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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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The Sea
by John Banville |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Metamore I defy any reader to find a novel with
more metaphors and similes per page than John Banville’s
Man Booker Award winning novel, The Sea.
Banville’s prose becomes rhythmic, like the sea, as
first person narrator Max Mordon reflects on his
life and grieves the death of his wife. Here’s an excerpt, pp. 52-57: Down here, by the sea,
there is a special quality to the silence at night. I do not know if this is
my doing, I mean if this quality is something I bring to the silence of my
room, and even of the whole house, or if it is a local effect, due to the
salt in the air, perhaps, or the seaside climate in general. I do not recall
noticing it when I was young and staying in the Field. It is dense and at
the same time hollow. It took me a long while, nights and nights, to identify
what it reminds me of. It is like the silence that I knew in the sickrooms of
my childhood, when I would lie in a fever, cocooned under a hot, moist mound
of blankets, with the emptiness squeezing in on my eardrums like the air in a
bathysphere. Sickness in those days was a special place, a place apart, where
no one else could enter, not the doctor with his shiver-inducing stethoscope
or even my mother when she put her cool hand on my burning brow. It is a
place like the place where I feel that I am now, miles from anywhere, and anyone.
I think of the others in the house, Miss Vavasour,
and the Colonel, asleep in their rooms, and then I think perhaps they are not
asleep, but lying awake, like me, glooming gaunt-eyed into the lead-blue
darkness. Perhaps the one is thinking of the other, for the Colonel has an
idea of our chatelaine, I am convinced of it. She, however, laughs at him
behind his back, not entirely without fondness, calling him Colonel Blunder,
or Our Brave Soldier. Some mornings her eyes are red-rimmed as if she had
been crying in the night. Does she blame herself for all that happened and
grieve for it still? What a little vessel of sadness we are, sailing in this
muffled silence through the autumn dark. It was at night especially
that I thought about the Graces, as I lay in my narrow metal bed in the
chalet under the open window, hearing the monotonously repeated ragged
collapse of waves down on the beach, the solitary cry of a sleepless seabird
and, sometimes, the distant rattling of a corncrake, and the faint, jazzy moanings of the dance band in the Golf Hotel playing a
last slow waltz, and my mother and father in the front room fighting, as they
did when they thought I was asleep, going at each other in a grinding
undertone, every night, every night, until at last one night my father left
us, never to return. But that was in winter, and somewhere else, and years
off still. To keep from trying to hear what they were saying I distracted
myself by making up dramas in which I rescued Mrs. Grace from some great and
general catastrophe, a shipwreck or a devastating storm, and sequestered her
for safety in a cave, conveniently dry and warm, where in moonlight—the
liner had gone down by now, the storm had abated—I tenderly helped her out of
her sopping swimsuit and wrapped a towel around her phosphorescent nudity,
and we lay down and she leaned her head on my arm and touched my face in
gratitude and sighed, and so we went to sleep together, she and I, lapped
about by the vast soft summer night. In those days I was greatly
taken with the gods. I am not speaking of God, the capitalised
one, but the gods in general. Or the idea of the gods, that is, the
possibility of the gods. I was a keen reader and had a fair knowledge of the
Greek myths, although the personages in them were hard to keep track of, so
frequently did they transform themselves and so various were their
adventures. Of them I had a necessarily stylised
image— big, nearly naked plasticene figures all
corded muscle and breasts like inverted tun-dishes—derived
from the works of the great masters of the Italian Renaissance, Michelangelo
especially, reproductions of whose paintings I must have seen in a book, or a
magazine, I who was always on the look-out for instances of bare flesh. It
was of course the erotic exploits of these celestial beings that most took my
fancy. The thought of all that tensed and tensely quivering naked flesh, untrammelled save by the marmoreal folds of a robe or a
wisp of gauze fortuitously placed—fortuitous, perhaps, but fully and frustratingly
as protective of modesty as Rose’s beach towel or, indeed, Connie Grace’s
swimsuit—glutted my inexperienced but already overheating imagination with
reveries of love and love’s transgressions, all in the unvarying form of
pursuit and capture and violent overmastering. Of the details of these skirmishes
in the golden dust of Love among the big people.
It was strange to picture them, to try to picture them, struggling together
on their Olympian beds in the dark of night with only the stars to see them,
grasping and clasping, panting endearments, crying out for pleasure as if in
pain. How did they justify these dark deeds to their daytime selves? That was
something that puzzled me greatly. Why were they not ashamed? On Sunday
morning, say, they arrive at church still tingling from Saturday night’s
frolics. The priest greets them in the porch, they
smile blamelessly, mumbling innocuous words. The woman dips her fingertips
in the font, mingling traces of tenacious love-juice with the holy water.
Under their Sunday best their thighs chafe in remembered delight. They
kneel, not minding the mournfully reproachful gaze the statue of their Saviour fixes on them from the cross. After their midday
Sunday dinner perhaps they will send the children out to play and retire to
the sanctuary of their curtained bedroom and do it all over again, unaware of my mind’s bloodshot eye fixed on
them unblinkingly. Yes, I was that kind of boy. Or better say, there is part of me still that is the kind of boy that I
was then, A little brute, in other words, with a filthy mind. As if there were any other sort. We never grow up. I never did,
anyway. By day I loitered about Then the adored flesh moved
and turned into the hairy shoulder of her husband, at stool, for all I knew,
and reaching for the lavatory roll. There was a day when the
door did open, but it was Rose who
came out, and gave me a look that made me lower my eyes and hurry on. Yes,
Rose had the measure of me from the start, Still has, no doubt. I determined to get into
the house, to walk where Mrs. Grace walked, sit where she sat, touch the things that she touched. To this end I set about
making the acquaintance of Chloe and her brother. It was easy, as these
things were in childhood, even for a child as circumspect as I was. At that
age we had no small-talk, no rituals of polite advance and encounter, but
simply put ourselves into each other’s vicinity and waited to see what would
happen. I saw the two of them loitering on the gravel outside the Strand Café
one day, spied them before they spied me, and crossed the road diagonally to
where they were standing, and stopped. Myles was eating an ice cream with
deep concentration, licking it evenly
on all sides like a cat licking a kitten, while Chloe, I suppose having finished
hers, waited on him in an attitude of torpid boredom, leaning in the doorway
of the café with one sandalled foot pressed on the
instep of the other and her face blankly lifted to the sunlight. I did not
say anything, nor did they. The three of us just stood there in the morning
sunshine amid smells of seawrack and vanilla and
what passed in the Strand Café for coffee, and at last Chloe deigned to
lower her head and directed her gaze toward my knees and asked my name, When
I told her she repeated it, as if it
were a suspect coin she was testing between her teeth. Many readers will be enjoyably captivated
by the prose of The Sea,
while others will want release from that captivity. If you enjoyed the
excerpt, you’ll like the rest. Steve Hopkins,
January 25, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the February 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Sea.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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