, UNHCR goodwill ambassador, and former physician. His debut novel The Kite Runner (2003) was a critical and commercial success; the book and his subsequent novels have all been at least partially set in Afghanistan and have featured an Afghan as the protagonist. Hosseini's novels have enlightened the global audience about Afghanistan's people and culture.
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt is a Franco-Belgian playwright, short story writer and novelist, as well as a film director. His plays have been staged in over fifty countries all over the world.
The Book of Evidence is a 1989 novel by John Banville. Many of the characters in The Book of Evidence appear in the 1993 sequel Ghosts.
Ghosts is a 1993 novel by John Banville. It was his first novel since 1989's The Book of Evidence, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The second in what Banville described as a "triptych", to make "an investigation of the way in which the imagination works." This novel features many of the same characters and relates to events of the previous novel.
Mayer Kirshenblatt (1916–2009) was a Polish-born Canadian self-taught painter and author of Jewish origin.
Shroud is a 2002 novel by John Banville. It is the second book in the Alexander and Cass Cleave Trilogy, which also contains the novels Eclipse, published in 2000, and Ancient Light, published in 2012.
Richard Abraham Gekoski is an American-born British writer, broadcaster, rare book dealer and a former member of the English Department at Warwick University.
Van Gogh's family in his art refers to works that Vincent van Gogh made for or about Van Gogh family members. In 1881, Vincent drew a portrait of his grandfather, also named Vincent van Gogh, and his sister Wil. While living in Nuenen, Vincent memorialized his father in Still Life with Bible following his death in 1885. There he also made many paintings and drawings in 1884 and 1885 of his parents' vicarage, its garden and the church. At the height of his career in Arles he made Portrait of the Artist's Mother, Memory of the Garden at Etten of his mother and sister and Novel Reader, which is thought to be of his sister, Wil.
Eclipse is a 2000 novel by John Banville. Its dense lyrical style and unorthodox structure have prompted some to describe it as more prose poem than novel. Along with Shroud and Ancient Light, it comprises a trilogy concerning actor Alexander Cleave and his estranged daughter Cass.
The Sea is a 2013 British-Irish drama film directed by Stephen Brown. It is based on the novel of the same name by John Banville, who also wrote the screenplay for the film. The film premiered in competition at the Edinburgh International Film Festival on 23 June 2013. The film had its North American premiere at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival.
Mark O'Connell is an Irish author and journalist. His debut book, To Be A Machine, was published in 2017, followed by Notes From an Apocalypse in 2020. His third book, A Thread of Violence, was published in 2023. He has written for publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, and The Guardian. He is also the author of the Kindle Single Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever, as well as an academic study of the novels of John Banville.
The Singularities is a novel by the Irish author John Banville, published in 2022. It is based on characters and themes from the author's earlier novels. Felix Mordaunt, sentenced to life for murder, has been released from prison. He goes to visit his childhood home which is now occupied by Adam and Helen Godley, a middle aged couple. Adam's late father, Adam senior, was a famous academic. He is the author of the "Brahma theory", a hypothesis of space, time and multiple universes. Adam engages William Jaybey, an academic author, to write a biography of his father; Jaybey accepts the commission though he has little regard for Professor Godley's work.
One of the judges, writer and antiquarian book dealer Rick Gekoski, confessed midweek that over the years he had been put off the Booker, partly because of the coverage which got bitchier and bitchier. But being a judge this year, arguing forcefully for Banville's The Sea and seeing it win has restored his faith in the prize. By the time of the judges' final meeting, he had read it five times, enjoyed it more and understood it better each time. Despite being berated after the award announcement by a bookseller who said the decision was disgraceful and that The Sea would be impossible to sell, Gekoski, writing in the Times, said it remains the best book of the year. 'It is a work of art, in the tradition of high modernism, and I'll bet it will still be read and admired in 75 years'.
