Book: The Sea

Somewhere in your mind rings a line, “Let us go down to the sea again. . . ” John Banville, an Irish writer, born at the end of WWII, wrote his novel, The Sea in  2005. That’s 6 years ago, but I choose him, not because he’s “hot off the press,” in the days when the presses were really rolling. He’s written a half a dozen additional books. This one works for me. The other five sit on the shelf. Let’s see what happens. I know The Shroud will not, so skip it.

Banville’s prose is exuberant, flowing, yet penetrating. You could read a line like this aloud in the middle of the night when Mr. Sleep doesn’t arrive and you’re eating chips and looking at a crack in the ceiling. Here, for example, is Banville's heady but plangent prose. Adolescent Max allows his imagination to float over Connie Grace, his friend Chloe’s mother.  Such stirrings are not uncommon. Sometimes a boy sees a woman before he sees a girl.

“She is in my memory her own avatar.” Then Banville wrestles with the book’s theme: What is the role of the past in our lives and how real and regenerative is it? “Which is more real, he asks us, the woman reclining on the grassy bank of my recollections. Or the strew of dust and dried marrow that is all the earth any longer retains of her?” Banville begs us to give place sometimes to our past. The Past is Light; the Present is Darkness.

And so Max battles with past and present. Anna, his wife, dies of cancer. He returns to the little coastal village away from Dublin. Can he solve the  problems that plague him?

In The Sea I had hoped for a solid father-daughter relationship such as my own with my three daughters. I didn’t get it in the film, The Descendants, and it’s a fragile work in progress in The Sea. Ironically, and most commonly with women, The Woman saves. Claire, Matt’s daughter, a female St. Sebastian, riddled with arrows of failed love, outlasts her drinking father’s immaturity and emerges, now stronger and centered by the end of the novel, than Anna, her mother. She takes Max, near dead from alcohol poisoning to her home, cleans out the liquor, refuses to sell her childhood home and marries. This blossoming into womanhood is more convincing than Alex’s so-called coming of age moments in the film, The Descendants, a film the press wants for the Academy Awards.

Anna and Max, our flawed couple and parents of Claire, are two floating creatures in the sea of life. More like jellyfish. Anna drifts, content to be a vague Mischung of all the other people she knows. Max tells us she—all of us—is “defined and have our being through others.”

Try working that statement through while you walk the dog or are helping your wife clean the kitchen. Allow your mind to plow the “sea-scenes” of your life—yes, the deep, abiding relationships that have “made” you what you are. I speak of the people in your past who impact even to this very day.

How much of your wife is in you? Your grandfather in you? Her aunt in her? Beyond this little mind game, however, Banville questions—and fails—to challenge my own notion of a core self. Sociobiologists love this problem. Gallons of coffee and hours of much-needed sleep have been spent in student eateries over this one. And when your own children come into your life, you continue to wrestle, as Jacob’s struggles with his angel. “Honey, who is the child? Where did she come from?”  Your wife calmly answers, “she is your daughter but she is more like your grandmother.” Complicated!

We can’t solve Max’s question quickly for ourselves, but for Max, there is never a complete answer. "Be  somebody," Anna yells, "Be anybody you want!" Then continues, "I am what I want to be, and what I don’t want to be." Max has no moorings; he drifts with the tide. As William Yeats, the Irish poet says, “The center will not hold.” Max is a spiritual drifter, pulled by the life-tides and occasionally bitten by deep ocean monsters.

And that same restless tides of time and water, wash both the twins, his friends, Myles and Chloe [second “love”] beyond help and down into the dark depths of a sea-death. Like Siamese twins, they are locked together in life and in death.

Banville, then, lays out some interesting questions about the past and the present for us to digest.  The novel spoke to me because I’m an incurable, untreatable Romantic. My own acute memory, one of my few gifts, has kept the Past alive in me.

That force field of memory feeds my deep affection for others. I bring the past, which is always with me, into the present. And because I believe in an endless Future, I will never suffer Max's trauma. The trifecta of these three time zones fuse and make people fascinating for me and worth knowing and loving. When I say, “thanks for being in my life,” I really mean it.

When I return to my own imaginary cottage by the Irish Sea, I’ll take all three worlds with me.

And ask you to come along.