The Sea is a novel that is likely to leave many a reader at sea. The reviews of the book, by and large, have not been of help in coming to grips with it. Hardly any reviewer has refrained from commenting on Banville's supreme prose-style. But praising John Banville as a lord of language--Don DeLillo comments in a blurb: 'Banville writes a dangerous and clear-running prose'--is like carrying coals to Newcastle, or, more appropriately, shipping Guinness to St. James's Gate. What does it all add up to, if add up it does? The Sea is a novel about guilt and atonement, that thematic cluster which has preoccupied Banville from the first. It permeates most of the stories in Long Lankin and is utterly central in "The Possessed' and has not lost its appeal since. It figures even in the so-called scientific tetralogy, where in Doctor Copernicus it generates 'redemptive despair'. The Sea, moreover, is about grief and loss, the transience of human existence, the senselessness and gratuitousness of life; the novel offers a meditation on the indifference of the world, and it is about the supposed comfort of the past. The Sea is also concerned with fraught relationships. None of those featuring in the novel is healthy and successful: Max and Anna--she is snatched away from him at a far too early age by cancer, by which he feels betrayed, and during their time together they never knew one another as intimately as they should, or could, have done and nor, for that matter did they care to do so; Max and his daughter, Claire--they have never really got on, their mutual trip to Ballyless is a disaster and on the drive back, she flings all sorts of accusations at him; Max and the twins--she walks into the sea, possibly because Max read the signs incorrectly by assuming that Rose had an affair with Mr Grace, and Myles followed his sister into extinction; Rose and Mrs Grace--Rose's passion for Mrs Grace remained unrequited; Max's parents--their marriage broke up after a period of bitter fights, he running off to England and she leading a miserable life with her son in dingy bed-sits; Max and his parents--they were in his way, he felt ashamed of his origins, which he deemed demeaning; Max and Mrs Grace--his infatuation with her was based solely on an overheated juvenile imagination, a fact that made him drop her, without reason, like a hot coal; Miss Vavasour and Bun--their relationship has soured into one marred by bickering and dispute; Chloe and Myles--they are manacled together like two convicts on the run; in a state of unavoidable intimacy, they are like two magnets, 'but turned the wrong way, pulling and pushing' (p.81). Finally, the book is, literally, about the sea and, figuratively, about the sea of memory. (2)
