5 reactions
John Banville and his The Sea
He's one of Ireland's most celebrated novelists, but has not been discussed much here so I thought I'd have a go. John Banville won the Booker Prize for The Sea in 2005. It's one of these books we could call a memory puzzle, with an unreliable narrator looking back, a little like Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day or Barnes' The Sense of an Ending. Yet while we read The Sense of an Ending, following its narrator with curiosity as his journey through the past leads to new knowledge, and read The Remains of the Day while hoping that the genteel Stevens will finally realise how much of his life he missed while answering the call of his butler's duty, the reader's experience in The Sea is a little different.
We have an unreliable narrator, sure. He admits to hurting animals as a child, which never endears one to readers. He misreads certain events, and conceals certain facts from us as well. But the journey does not have a "bang" in the way that either of the other two novels above have, where we or their narrators put together the "truth" of what actually happened and what they missed.
Instead, it seems to me that Banville attempts to tell us something about a person's character through a kind of narrative bifurcation. Max Morden, our art historian narrator, returns to the seaside village where he once spent a childhood holiday. He carries the grief of his wife’s recent death from cancer, a certain amount of estrangement from his daughter, and another, deeper trauma from that old childhood break, where he got to know the Grace family. As he sits in his room, he writes musingly about these two pasts – the childhood past at the beach with the Graces, and the adult past with his wife Anna. The two are divided by time, but narratively glued together, as Max shifts from one to another as his memory travels.
Really where this novel is interesting is in the way that the earlier strand influences our understanding of later one. Perhaps the central impact of Max's acquaintance with the Graces is his awareness of the class divide separating them, they being rich and he being poor. It spoils his relationship with his mother, leads him to take up the career of art historian (ever a good camouflage for the aspiring unbourgois), perhaps even causes him to marry Anna, his wife, about whose hobbies he does not care, but who as a person brings him a lot of money thanks to her wealthy father. This class anxiety also influences his relationship with his daughter, who he tries to force to pursue a similar academic career to himself and thus consolidate their new status, while she wants to dedicate herself to others via volunteering.
Giving readers the chance to understand a person through the past is something most literature does by providing backstories for characters, but I do not know many books where this theme is as central as it is in The Sea. It is, essentially, the book. We read Max reading his own past through the lens of his own past. Indeed, sight is one key way of extending our interpretation of the book's contents. Max is always seeing people through his own art history work, in particular through the artist Bonnard. He is not seeing people for themselves.
This is all well and good. If all narrators were reliable, critics would be out of a job. I just didn't find the text very interesting - certainly not Booker Prize worthy (it won 2005). I could talk about sexuality and art, childhood and innocence, but this already feels like box ticking, as if I were writing an essay at school. The presence of a theme doesn't mean there's much to say about it. Aside from those two narrative strands, I'm just not sure there's that much to commend the book. (Banville's prose is good, I learned many new words, but that's also not the point of reading either)
Do Litterateurs have any experience with Banville that contrasts with my own, or fonder views on The Sea that they wish to juxtapose against mine?
(Crosspost from Truelit)
#entertainment
source
He's one of Ireland's most celebrated novelists, but has not been discussed much here so I thought I'd have a go. John Banville won the Booker Prize for The Sea in 2005. It's one of these books we could call a memory puzzle, with an unreliable narrator looking back, a little like Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day or Barnes' The Sense of an Ending. Yet while we read The Sense of an Ending, following its narrator with curiosity as his journey through the past leads to new knowledge, and read The Remains of the Day while hoping that the genteel Stevens will finally realise how much of his life he missed while answering the call of his butler's duty, the reader's experience in The Sea is a little different.
We have an unreliable narrator, sure. He admits to hurting animals as a child, which never endears one to readers. He misreads certain events, and conceals certain facts from us as well. But the journey does not have a "bang" in the way that either of the other two novels above have, where we or their narrators put together the "truth" of what actually happened and what they missed.
Instead, it seems to me that Banville attempts to tell us something about a person's character through a kind of narrative bifurcation. Max Morden, our art historian narrator, returns to the seaside village where he once spent a childhood holiday. He carries the grief of his wife’s recent death from cancer, a certain amount of estrangement from his daughter, and another, deeper trauma from that old childhood break, where he got to know the Grace family. As he sits in his room, he writes musingly about these two pasts – the childhood past at the beach with the Graces, and the adult past with his wife Anna. The two are divided by time, but narratively glued together, as Max shifts from one to another as his memory travels.
Really where this novel is interesting is in the way that the earlier strand influences our understanding of later one. Perhaps the central impact of Max's acquaintance with the Graces is his awareness of the class divide separating them, they being rich and he being poor. It spoils his relationship with his mother, leads him to take up the career of art historian (ever a good camouflage for the aspiring unbourgois), perhaps even causes him to marry Anna, his wife, about whose hobbies he does not care, but who as a person brings him a lot of money thanks to her wealthy father. This class anxiety also influences his relationship with his daughter, who he tries to force to pursue a similar academic career to himself and thus consolidate their new status, while she wants to dedicate herself to others via volunteering.
Giving readers the chance to understand a person through the past is something most literature does by providing backstories for characters, but I do not know many books where this theme is as central as it is in The Sea. It is, essentially, the book. We read Max reading his own past through the lens of his own past. Indeed, sight is one key way of extending our interpretation of the book's contents. Max is always seeing people through his own art history work, in particular through the artist Bonnard. He is not seeing people for themselves.
This is all well and good. If all narrators were reliable, critics would be out of a job. I just didn't find the text very interesting - certainly not Booker Prize worthy (it won 2005). I could talk about sexuality and art, childhood and innocence, but this already feels like box ticking, as if I were writing an essay at school. The presence of a theme doesn't mean there's much to say about it. Aside from those two narrative strands, I'm just not sure there's that much to commend the book. (Banville's prose is good, I learned many new words, but that's also not the point of reading either)
Do Litterateurs have any experience with Banville that contrasts with my own, or fonder views on The Sea that they wish to juxtapose against mine?
(Crosspost from Truelit)
#entertainment
source
| 10,000 mlx | |
| 5 | |
| 5 |