The Sea

By: John Banville

Narrated by: John Lee

The author of The Untouchable (“contemporary fiction gets no better than this”—Patrick McGrath, The New York Times Book Review) now gives us a luminous novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory.

The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wife’s death, has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child—a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his life without her. But it is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled vacationing family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. The seductive mother; the imperious father; the twins—Chloe, fiery and forthright, and Myles, silent and expressionless—in whose mysterious connection Max became profoundly entangled, each of them a part of the “barely bearable raw immediacy” of his childhood memories. Interwoven with this story are Morden’s memories of his wife, Anna—of their life together, of her death—and the moments, both significant and mundane, that make up his life now: his relationship with his grown daughter, Claire, desperate to pull him from his grief; and with the other boarders at the house where he is staying, where the past beats inside him “like a second heart.”

What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, vividly dramatic, beautifully written novel—among the finest we have had from this extraordinary writer.

©2005 John Banville (P)2006 Random House, Inc.

Critic reviews

“Remarkable. . . . The power and strangeness and piercing beauty of [The Sea is] a wonder.” —The Washington Post Book World

“With his fastidious wit and exquisite style, John Banville is the heir to Nabokov. . . . The Sea [is] his best novel so far.” —The Sunday Telegraph

“A gem. . . . [The sea] is a presence on every page, its ceaseless undulations echoing constantly in the cadences of the prose. This novel shouldn't simply be read. It needs to be heard, for its sound is intoxicating. . . . A winning work of art.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

A Time to Live and to Die

Blanville captures so beautifully both the time to live (the coming of age, young love or lust) and the time to die (oneself, and to reflect on the death of loved ones) in the rightly acclaimed winner of the Booker Prize. It evoked in me so many of the times of my youth, many of them painful, embarrassing or both (like the misapprehended longings and misjudged romances) and put into perspective so many of the things that I saw my grandparents go through toward the end of their lives. The language is languid and precise; placed together like a purposefully created ceramic mural. And that language is old and new (the resonance of the frustrated swearing juxtaposed to the prose still echoes in my minds ear). Really lovely.
By comparison (and I know that I wade into deep water here), I find John Lee's reading challenging. I am not sure why that it. Perhaps the Celtic rasp doesn't suit my ear. But like "100 Years of Solitude", the cadence just didn't sympathetically meet my expectation, albeit Irish-like. Alas, there are so many Irish lilts that I just wasn't taken with this one. That doesn't mean that the performance was bad; just not as I expected.

The Snore

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

This story had too many tangential travels for my liking. It's like reading a review that suddenly... oh look a butterfly..

Have you listened to any of John Lee’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

No

Could you see The Sea being made into a movie or a TV series? Who should the stars be?

Nope

Let it flow over you

I had not heard of Banville before this. What is it about the Irish? The command of the language, the humour, pathos, gentility, insight was astounding. At the end I felt I had lost a friend! Beautifully read, this was a true pleasure. It was a gentle journey that could have gone on and on! I recommend this anyone with an interest in the human condition!

Engaging and colorful

Love his use of language. Sometimes I’m laughing out loud, other times musing on the sadness or crazy juxtapositions of life. Masterful use of language, and I loved the moving to different time frames in the telling of the story.

Masterfully engaging story and beautiful written

Having read all of the Quirk series books, I’m again rewarded with John Banville’s skillful command of language to write an engaging and poignant story. The narration was perfect to portray the main character’s life’s memories. I continue to seek this author’s books.

Dark beauty of depth and humanity

A beautiful evocation of memories past and present. A long poem of sorts. It rises and takes you, like the sea itself.

Thoughtfully poetic

Lovely concise descriptions of characters in a painterly style. The underlying tensions between them made each page excitng and necessary to read, revealing the unexplained in veiled glimpses. The performance voice was personal and responsive to every word bringing a strong reality to the story.

Your Patience Will Be Rewarded

If thrills, chills, spills and suspense is what u seek, this listen is not for you. The pace is lugubrious, purposefully so as an old man alternately grieves for his dead wife and recalls his mean-spirited, joyless childhood. Once we understand where the author is going with his unreliable and, at times, reprehensible narrator, the mastery of this work is revealed. We may not like the narrator, yet we still care about what or might happen to him. The poetic prose might seem tedious at times, and the brogue a mite overdone, but again with masterful intent. And the end is well worth waiting for. Stick with it you'll be glad you did!

Banville and John Lee

A quiet memoir, more like a reverie. Of internet only to one of like mind. Thanks

the sea

I've been inside the heads of alot of old men lately; Mr Sammler's Planet,Gilead,The History of Love. I thought it was as good as these other novels. Without much real action or suspense, I was glad to journey with this old man to the end.
It was so beautifully written, insightful, humorous at times and just so human.