 Book
Reviews
with Robin Osborne
The Sea
By John Banville
Picador $30
 If
his masterly novel, The Untouchable, had been John Banville's only work the Irish-born
writer could have retired with grace. A near perfect work, written as if spoken
by the Soviet spy Sir Anthony Blunt, one of the infamous 'Cambridge commies',
relation of the Queen and prominent homosexual, the book signalled what has become
a common theme in Banville's fiction, the late-life musings of lonely, often artistic,
men.
The Sea is presently on the longlist for the 2005 Booker Prize, an apt nomination
for this reflection by art historian Max Morden upon his relatively poor childhood,
his marriage to the daughter of a wealthy industrialist and, now, his waning,
widowed years.
As with Blunt and others, the tone is again maudlin and the plot, at least
in the conventional sense, somewhat lacking in action: a man's wife dies after
a surprise diagnosis and a struggle with cancer and in his grief he returns to
the English seaside village where he holidayed as a youth, putting up at a guesthouse
and observing its manager and residents whilst remembering the long-distant past.
However Banville should be read, and judged, not for plot but for the intelligence
and flow of his words, and in this regard, too, The Sea is a typical work. As
ever, it can be useful to have a dictionary on hand.
'My temples where the greying hair has gone sparse are flecked with chocolatey,
Avrilaceous freckles, or liver spots, I suppose they are, any one of which, I
am all too aware, might in a moment turn rampant at the whim of a rogue cell,'
observes Morden, who likes a drink.
Of the many quotable passages, a standout concerns Morden's first meeting with
his father-in-law to be, Charlie Weiss - 'Don't worry, it's not a Jew name,' the
industrialist quips.
'I was big and young and gauche,' Morden recalls, 'and my presence in those
gilded rooms amused him. He was a merry little man with tiny delicate hands and
tiny feet... His head, which he took to Trumper's to be shaved every other day
- hair, he said, was fur, no human being should tolerate it - was a perfect polished
egg, and he wore those big heavy spectacles favoured by tycoons of the time, with
flanged ear-pieces and lenses the size of saucers in which his sharp little eyes
darted like inquisitive, exotic fish.
'He could not be still, jumping up and sitting down and then jumping up again,
seeming, under those lofty ceilings, a tiny burnished nut rattling around inside
an outsized shell.'
For elegant writing, Banville is, in the term of his earlier masterpiece, untouchable.
- Books available at Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore
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