The Sea

Max Morden is an art historian who has spent years failing to finish a monograph on Pierre Bonnard, the painter who spent four decades repainting his wife Marthe in her bath, often continuing to paint her as young and freshly bathed for years after her actual death. Banville makes this professional detail the novel's real thesis: Bonnard's canvases are a technology for keeping the dead undead, and Max's own prose — recollecting Anna in fine, controlled detail even as she dies of cancer offstage in the present-tense chapters — performs exactly the same operation. The unfinished monograph isn't a subplot; it's Max admitting, without quite admitting it, that he doesn't actually want to finish looking, because finishing would mean letting both women, wife and dead childhood infatuation alike, become properly past.

Grief, in this novel, doesn't invent new material — it goes looking for old wounds to reopen, and Max's return to the seaside house where the well-off Grace family once summered lets one loss borrow the shape of the other. As a grocer's son besotted first with the indolent, gin-scented Mrs. Grace and then with her daughter Chloe, young Max wanted less a girl than an entire class's ease and unearned confidence; that class envy curdles, decades later, into the same acquisitive watching he directs at Anna's illness, cataloguing her decline with the same connoisseur's eye he once turned on the Graces' bodies and rooms. Banville's sentences are famously overdressed — jeweled, Latinate, self-consciously beautiful — and the effect isn't decoration but defense: a narrator this fluent, this in love with his own cadences, is a narrator working very hard not to say the plain, unbearable thing directly.

The book alternates, chapter by chapter and often paragraph by paragraph, between the weeks after Anna's death and the single childhood summer decades earlier, with almost no signposting beyond verb tense — a formal choice that puts the reader inside the same undifferentiated flood Max is drowning in, where a fifty-year-old wound and a fresh one arrive with equal force. Banville lets digression stand in for plot: Max circles the same handful of images — Mrs. Grace's damp swimsuit, Anna's hospital gown, the particular gray-green of the sea — returning to each with slightly more information every time, so that understanding accumulates the way memory actually works, in passes, rather than the way conventional narrative delivers it, in a line.

The Sea's 2005 Booker win was, and remains, one of the prize's most contested — critics who found the novel mannered and airless argued it beat more emotionally direct competition largely on the strength of its sentences rather than its human stakes. That objection misses what the prose is doing: the ornateness is Max's, not just Banville's, a grieving man's defense mechanism dressed up as style, and the chilliness readers complain about is the novel's subject as much as its texture — a portrait of a man who has always preferred describing feeling to having it.