I mentioned earlier how pleased I was to confirm my suspicion that British prose fiction hadn’t really sunk to the state of exhaustion and collapse suggested by the bestowal of the Man Booker Prize on John Banville’s The Sea. I was reassured on that point by reading one of the novels–just one, pretty much randomly chosen–from the Booker long list, Tash Aw’s excellent The Harmony Silk Factory. But, you ask, what about Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, J.M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie, to name just the most well-known and proven of the writers whose work from last year slid into the Booker’s orbit? Could they be so drastically off their game as to produce novels as verbally and philosophically stale as The Sea? I doubt it very seriously, but I’ll have to let you know.
For the moment, the text in hand is this thing of Banville’s, a novel of loss, of memory, of existential anguish. The Sea puts us in the cheerless company of Max Morden, a 60-ish art historian who has just lost his wife of many years to cancer. As a means of coming to terms with her loss, Max decides to return to Ballyless, the seaside resort town where he spent his boyhood summer vacations. Once there, he prowls the landscape, haunts the old places, runs into the odd survivor of bygone times, and gradually sifts through his memory the details of one particular summer holiday there in which he is befriended by a socially superior and rather too suggestively named family (the Graces) staying nearby. Immediately after managing to latch onto the Grace clan for beach picnics and whatnot, Max develops an infatuation with the mother, Connie, but soon transfers his longing to the daughter, Chloe, who seems to be near his own age. Chloe has a twin brother, Myles, with whom she shares an exclusive non-verbal mode of communication, and the family is accompanied by an older girl, Rose, who serves more or less as the twins’ governess. It finally transpires that there’s a secret behind the slightly peculiar modes of interaction that first put the clan under Max’s surveillance. And with the close of this summer interlude with the Graces comes a tragedy that brings mortality fully into Max’s consciousness and gives him his first hard lesson in the fundamental and unbridgeable isolation of every person from every other. It’s not difficult to see why the older Max, suddenly alone after so many years and thinking inevitably about his own nearing demise, would be drawn back to the scene of this earlier, undigested trauma.
I should say before going too much further that there are some fine pages in The Sea. Its most attractive feature is the often finely spun surface tracery of painterly detail that it accumulates as it progresses (Banville dotes particularly, and often to good effect, on the gradations and refractions of sunlight). The trouble stems from Banville’s delineation of the relationship between Max and his wife, Anna–his arrant neglect of this, I mean to say. For the knot of affect at the center of the narrative, the peculiar human stain that grounds and charges the whole, must be the decades-long relationship between these two people, as spouses and as the parents of a now-grown daughter. But this long-married couple is merely asserted, not elaborated into a concrete and recognizably human consortium of minds, wills, sensibilities, and experience. Beneath The Sea’s subtly hued shell lies a void where the concrete particulars of a human relationship ought to be. Thus Anna’s death feels more like a disinterested structural gambit than a lived bereavement–and the tale’s unearned epiphanies and insufficiently contextualized revelations fall from its pages like dead leaves.
It isn’t even clear whether bereavement is the right word for what Max is going through. We don’t have enough information to say. We are constrained to watch Max coping with Anna’s death as no living person in the history of the world has ever experienced the death of someone he knows, let alone loves: abstractly. It just doesn’t work this way. The distinct pathos of any person’s end issues from the wealth of particulars by which that person is known to those around him. When that person is gone, it means the extinction of these known particulars, and the aftermath of that death, the survivors’ experience of it, is conditioned and colored by the specific absence they create. Death itself, whatever convictions about an afterlife one may hold, is a thing indefinable and unknowable to the living, and it is usual for most of us to regard death as a distant abstraction most of the time. But your death is the sealing of a peculiar destiny, and it will visit a peculiar psychic injury upon your survivors.
In order for Anna Morden’s decease to exert this kind of force within this narrative, one in which we are restricted to her surviving husband’s point of view, much more of the grain of her personality and the specific density of her relationship with Max has to be made present to us. But when we come to Max’s account of the atmosphere between the two of them after they’ve just received the news that Anna is terminally ill–
I realised what the feeling was that had been besetting me … It was embarrassment. Anna felt it as well. I was sure of it. Embarrassment, yes, a panic-stricken sense of not knowing what to say, where to look, how to behave, and something else, too, that was not quite anger but a sort of surly annoyance, a surly resentment at the predicament in which we grimly found ourselves. It was as if a secret had been imparted to us so dirty, so nasty, that we could hardly bear to remain in one another’s company yet were unable to break free, each knowing the foul thing that the other knew and bound together by that very knowledge. From this day forward all would be dissembling. There would be no other way to live with death.
