The Sea by John Banville

I finished The Sea by John Banville. I'd love to have an open, radically honest discussion on it. My opinion may be unpopular and seem deliberately provocative, but my aim is to engage with others in the hope of gaining new insights and greater understanding of it and others' interpretation of it. My apologies if these points have been previously addressed; I couldn't find anything in other threads that would indicate so. 

Takeaway: I found the writing craft/wordsmithing sumptuous and gorgeous but the story craft / narrative itself very mediocre. With significant revision, I think it could make a great short story, gothic or otherwise. He could have just leaned into the creepy and grotesque atmosphere he evoked that hinted at violence and the sinister. Here's the longer review:

The Sea by John Banville: a self- absorbed dilettante reflects upon his life and on his encounters with tragic deaths around him. Oof.

As a novel, it fails. However, with some major revision, it could have been a good short story. It's a failure as a novel because the exquisite prose ultimately serves as a fig leaf for a shallow and prosaic story with major structural flaws and narrative deficiencies. A short story, on the other hand, is an entirely different craft and allows for more impressionistic, imagistic tableaux that don't create any kind of depth – of narrative, of characterization and intersubjectivity, of relationships, of feeling, of ideas, etc., and The Sea seems to fit more into that category. Banville hasn't found the right short story, but it's in there somewhere, hidden. A novel, however, requires that the reader walk away from the text with some level of immersion in the world of the characters beyond dipping one's toes in the shallow end for an hour. The Sea is neither a tragic romance nor a romantic tragedy, nor is it a profound and heartfelt meditation on grieving the death of a loved one, nor a new Gatsby exploring class pretensions and the senseless cruelty and carelessness that people inflict on each other in intimate relationships. What it is, for me, is a tale whose premise, of being haunted by ghosts of the past and of living with ghosts, is undermined by the relentless narcissistic solipsism of the protagonist, which stymies narrative and interior progress, never venturing below the surface of his psyche.  From Chloe to Anna to Morden’s daughter (whose name escapes me at the moment), the other characters are not fully fleshed-out, three-dimensional people but mere props and objects, marionettes dragged around the stage to showcase the endless navel-gazing and superficial treatment of Morden as narrator-protagonist.

If less had been said and more implied, it would have made a very compelling short story, and i would have forgiven how clumsy and juvenile the pacing and positioning of the dual stories were. In constantly alternating between the two stories and staggering them in parallel for cheap suspense-building, the gestalt came out disjointed and superficial. My view is that the death of his wife (and the entirety of their marriage and parenthood) required more fleshing out and shouldn't have been flattened to mirror the tense build-up and shocking climax of of what happens with Chloe and Myles. The novel overrelied on the conceit of his narcissism (and preoccupation with class and money/Mammonism) to avoid doing storytelling of any substance.   

I didn't hate it, but I found it lacking -- certainly not a novel, but it could have been a shocking Gothic short story with proper restructuring and editing. And I am not qualified to weigh in on the criteria that makes a novel worthy of the Booker Prize, but to me The Sea wasn't deserving of it in its current state. I've only read that one and Never Let Me Go from that year (I think), but I'd give it to Never Let Me Go and then wait until Banville has something as compelling to say as he has an exquisite way of saying it.

I was trying to think of an elegiac novel of grief and the complicated bonds of love that moved me, and both Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry and The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing by Mira Jacob fit the description.  Here is my review of Old God’s Time, one of my all-time favorite reads, in case you missed it: https://open.substack.com/pub/rebeccalovesreading/p/reflections-on-old-gods-time-by-sebastian?r=11vk4t&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web.  In The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, another heartfelt novel of loss and memory, the reader can feel the raw emotional honesty of how she's processing grief. In the afterward, she writes to her deceased father, "I still see you everywhere." It hit me hard.

Another profound elegy: Belladonna by Daša Drndić.