John Banville: The Sea

Max Morden returns to Ballyless, the coastal town in Ireland where he spent a memorable childhood holiday, 50 years before, and fell in love, and it ended in disaster. He is a burnt-out case, as much a collection of traits as a coherent personality.

He knows this. An only child of modest background, he is violent, hypochondriacal, voyeuristic, masochistic, self-preoccupied, a lover of smells, especially those of the women he loves, a dilettante fussing about a book on Bonnard he will never finish; an alcoholic.

The plot makes him relive two anguished pasts, the distant one of his childhood, the more recent one of his marriage: his wealthy wife Anna recently died of cancer. Two sets of memory converge. As an 11-year old he fell in love with a whole family, the Graces, who are exotically wealthy and decked out with strangenesses: they pay a governess to guard a boy with webbed feet who refuses to speak, and his twin sister.

Max is an aesthete and therefore casts a cold eye on life, on death. He is also an educated pessimist, who believes that — apart from art itself — nothing redeems the mess, littleness and unhappiness of life. About love he is sceptical: its companion is hate, and its durability is questionable.

One Proustian meditation tells us how many bridegrooms dream on their wedding night of someone other than their wives. Another passage describes the memorably horrible photographs Max's dying wife takes of other terminally ill patients in hospital, as an indictment of life's cruelty.

Banville is prodigiously gifted. He cannot write an unpolished phrase, so we read him slowly, relishing the stream of pleasures he affords. Everything in Banville's books is alive. Bleakly elegant, he is a writer's writer, a new Henry Green, who can conjure with the poetry of people and places.

He relishes language, and wants it to work for him anew. So he uses virtuoso coinages such as "inconsidered" and "misfortunate". "Rosacea" is explained. Ichor and deckle, cracaleur, groyne, cinereal, supination, lucent, caducous, scumble and glair is not. Why do Banville or Morden — distinction between sensibilities, as in Proust, isn't always clear — use "ovine" when all the context needs is "sheepish"?

"Profoundly moving", sings the jacket-blurb: I'm not sure. Banville wants us to read at a low emotional temperature. Nothing shames him about human life, except to be caught supine inside a feeling, rather than coldly anatomising it, as the sport it must prove to be.

How onlookers behave to one in grief; how water behaves in a butt; how adolescents carry on in a cinema: everything interests him. He views life, as D. H. Lawrence once told us we view the humming-bird, "through the wrong end of the long telescope of time, luckily for us".

The distance of memory and its savage power to hurt both absorb him.

Picador
$24.95

- INDEPENDENT