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I learned a lot from John Banville's latest novel, The Sea. For instance, I can rattle off five new terms for bodily excretions, including "particles of nether-do"; I can diagnose a case of "grog blossoms"; and I'm aware that "ichor" refers not only to the liquid flowing through the veins of the gods but to that watery stuff that leaks out of a paper cut. I also know that "strangury" is a mystical-sounding word for slow urination (yes, this is a book about growing old).
The Sea
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Such discoveries mostly delight me, but others find Banville's writing pretentious and remote. "Banville's famously torrid affair with his thesaurus," writes Jessica Winters of the Village Voice, "has previously birthed erudite but emotionally delimited characters … but The Sea nudges this pathos toward parody." It is true that if he paid a fine for every time he broke the writer's rule of ordinary language, Banville would have to mortgage his Booker Prize. It's unfair to say, though, that he dotes on words at the expense of human feeling. In fact, it's the preening language of The Sea that most reveals its hero, a man both vain and emotionally broken.
Max Morden is an art historian of no particular genius. ("As for us middling men," he says, "there is no word sufficiently modest that yet will be adequate to describe what we do and how we do it.") For years he's been "mired" in a monograph on the French artist Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), famous for his many portraits of his wife Marthe in the tub: "Brides-in-the-Bath," Max's wife Anna calls him. At their oceanside home, Anna herself spends long hours in the bath, soothing the pain of her cancer. Max sometimes worries she'll drown accidentally: "I would creep down the stairs and stand on the return, not making a sound, seeming suspended there, as if I were the one under water." Guiltily, he half wishes she'd go on and get it over with, for both their sakes. When she does at last die, in the hospital, he finds himself drowning in grief, past and present.
Led by a dream, Max leaves his present home and wanders back to Ballyless, the seaside town where he spent boyhood holidays. He moves into a local boarding house, the Cedars, which was once the private residence of his close friends, the Graces. Their presence lives on in the ministrations of the landlady, the elegant Rose Vavasour, whom Max remembers as their governess. Miss Vavasour has just one other tenant, Colonel Blunden, a lonely soul with a military haircut and a love of peppery condiments. Max is skeptical about the Colonel's cartoonish habits and half-wonders if the soldier identity is a ruse, a façade.
Max has good reason to be skeptical about the hapless Colonel, since he's been reshaping his own identity for his entire life. As a child, staying with his working class parents in their rather primitive "chalet" at Ballyless, he felt ashamed of their ordinariness, consciously distancing himself from them: "I did not hate them, I loved them, probably. Only they were in my way, obscuring my view of the future. In time I would be able to see right through them, my transparent parents." Then his father left the family and his mother sank into maudlin despair. Max spent a miserable adolescence shut away with her in a depressing series of claustrophobic flats, waiting on his father's monthly posts.
It was the prosperous family Grace that claimed Max's early devotion and affection. In their upper-class vacation home they seemed like gods descended to earth, more living and solid than ordinary humans. First to arrive in his consciousness were the parents: Carlo Grace (father of the gods), satyrlike and mocking, and Connie Grace, an enveloping earth-mother who fed Max's first erotic fantasies. Through a mythopoeic shift of affections, he one day ceased to love the mother and fell madly in love with the daughter, a nymphlike ten-year-old named Chloe with a portentous green tinge to her teeth. Chloe's twin brother Myles was an otherworldly creature. His webbed toes made him seem a kind of godling, and he never spoke a word, either because he wouldn't or couldn't. Max imagines that Myles whispered with Chloe at night, the two of them enjoying their private joke on the world: they seemed like two halves of one person.
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