Traumatic Memories. Review on Sea, The - John Banville

John Banville, for his novel The Sea, won the Man Booker Prize for the year 2005. The Sea has waves of a sublime prose characterized by ardent brilliance and beautiful texture. The novel is a journey through memory and its rising tides move through the present and the past. Banville has created a literary masterpiece with his usual style of first person narration. His remarkable craftsmanship has produced an artistic work, which is awesome, luminous and piercingly beautiful. He has described everything with scientific precision and a poetic language. I went back several times to the previously read pages of the novel to marvel once again the beauty of the sentences woven with elegant and evocative words and I was again mesmerized by the sweetness of his exquisite prose. You will definitely attain utmost satisfaction, if you imbibe his prose in sips like an aged wine and its originality and elegance will intoxicate and submerge you in the waves of astonishment. Like Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett, John Banville has taught us how to use the English language. In his own words:

''There is not a sentence anywhere in my work which, in terms of syntax, grammar and vocabulary, would not be understood by an eight-year-old equipped with a dictionary. I would not expect a child to absorb the nuances of meaning and suggestion in those sentences, but I do strive to make them as clear as mirror glass, with all the ambiguity that implies.''

Max Morden, an ageing art historian is the first person narrator of the novel. He is self-loathing and describes himself to be ''a person of scant talent and scanter ambition, greyed o'er by the years, uncertain and astray and in need of consolation and the brief respite of drink-induced oblivion''. Prompted by a dream, he revisits the Irish coastal town, where, as a child, he met with the Grace family, affluent and influential, while spending a summer holiday. He takes a boarding house of Miss Vavasour. He tries to cope with the recent death of his wife from cancer and with a past tragedy during his childhood days. The ten year old Max befriends the Grace family which had a great effect on him as a child.

The narrative shifts between the two events of the present and the past. Max says, ''The past beats inside me like a second heart''. Max's daughter Claire blames him saying that he wished always to live in the past and he asserts ''that is why the past is such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and a colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that''. He painfully recollects the deterioration of the health of his wife and the happenings in the childhood summer. Banville portrays the abstruse fluctuations of his characters' emotions with impeccable precision.

Max developed a fascination for Mrs Grace which later shifted to her daughter, Chloe. Chloe had a twin mute brother, who had never spoken in his life. Max and Chloe were of the same age. Max was infatuated with Chloe more and more as the days passed by. Banville has elegantly led the reader to the complexities of the relationships of his characters with his jeweled sentences.

The narration of multiple times takes us back and forth and Banville extends his articulate hypnotism to unparalleled dimensions. Max goes on to narrate his exploits with Chloe, ''As I walked behind her amid the trudging crowd, I touched a finger tip to my lips, the lips that had kissed hers, half expecting to find them changed in some infinitely subtle but momentous way…like the day itself, that had been sombre and wet and hung with big bellied clouds when we were going into the picture house and now at evening was all tawny sunlight and raked shadows''. Banville's prose enthralls and imparts a ''continuous sensual delight'' as Martin Amis rightly commented.

When his wife was diagnosed with cancer, Max announces,'' In the midst of the imperial progress that was our life together a grinning losel has stepped out of the cheering crowd and sketching a parody of a bow had handed my tragic queen the warrant of impeachment'' and when her illness deteriorated to a point of no return, he speaks of their togetherness, ''In those October nights, lying side by side in the darkness, toppled statues of ourselves, we sought escape from an intolerable present in the only tense possible, the past, that is, the faraway past. We went back over our earlier days together, reminding, correcting, helping each other, like two ancients tottering arm-in-arm along the ramparts of a town where they had once lived, long ago''.

As we read these words, a certain grief pervades into our souls and our heart grows in heaviness and we fall into a trance surrounded by thoughts of mortality, sorrow and death.

The Sea gives us hope to live with traumas and tragedies. It gives us a sudden perception to combat life's uncertainties and gives us an opportunity to do a self analysis of our deeds in the past.

Happy Reading!!!