Book Reviews
Banville's achievement seems remarkable to me. Banville appears to be fining down his writing to the central impulse of all his mature work, which he stated long ago in the extravagant Gothic tale Birchwood : "We imagine that we remember things as they were, while in fact all we carry into the future are fragments which reconstruct a wholly illusory past. The first death we witness will always be a murmur of voices down a corridor and a clock falling silent in the darkened room, the end of love is forever two cigarettes in a saucer and a white door closing."
John Crowley - Washington Post
With his fastidious wit and exquisite style, John Banville is the heir to Nabokov.... The Sea [is] his best novel so far.
Sunday Telegraph (UK)
A gem.... [I]ts ceaseless undulations echoing constantly in the cadences of the prose. This novel shouldn't simply be read. It needs to be heard, for its sound is intoxicating.... A winning work of art.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Banville's novel, which won this year's Man Booker Prize, is narrated by an art historian, whose grief at the death of his wife has stalled his work on a "Big Book on Bonnard." In retreat at an Irish seaside town where he vacationed as a child, he sifts through memories of his entanglement with an upper-class family who stayed nearby. The plot is minimal; instead, the novel's drama takes place in Banville's remarkable imagery—a thunderstorm is "the sky stamping up and down in a fury, breaking its bones," and distant breakers are "like a hem being turned endlessly by a sleepy seamstress." Banville's technique generates a kind of supercharged sparseness, forcefully conveying the narrator's anguish, as he comes to an understanding that "we are defined and have our being through others" and must realign ourselves when those closest to us disappear.
The New Yorker
Banville’s language is captivating. Critics (unless you’re Michiko Kakutani, who found little to like) frequently compare his intricate, powerful imagery to that of Nabokov. It is the intense beauty of his language that allows readers to work through the often discomforting characters and stories he renders.
Bookmarks Magazine
(Starred review.) Irishman Banville's new book does more than simply explore a life. It explores life. This splendidly profound and beautifully written novel offers lessons aplenty about how the shadow of the past does not necessarily cast darkness over the present but certainly leaves its imprint.... In a word, this novel is brilliant. —Brad Hooper
Booklist
Banville's magnificent new novel, which won this year's Man Booker Prize and is being rushed into print by Knopf, presents a man mourning his wife's recent death—and his blighted life. "The past beats inside me like a second heart," observes Max Morden early on, and his return to the seaside resort where he lost his innocence gradually yields the objects of his nostalgia. Max's thoughts glide swiftly between the events of his wife's final illness and the formative summer, 50 years past, when the Grace family—father, mother and twins Chloe and Myles—lived in a villa in the seaside town where Max and his quarreling parents rented a dismal "chalet." Banville seamlessly juxtaposes Max's youth and age, and each scene is rendered with the intense visual acuity of a photograph ("the mud shone blue as a new bruise"). As in all Banville novels, things are not what they seem. Max's cruelly capricious complicity in the sad history that unfolds, and the facts kept hidden from the reader until the shocking denouement, brilliantly dramatize the unpredictability of life and the incomprehensibility of death. Like the strange high tide that figures into Max's visions and remembrances, this novel sweeps the reader into the inexorable waxing and waning of life.
Publishers Weekly
"I have carried the memory of that moment through a whole half century, as if it were the emblem of something final, precious and irretrievable," says the narrator of Banville's Booker Prize-winning novel of a relatively trivial moment. But when he recalls the mother and daughter whom he first loved as a barely pubescent child-whose presence pulled him out of the shadow of his paltry self-he observes, "The two figures in the scene, I mean Chloe and her mother, are all my own work." Memory, then, is the subject of this brief but magisterial work, a condensed teardrop of a novel that captures perfectly the essence of irretrievable longing. After the death of his wife, Max has retreated to the seashore where he spent his childhood summers, staying at an inn that was once the home of a magnificent, careless family called the Graces. It's as if reawakening the pain of his first, terrible loss-that high-strung and volatile Chloe-will ease his more recent loss. The novel is written in a complex, luminous prose that might strike some as occasionally overblown, and Chloe's final act didn't entirely persuade this reviewer. The result? A breathtaking but sometimes frustrating novel. Highly recommended. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal