Where new writing finds its voice
Review

The Sea

Fintan O'Higgins

By John Banville
Picador 2006

There is a particular giddy pleasure that comes from reading a book so exhilaratingly awful that you just want to pounce on a wedding guest and tell them about it. I experienced it reading The Da Vinci Code and I have had it again these last few days going over The Sea by John Banville. I have been in the fevered grip of an outraged enthusiasm that has had me on my feet every couple of pages and pacing about my chair in an ecstasy of disbelief that such a feeble and stupid bit of work could ever manage to hoodwink the intelligent British reading public at large, and the jury of last year’s Man Booker Prize more particularly.

Not everybody was as silly as the Booker jury, of course: David Grylls in the Sunday Times called The Sea a ‘crashing disappointment’, and in the Independent Boyd Tonkin complained that the decision to give the prize to Banville was ‘a travesty’ that brought discredit to the award. Generally speaking, however, otherwise perfectly sane critics have been quite prepared to accept this dreadful piece of nonsense as deserving of a prestigious literary award. These ninnies have praised Banville, not for his storytelling or characterisation – which might merit our compassion rather than frustration as being a clear symptom of some kind of brain disease – but for his prose style, which is usually described as exquisite, precise and deft; sometimes, gawd help us, Nabokovian.  

It is true that Banville can write a beautiful sentence, and there are just enough of them in The Sea to keep you strung along. However, for sheer volume, the good stuff is overwhelmed by idiocies, and horribly pretentious idiocies at that. Look at this, for instance: Banville’s protagonist, the idiotically named Max Morden describes his father coming home from work 

[B]earing the frustrations of his day like so much luggage clutched in his clenched fists

The detail of the clenched fists is pretty good, but does Booker Prize-winner John Banville really think he’s invented the idea of emotional baggage? His prose is infuriatingly smart-alecky without actually being very smart. He has no control of tone, relying on a lugubrious self-importance to distract from the silly nonsense he’s writing. How about this: after a nice lyrical passage: 

A breeze smacked down on the beach and swarmed across it slantwise under a skim of dry sand, then came over the water, chopping the surface into sharp little metallic shards

Banville concludes the section:

Was it that day I noticed Myles’s toes were webbed?

Could Woody Allen parodying a pretentious prize-winning novelist have come up with anything more hilariously bathetic? To a book that stands or falls on the quality of its prose, the cumulative awfulness of a thousand minor infelicities is fatal. There is at least one crime against truth and beauty every couple of pages, so reading the book feels like an afternoon spent picking nits. The problem is that nit-picking seems the only way to approach this book, because not only is it horribly infested and genuinely lousy, but since nothing really happens (not in itself a fault, let’s be clear) Banville’s art shows itself entirely in the details.

The thing of it is that Banville does not know the meaning of the word ‘art’. I do not mean that in a bombastic rhetorical way; I mean it literally, and it’s very telling. Look at this passage where Max describes his dead wife Anna’s photography:

Did I seem to disapprove of her attempts to be an artist, if taking snapshots can be considered artistry?

The condescending tone from the art critic to the photographer here is fair enough. It’s not terribly 

interesting but it is not awful. But what an artist produces by definition is not artistry, it is art. I think we get close to the root of the wretchedness of
The Sea when we realise that award-winning novelist John Banville does not know the difference between artistry and art. Which is not so very different from saying that he has contrived a voice but has no character to go with it and no story for it to tell. He is like a blind man trying to build a cathedral out of butterfly wings and headlice.

There is a chance, of course, that the poor grasp of English which is so grating a feature of the book may be attributed to Max without reflecting on his creator. It may be claimed that it is not Banville who needs English lessons, but his protagonist. The creation of Max, I suggest, is the one really ingenious thing about The Sea. As a pretentious dilettante he acts as a device to distance Banville from the atrocious quality of his own writing. Any really egregious stupidities can be blamed on his horrible narrator while Banville gets credit for all the lovely lyrical stuff.  

This won’t do, though, because Banville’s good stuff – and it’s mostly the descriptions of seas and skies; he’s not so much a novelist here as a maudlin meteorologist – is too good. It really is beautiful, some of it, and while it is touching to see a man make such a sincere and moving tribute to the sound of his own voice, it compromises fundamentally the work of the novel because it’s hard to conceive of a character, distinct from the author, so skilled and lucid at one moment and so idiotic in the next. If Banville had any insight or integrity as an artist he would have stripped away all the good lines and left us with Max: a believable character, if an imbecile, rather than an implausible savant with no brain or soul but the occasional nice turn of phrase. Sadly, it seems that Banville thinks Max’s self-important platitudes are actually worth reading. Max is supposed to be educated but he wears his learning the way a seal wears a beach-ball and it become dangerously tricky to distinguish the author from
his narrator.

Max has nothing of interest to say and a very heavy-handed way of going about saying it. Try this:

I have always suffered from what I think must be an overly acute awareness of the mingled aromas that emanate from the human concourse. Or perhaps suffer is the wrong word. I like, for instance, the brownish odour of women’s hair when it is in need of washing.

This is just a graceless and longwinded way of saying that he likes the smell of women’s hair (1), and it makes you wonder if he has anything of equal profundity to say on the subject of fresh-cut grass (2) or baking bread. The book is full of these awkward inanities and if Banville can blame them on Max he still has to take responsibility for allowing his narrator to talk such boring rubbish. And there are some things which Banville can’t blame on Max.  His tone throughout the book is arch and pompous.  There is one point, however, where it changes suddenly, angrily addressing his dead wife:

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.

This is the only bit of the book that uses obscenity and there is clearly a point to it. Perhaps the shift in tone is supposed to express for a moment the naked centre of Max Morden’s pain, or give him respite from his eternal smart-aleckry.  But it is entirely unconvincing and utterly ineffective dramatically. It reveals not the core of Max’s soul laid bare, but the total absence of anything at the core of Banville’s narrator. It shows us definitively that the niggling suspicions prodded into life by the book’s many many cack-handed stupidities are quite justified, and it allows us to articulate them. The problem – the really fundamental problem, the one that spawns all the silly clumsiness throughout the book – is that there is nothing behind Max Morden. There is no character behind the voice, and there is no story for the voice to tell. And John Banville does not know the difference
between art and artistry.

People always describe Banville’s writing as Nabokovian, and in fairness The Book of Evidence is probably the second-best book you will read about a murderer with a fancy prose style. It should have won the Booker Prize in 1989, but that is not an excuse for Banville to harbour a grudge so long and so bitterly that he feels justified in inflicting The Sea on the defenceless public (3). The book reads like an act of vengeance on the Booker jury. It feels like a school exercise in how to win a literary award. There is nothing wrong with themes of memory and alienation, about grumpy late-middle-aged academics trying to reconnect to the past or mourning their dead wives or having difficult relationships with their daughters. All these are good meaty themes and there is a lot of material in them. What Banville has done, however, is to refer to these ideas without ever really engaging with them and it is a shame that the Man Booker Jury allowed themselves to be conned by such a cynical exercise in button-pushing, and by such a poorly executed one at that. It is a shallow, stupid, crass and pretentious book dressed up as a profound and important one. It has its moments of loveliness, but they are far too few. The rest is noise.

 

1) Don’t be fooled by the dirtiness of the hair, by the way; it’s one of those details that is intended to suggest some sort of primal cunning but in fact just means that he prefers the smell of hair to shampoo.

2) ‘Greenish’, presumably…

3) Although, I must admit that a small and ignoble part of me enjoys some satisfaction at the audacity of an Irish writer pulling a fast one on the British literary establishment…