–the words lie dead on the page. The featureless landscape that is the marriage of Max and Anna Morden leaves us unsure of whether this is, for them, a plausible response to this event. Their “embarrassment,” again, is asserted, not established; there is no larger, developing whole that we can fit it into. And this obscurity shrouding the body of feeling unharnessed in Max by Anna’s death is also likely to make one feel that the inner howl of pain that Max allows himself at one point is, because so immaculately uncircumstanced, just painfully hollow: “You cunt, you fucking cunt, how could you go and leave me like this, floundering in my own foulness, with no one to save me from myself. How could you.” The situation is no better between Max and his daughter Claire, who also largely fail to illuminate each other. Claire’s ungainly asexuality and general blandness–to Max she is “a fastidious spinster” who “usually has no smell at all”–has the effect of dehumanizing her and distancing her from Max: “I know so little about her, my daughter,” he confesses. “… I suspect she is still a virgin.” Here is another flatly structural conjunction, a relation utterly bleached of distinguishing marks.
The Sea also piles up a startling number of clichés and verbal infelicities–a dismaying surprise in view of Banville’s high repute as a prose stylist. At one point, for example, Max is driven to the following rumination as he struggles to process the brutal fact of Anna’s impending terminus. Note how this trite “other people” reflection ends with a strange abruption of archness, a queasy moment of preciosity that seems, in hindsight, to announce the narrative’s radical artificiality, the falsity at its core.
This was not supposed to have befallen her. It was not supposed to have befallen us, we were not that kind of people. Misfortune, illness, untimely death, these things happen to good folk, the humble ones, the salt of the earth, not to Anna, not to me. In the midst of the imperial progress that was our life together a grinning losel had stepped out of the cheering crowd and sketching a parody of a bow had handed my tragic queen the warrant of impeachment.
One also asks why any of us, fully as late in the fall of man as 2005, need Banville/Max to prompt us to wonder: “Are not the majority of men disappointed with their lot, languishing in quiet desperation in their chains?” It is possible that many of Banville’s readers have come across something very close to this before. But he’s not through. Having pitilessly mugged Thoreau, Banville goes on pick Freud’s pocket in a passage that so punctually recapitulates the Freudian account of the origin of the ego that it might have been cribbed from a two-page span of Civilization and Its Discontents:
In her I had my first experience of the absolute otherness of other people. It is not too much to say–well, it is, but I shall say it anyway–that in Chloe the world was first manifest for me as an objective entity. Not my father and mother, my teachers, other children, not Connie Grace herself, no one had yet been real in the way that Chloe was. And if she was real, so, suddenly, was I. She was I believe the true origin in me of self-consciousness. Before, there had been one thing and I was part of it, now there was me and all that was not me. But here too there is a torsion, a kink of complexity. In severing me from the world and making me realise myself in being thus severed, she expelled me from that sense of the immanence of all things, the all things that had included me, in which up to then I had dwelt, in more or less blissful ignorance. Before, I had been housed, now I was in the open, in the clearing, with no shelter in sight. I did not know that I would not get inside again, through that ever straightening gate.
Here’s the Freud, in case you think I’m kidding:
An infant at the breast does not as yet distinguish his ego from the external world as the source of the sensations flowing in upon him. He gradually learns to do so, in response to various promptings. … [O]riginally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive—indeed, an all-embracing—feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it. If we assume that there are many people in whose mental life this primary ego-feeling has persisted to a greater or less degree, it would exist in them side by side with the narrower and more sharply demarcated ego-feeling of maturity, like a kind of counterpart to it. In that case, the ideational contents appropriate to it would be precisely those of limitlessness and of a bond with the universe … the “oceanic” feeling.
Freud’s “intimate bond between the ego and the world about it” is Banville’s “sense of the immanence of all things,” the “blissful ignorance” in which Max had been “housed” and which he “would not get inside again.” And of course Max’s “oceanic” yearning takes him, we note, to the sea. You are granted leave to wince at how little transformed from its original enunciation we find this concept in Banville’s novel.
I’m afraid I could carry on with other examples, but I’ll end with one of Max Morden’s plangent notations, one that is perhaps more trenchant than his creator knows. Readers of The Sea may feel Max’s pain most warmly when he complains of ”how imprecise language is, how inadequate to its occasions.” Well. Bingo.
