Michelle Bailat-Jones

Over my holiday I read John Banville’s The Sea very slowly. I think he is a good author to take slowly, and I liked being able to take up with the book a little each day and meander through his careful sentences. The Sea is an interesting novel, with not much resembling any sort of plot. Despite the quietness of the narrator’s account and his sometimes hazy focus, there are two stories vying for attention – narrator Max’s childhood memory and his feelings about a more recent, but significant loss. But even without any overt plot, there is movement. Max uses his memories of the one painful experience to get to the heart of the other, much more powerful one.

I mentioned before that my initial experience with The Sea was slightly disappointing because it reminded me so quickly of the Banville novel I read and loved last year – Eclipse. As I got deeper into The Sea, some of the resemblance wore off, but the more striking similarities remained. Especially the overall narrative tone and how the book features a narrator escaping into the past to deal with a present trauma.

Now I happened to really like the narrator in Eclipse, so finding him in slightly altered form in The Sea wasn’t necessarily a problem for me. I just had to make some small adjustments to my expectations, to try and banish my vision of Alex from Eclipse and let Max come into his own. There were differences, although mostly in detail, not much in tone and emotional structure.

There was something very ominous about The Sea, a moody and threatening subtext which I think created much of the novel’s tension. I felt this mostly when Max went into the past to describe his relationship with the Grace family but it was there in his more recent memories as well and in his current-day conversations with his daughter or the other residents of the hotel where he is staying. I saw this as Banville’s acceptance of the more dangerous aspects of grief. Not the danger of suffering, or the way sadness can surreptitiously and wholly take over, but more a kind of simmering violence. The understanding that things are not right, and that they won’t ever be right.

This is only my second Banville novel and I’m sure I’ll be looking for more, if anything just to enjoy the thick texture of his writing. There were moments when I wished he’d taken a simpler route to convey a thought or two, but on the whole I like his layering and complicated sentences, his obscure word choice and heavy images. This type of writing asks me to slow down and measure out the rhythm of each word.

I wish I could quote out long passages from John Banville’s Eclipse, in lieu of a review. I would enjoy typing them, a kind of slow and careful re-read of the pages I’ve so loved reading. I am a fast reader and Eclipse is a short book but I took over a week working my way through it, savoring the lines and the scenes and the narrator’s reflections.

Before, what I contained was the blastomere of myself, the coiled hot core of all I was and might be. Now, that essential self has been pushed to the side with savage insoucience, and I am as a house walked up and down in by an irresistibly proprietorial stranger. I am all inwardness, gazing out in ever intensifying perplexity upon a world in which nothing is exactly plausible, nothing is exactly what it is.

Narrator Alex has retreated from the world, into his childhood home on the Irish coast to muse over, or, I suppose it would be more accurate to say, to nurse a set of bewildering wounds. Alex is a stage actor who has taken an early retirement, abandoned his family to hide out in a state of hyperaware limbo, conscious of the ghostly presences of his past that have followed him to his retreat. Followed him isn’t quite right; perhaps some of them were already waiting there for him.

Everything here is twilight and half-dream, yet the appearance of these phantoms is naggingly insinuative, as if I should, or would, know them. There is something in them of those ancestral resemblances that will spring unnervingly up at one from the cradle or the deathbed.

Growing domestic disturbances and a traumatic professional event brought Alex to seek solace in his hideaway to sort out the personal ramifications of his crisis. To hear him describe it, his entire self has become wrapped up in an ability to transform into an “other” which necessarily engendered a slow loss of what was originally “him”. Do all actors experience this tension and fear? It’s a wonderful metaphor for helping a non-thespian understand the emotional and personal investment in stage performance.

Eclipse is also about Alex’s relationship with his daughter, a young woman suffering from what must be schizophrenia, although her specific illness is never named. The parallel between these two is stunning – that he needs to create new voices inside himself in order to succeed in his work, that she cannot stop manufacturing similar voices but which threaten to destroy her.

Indeed, such was her calm at times that she would seem to be not there at all, to have drifted off, lighter than air. It is a different air in which she moves, a separate medium. For her I think the world is always somewhere other, an unfamiliar place where yet she has always been. This is for me the hardest thing, to think of her out there, standing on some far bleak deserted shore, beyond help, in unmoving light, with an ocean of lostness all before her and the siren voices singing in her head.

As you can see from the passages I’ve included, Banville writes with rich, vivid prose, filled with complicated words and sometimes twisty grammar. I loved the complexity of his language and the way it forced me to slow down and really think about his word choices and images. And for all of Alex’s intense interior musing and remembering, the book moves forward through a steady procession of tense scenes and dialogues.

Someone with a better background in drama will probably find the novel filled with allusions to the world of the theatre. I found myself looking up a lot of Alex’s references to certain characters, and without that I would have missed some of his emotional orientation. Eclipse was definitely one of the best reads of the entire year so far. Which makes me really look forward to reading Banville’s prize-winning novel, The Sea, already waiting for me on the shelf.