"The Sea" Is Not Beach Reading

In case you were thinking of taking up John Banville's award-winning The Sea (Alfred A. Knopf Publishers) as light reading, let us warn you: don't. This book takes some concentration, and after finishing the novel, we wonder if it was worth it.

The novel is told from the point-of-view of a recently widowed man who has moved back to the village where he summered as a child, where an event happened that still haunts him. Entwined in his stream-of-memory thoughts about that specific summer are his memories of his wife - how they met, fell in love, and how her sickness changed them both. The main storylines take place in the past, although the present does creep in every now and then. Max admits that he lives too much in the past:

. . . The past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the 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. And yet.

While there are such brief moments of beauty, the book is tedious nevertheless. We are usually eager to finish a book, but we read two books while still working on this one because we dreaded it so much. We don't want to scare anyone away from reading The Sea, but it is dark, slow, and seems repetitive at times. For a less-than-200 page novel, it is quite dense.

* Image (c) bigeoino