The Sea | 
 enlarge | Author: John Banville
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy Used: £0.01
You Save: £7.98 (100%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  48 reviews
Sales Rank: 3602
Media: Paperback
Edition: New Ed
Pages: 200
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.1 x 1
ISBN: 0330483293
EAN: 9780330483292
ASIN: 0330483293
Publication Date: April 21, 2006
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: In good conditions, a few pages creased.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 43 more reviews...
 Oh dear the price of the internal dialogue! August 20, 2008
Imagine you are considering the plot for your next blockbuster novel and after much consideration you settle on the story of an ageing, curmudgeonly academic who has very recently experienced spouse bereavement through a long drawn out cancer. Driven by this riveting idea you set the book against a return visit to the scene of a childhood holiday where the, then pubescent, hero tasted his first salty kiss and revelled in his relationship with a weird family of jolly psychopaths, most notably with their heavily disturbed twins. Indeed as you surmise gentle reader, your publisher would be turning pale at the thought of perpetrating such poetic literary violence against the unsuspecting mass of Oprah Book Club enthusiasts awaiting the Booker Prize longlist. So is 'The Sea' a book for the beach? I fear not. No, better that those dark, narcissistic, internal monologues of poor Max Mordern are read on a bench in the local cemetery, among the stones and under a leaden sky.
For though the prose heaves and flows like the roiling sea itself, and though the master John Banville wrote like an angel; dear reader, this is like wading through beautiful, jewel-encrusted, literary, slurry. One of many beautiful quotes from this novel- "We fight in order to be real."
 Poetic and acute August 17, 2008
I think this was a fairly worthy winner of the 2005 Booker Prize. Primarily an unfolding memory interspersed with reflections on death and grief and ageing, gradually Banville's acute and finely phrased observations work their magic. The description of the narrator's wife's consultation, where she learns her condition is incurable, and the aftermath when they return home, is stark and unsettling, and we understand the need in Max to return to retreat into the past, a common reaction to the touch of death. He brings situations alive in his descriptions; some that have stuck for me are the `cruel complacency of ordinary things', in how for example the kettle boils in the same old way when they get home from the consultation, their world completely changed; his preoccupation with smells - `the brownish odour of women's hair when it is need of washing'; his observations on the lonely life of the Colonel; his realisation that all he has ever really wanted was `to burrow down into a place of womby warmth and cower there, hidden from the sky's indifferent gaze'. Much of the novel is concerned with indifference, with the cruel arbitrariness of life, with our inability to finally understand or inhabit the private world of the other person, even though we exist primarily as manifestations of our interactions with them; in this he is often reminiscent of Samuel Beckett. Max is not a morose narrator though, and his wry humour made me laugh out loud more than once, in his description of his ageing features and preoccupation with the medical dictionary, and in his drunken escapades. The main problem is a certain slackness in its unfolding; the denouement continues in the vein of the random and illogical, by which stage the reader wants something more substantial; not a 'neat closing twist' particularly (there is a small one), but something more involving and significant. The poeticism, fine observation, introspection, and literary and academic allusion are admirable, but perhaps need more of a framework, a little more tightness and structure and cohesion, to make this a truly great novel.
 Shame about the melancholy June 27, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Great use of language - had no all sympathy for whining lead character to the point of losing interest in the book. Wanted him to stop being soi self-indulgent and get on with his life.
It is possible to reflect without being so dull and melancholoy - just try "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" by Mitch Albom
Not all will like May 21, 2008
While I appreciated and enjoyed Mr. Banville's control of language (and choice of the word 'lightsomeness'), I was conscious of having to be patient with the pace at which the story was revealed. Not all fiction should be expected to move swiftly along, but there seemed to me moments of excess detail (e.g., a description of the veins between one character's toes) that distracted me from fully caring about the narrator. Still, I can say that the book has a distinctive sense of place and the author is very observant about memory. And for these reasons he won the Man Booker. It will not however 'grip' everyone.
Poetry on grief and childhood March 9, 2008
If there is one phrase that describes John Banville's The Sea, it is fluent, if wordy poetry. The plot: Max Morden, a recently bereaved widower, returns to the seaside village where he spent a childhood holiday. He recalls meeting the Grace family to whom he is drawn. In his recollection of that holiday it becomes obvious that something terrible must have happened. Slowly, Max, the narrator lets us in on a secret: He had a crush on 10-year old Chloe, who is surprisingly mature for her age. They explore their prepubescent love, and steal kisses until they are caught in the act. And then something happens to Chloe (and her brother Myles) that changes Max's life forever...
I loved John Banville's writing style. It was self-indulged without being narcissist, fluent yet well grounded in real emotions. The narrator's flashbacks are delicious-nay precious-exhibitions of dexterity with the English language. He describes the smallest details of the scence to produce an almost cinematic effect on the reader. Yes, even reading this book in rainy Paris, I could still picture the puddles in the seaside resort and the belching smoke from the locomotives of the narrator's childhood.
However, you cannot read this book without a dictionary, except you are an English major. The Sea has added more words to my vocabulary than I care to count: integument, cracaleured, cinereal to name a few. Notwithstanding this small shortcoming The Sea is a wonderful read. I recommend it and it does deserve my 4 stars.
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