The Sea by John Banville
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’d like to know the real reason they gave this the Man Booker Prize. Maybe it was really an award for his whole career. Maybe everybody knew he had to win it one year, and this was a year with no other obvious champion. Anyway, the novel as a whole disappointed me.
The scenes from the protagonist’s childhood are convincing and excellent. There’s the open question, in the boyhood scenes, of how his maturation will unfold. There’s the mystery of the twins. And, of course, the final trauma he named the book after. Every boyhood section has a suspenseful open question or mystery. You have a reason to read them.
But they’re framed by a huge amount of material from his later life about which I never figured out why I should care. His wife dies, but we knew that from the beginning. His daughter generally gets on with her life. He turns into the drunk widower we met on page one.
The big revelation at the end is a disappointment. It’s something the protagonist could have told us from the beginning, but just didn’t. So even when this ‘new’ information forces a reconsideration of the past, it feels like a cheat. I hate to say it, but these are problems that Banville should have corrected at the outlining stage. Somebody should have said, “Hey, you have here that we learn the true identity of so-and-so. But why wouldn’t the narrator say that from the start?” And he could have invented a reason. Anything would have worked. A boating accident and plastic surgery.
In my opinion, this should have been a novella set in the protagonist’s boyhood at the beach. There’s some very good prose, but the deadly plot problems kill the interest and momentum.